cuteness

I was greeted by the most wonderful thing ever this morning, as I woke up and came out of my room, Cherry came bounding toward me and then little copper not far behind tripping over his soaky wet ears (they always drag in the water when he is drinking).  It was the cutest thing ever.

We keep taking more and more pictures of Copper, we just can't help it, in fact he must be very photogenic because even at his vet appointment this morning the ladies were pulling out their phones and taking pictures of him.

I took this one because we have pictures of Cherry sleeping in the very same spot.

Sleepy boy!

Last night Dani was sooo funny we were watching "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel and Dani was playing in the kitchen.  I hear her say to Kassie...

"Playing with moon sand is a Dirty Job!"

I am so confused!!!!

Two bumper stickers seen together on one car yesterday...

1.) Animals are people too (PETA)

2.) A woman's choice is a woman's right

Hmmm so what you are telling me is save the animals but kill the babies????

Does anyone else see anything wrong with this?

Cherry and Copper

Cherry really loves Copper, but she is super overprotective of him.  She follows him and around and won't let him in certain parts of the living room, places where she isn't allowed.  Also when we take him out and don't take her, she sits at the door worrying till he is back in and she fusses over him.  It is so funny.

Copper cried a lot last night, but he also had periods of long sleep, so it wasn't too bad.  It only took Cherry a couple weeks to get used to sleeping in her kennel.  Copper is also way more of a leaky faucet than Cherry was.  He pees wherever he is, but having said that, he is braver than her, he can already do stairs and he isn't afraid to go running off in the grass at night.

Pictures of Copper

Saying goodbye to the family!

First Day of School

First day of school went awesome today!  I was so nervous about starting with Danijela who would need my attention for all of her school.  It went great.  The older girls read out loud to each other in almost every subject, they got all their work done and turned in and in between helping Bela and Danijela I graded and began redoing ALL my lesson plans because the program I used messed everything up so I had to get a new program and start all over. 

Dani was so excited about school that when she was done, she was sad and begged me to be able to do more.  We sat down and read a few more books (in between me helping Bela out and getting some laundry done since I am dreadfully behind.) Today she learned about habitats and environment, things we need to survive, how to write the numbers 1-4, how to write the letter b, the word bed, and the word bath, and she learned a little bit about the Sonora Desert.  She already knew what shelter was...she informed me that it is protection!  Very precocious if you ask me.

Everyone worked so hard that we managed to get school and chores done by 3:30 and head out for voice lesson auditions.  Brittany and Gabby had to tryout and they both sang Amazing Grace.  They both did well and lessons start in two weeks.  Bela and Kassie will be doing voice and recorder as well.   

Kassie and Dani had an interesting conversation on the way home tonight. 

Dani: My stomach is too small to fit my spit.

Kassie: What?!?!

Dani: Everytime I swallow my mouth fills back up!

I started my real estate licensing course today too.  That will be done in my free time (oh wait do I HAVE any free time????) and when I am done with it I will be choosing my own hours.  Who knows if it will benefit me, but I am already finding the course very informative and interesting!

Just a few more days

We don't have an exact date yet, but probably one day this week Copper will be coming home, isn't he just the cutest...I wonder how he will walk with his ears longer than his legs!

Love today!

I thank God for breezy fall days after a long, hot summer!  Spring and fall inspire most of my poetry!

Dr. Mr. Manager of Chipotle Grill Arlington VA

I just wanted to make a comment about a wonderful experience we had at one of your Chipotle stores.  When we walked in at about 1:30 this afternoon, it was so crowded and my mother in law and I had my five kids with us.  We managed to find a table and sit down and I was getting ready to go up and wait in a VERY long line to order for all 7 of us when a manager walked up to us.  "Please, when you are ready to order follow me, I have a special place for you to order!",  he said, and he took us all back to the order ahead window and told us to take our time.  Each child got a chance to order exactly what they wanted and he personally made sure that each order was what we wanted and he carried our food for us to the table.  I have to say that when I usually walk into a crowded restaurant with five kids I get dirty looks and bad attitudes, but your staff was wonderful.  They went above and beyond the call of duty.  Unfortunately I was so busy trying to get the kids all situated I was unable to get his name, but I believe he deserves a special commendation for making our dining experience great and making me feel better about customer service!  Thank you very much!

Bodies

You can't imagine the awesome day we had today.  An hour drive into DC to a display called "Bodies".  We were unable to take any pictures due to display rules, but if you check out the website you can get a good idea of what we saw. 

It was amazing.  They took real cadavers and made them into educational displays explaining each of the systems of the body, how they worked, how different diseases and smoking effect them and all kinds of other useful information.  There was also a room just for fetal development.  It had fetuses from 10 days all the way to late term, and a special display on fetal bone growth where they took the different stages and dyed them red so you could see their growth.  We had such a great educational time.  I would recommend it to everyone.   

 

Kelsey Briggs

Our little copper...2 more weeks till we can get him.

Chatterbbox

Danijela has been going through a stage where she doesn't like to go to sleep at night.  Instead she would prefer to chat with whomever might be lying next to her.  The other night she wanted to sleep in Brittany's room so I told her it was okay.

"Brittany," She says as Brittany starts to doze off.

"What"

"I wish we would move to Australia and the jungle and I could be Bindi the Jungle Girl and Daddy could be her Dad, The Crocodile Hunter and Mommy could be Bindi's Mom."

Brittany starts to doze off again and Danijela is lying there.  It is quiet for a minute and Danijela gets up and hits Brittany on the nose, "Shut up! Brittany, Brittany!"

Sighing, "What????"

"Brittany your nose is making whistley noises and mine is only making air noises!"

Luray Caverns

Been a busy two days.  Long story short, Bridget and Ed have a visitor.  A boy they used to babysit when he was 3.  He is now 17 and visiting and we are going lots of fun places.  Yesterday was Luray Caverns.  I let Kristopher have free reign of the camera for photographs and he did a really good job.

 

After that we drove up into Skyline Drive only monsoon season began yesterday so it was a deluge of rain.  Before we went into Luray it was hot and humid but dry, when we came out, part of the parking lot was flooded.  So on our trip to Skyline we began to realize that we weren't going to see much.  We got a couple of good pictures when the rain let up for a few minutes.

On our way home we saw three black bears, a momma and two babies, but we weren't quick enough to get any pictures.  It was kind of exciting.  We are going to go back on Sunday to see if we can enjoy it a little more without all the rain.

Gabby Thinks she looks like me, what do you think?

Bela likes to play with the kitties and they allow her to do anything to them.  She stuffed a pacifier in Duke's mouth and he just laid there and left it in!  HAHAHA

Today we drove in to have lunch with David's Mom, we picked him up along the way.  All the pictures came back from Target so I went and got frames and hung them.  Wow do I have too many kids or what?  Please dont tell me if you see any crookeds, it doesn't look crooked anywhere but in this picture so I think it is in your imagination. Hehehe

 

When the Bunny Lays down with the Dog????

The new bunny is so sweet and loving and he loves attention.  Apparently Cherry likes him because when I just walked into the kitchen I saw this.

After rearranging a bit Cherry got more comfortable.

Roger Hoppington (the new bunny name) also likes to lay on the air conditioning vent

 

Home schooling and socialization, are yours any better off in public school????

Just because I home school my children, doesn't mean I want to hear your opinion on homeschooling and why I am ruining my kid's lives.  So if you have an opinion other than what I want to hear.  Keep it to yourself.

Since this is my blog, however, I am going to give you my opinion and if you don't like it you better stop reading now!

To all the people who have given me negative comments about homeschooling...Please don't bring your misbehaving, wild, unruly children into a restaurant or grocery store and stand there while they scream, holler, and throw unwanted items in your cart, while mine are behaving nicely, and tell me that homeschooling is ruining my kid's lives.  I don't tell you that public school is ruining your children's lives.

Don't tell me that spending hours every single day encouraging, loving, teaching, and guiding is worse than having a teacher with too many kids in her classroom forget your child's name, or not notice that they can't read till it is too late or not notice that a child is being abused because she has too many kids to worry about or just doesn't care, or in extreme cases the teacher being the abuser. 

Don't tell me that my kids need to be in the "real world"! How is a public school environment "the real world"?  While your kids are holed up in a classroom all day long being told to sit down and shut up, mine are out there exploring the trees and the bugs and the animals, volunteering to help in the community, getting involved in many activities and interacting with ADULTS not just other children.  ADULTS are the people that kids are going to need to be able to deal with when they have "real world" jobs.  While your child gets to read about historical places, I am taking mine there.  We get to be there!  While your children are getting lectured on bugs, birds, planets and plants my children are in the yard catching bugs and building bird sanctuaries, looking through the telescope at the moons of Jupiter, and helping me plant and learning how things grow.  We pick fruit and vegetables and we can them, we make homemade jam and applesauce.  That IS  the "real world". 

Your kids may be lucky enough to get two or three field trips a year, we go everywhere and we do it together, they have a wonderful sense of family and they know we are there for them.  They volunteer at the library, they are in drama class, they go to dances and luaus, they are in music class.  Many homeschooled children are in sports and other community activities a lot have jobs before they are 15.

While your kids have to deal with untrained children who bully and play emotional games, mine are at home being guided through every emotional moment so they KNOW how to control their anger and emotion and they know how grown up people deal with their problems.  They are not only watching their parents every single day interact with other grown ups, but they are interacting with them as well and I am there to say, "Next time maybe you should handle that situation in another way," and tell them how.   I have run into a good lot of public school children who had no idea how to interact with an adult.  That is not to say all are that way, but a whole lot of them are.  Ask anyone how my children interact with adults and other children, you will think twice about calling them "unsocialized".

They know what it is like to help around the house and to have to take responsibility for younger children.  They know what it is like to have to help others and serve others and give up things you want so someone in need can have.   My children are allowed to watch TV, but they prefer to be outdoors most of the time.  They are very active and not sitting at home eating bon bons and watching TV.  They are not overweight, in fact they are very much in shape.  We eat healthy and we make a lot of homemade foods.  We have dinner together every night and they help with the dinner and the dishes.  When I ask my kids to help out, for the most part they help willingly (they are normal kids, we have our moments).

When my children have a question they hardly ever even ask me anymore, I hear this instead, "Mom, can I use the Internet to look something up?" or "Where did you put the encyclopedia?"  They can research and write a report just like yours only my kids do it because they enjoy doing the research.  Sometimes they write reports that I haven't assigned on things that I would never think to research.  They write poetry on their own, read books on their own, create amazing elaborate art projects, on their own and there are homemade science projects all over my house.

Still think I am ruining their lives?  Tell me how many projects you have in your house.  Tell me how many hours of your day are devoted to your children.  How many times you run to school to help out with a problem that they don't understand?  How many books do you read to your children every day or make them read to you?  How many of your children tested above their levels in every subject?  I have an 7 year old who is entering 4th grade.  Am I ruining her life by letting her learn at her own pace?

I apologize to every public school parent out there who might have taken offense to this.  I know that there are many, many dedicated parents of both public and private school orientation.  I do not condemn ANY dedicated parent and that is why it irks me so much when someone condemns me.  My whole life is devoted to making sure these kids have a well rounded education, from learning about sex, to civil war battlefields, to home making, to bill paying.  I teach them about EVERYTHING that would be taught in public schools and so very much more and I do it with a love that any teacher, no matter how good, could never give to them because I am their MOTHER, and to top it all off I teach them IN the "real world". 

So if you have legitimate questions about homeschooling please feel free to ask me any time!  I will gladly answer as in-depth as possible.  If you just want to ask me why I don't want to let my kids socialize or grow up in the "real world" then go away, because you are uneducated and you don't know what you are talking about.  Maybe you should have been homeschooled!

My grandma

One thing about having my blog.  I never know what I am going to write about next.  Some days I feel like writing my whole day or my whole life for the world to see,  other days I just want to put a picture up and be done, and some times I don't feel like writing at all.  There have been days when I got on here and typed something up fast, just for my Grandma, who so faithfully and regularly visits me here.

My Grandma, whom I love so very much.  She is the bright point of my day when I get to talk to her.  Always cheerful and positive even when she is in so much pain she can't move.  A beautiful woman inside and out, who raised 6 children of her own and helped raise several of her grandkids, not to mention the babysitting and all of her children's friends that she touched as well with her kind, generous, loving heart.  I remember her arms around me when I cried.  I always felt so safe and loved, like nothing could ever happen to me there. 

Grandma and I used to stay up late and play Scrabble.  I think sometimes we would cheat a little, but we were pretty well matched.  Everytime a game was over one of us would look at the clock and say, "Just one more game." and we would start over again till it was so late that we couldn't keep our eyes open anymore and we would reluctantly go to bed. 

When I would get up in the morning Grandma and Grandpa would already be sitting up at the kitchen table with the radio on and usually the farm report.  Breakfast would be cooking and smell so good. 

Grandma's house was usually a bustle with people, family and friends and I used to love to lay in the living room and listen to the grown-ups talk.  Sunday morning we would go to church and when we came home the house smelled wonderful usually because there was a roast cooking in the oven.  There were extra people a lot of the time. 

I miss you Grandma!  I just wanted you to know!