kale

  

We love kale.

pictures of brother

Evalana loves taking pictures of all sorts of things but especially lazarus. She gets especially excited if she can capture a smile.

 

Mo time

3/19/12

My mom comes over about once a week, and we love our time with Grandma Mo. About every day Evalana asks if we can go to Mo's house. Lazarus gets so excited when he sees her and goes straight into her arms. 

evalana's photography

chloe's birthday

We love cousin time! March 18th we were able to go to joplin to celebrate Chloe's birthday.

Lazarus loved the zipline. He did really well, hanging on really far at first, and then he was a little tired by the time i got out the camera.

fish mush soup

3/15/12

Joshua was going to class two evenings a week this semester, so i was in charge of dinner cleanup and bedtime by myself on those nights. Some evenings went smoothly and great. Some were more challenging. Sometimes he'd come home at 10pm, and everyone was still awake. Oh well. Now, as i write this, he only has one last class next week! Here's one evening when we finished dinner, i ran to the bathroom for ten seconds (i was kind of excited to be able to go alone!), and i came back to find "fish mush soup" being "plunged" all over the kitchen floor. At least we have our cleanup crew dogs.

running

3/14/12

Joshua fixed our jogging stroller, so i've been able to use it again! here's my cute load after my first run, well minus the cute girl who hopped out as soon as we got home. and, with lazarus napping in the stroller, i was able to do a few things with two hands!

painting

3/5/12

Evalana and Lazarus love to paint and color. Here's Evalana making a picture for her friend Elizabeth who moved to Indianapolis in February.

skype

We love to skype! Here they're talking with Mima in Joplin. 

birthday party at Mo's

March 4th, we got to celebrate birthday season over at Grandma Mo and Grandpa Greg's house. I love family time together.

watching ice skating on aunt michelle's ipad

A walk behind Mo's house

green eggs and ham

3/2/12

We decided to make some green eggs and ham for breakfast. I thought it was really yummy! Evalana said she prefers yellow eggs. I blended the eggs and spinach together and then cooked them.

La Quinta (from February)

I had some last Palm Springs pictures I needed to post from our February trip. Here they are :-)

a couple swimming pictures from tompa

We headed home on Feb. 25th (happy birthday uncle alex!). Evalana loves taking pictures of her brother; she thinks he's adorable.

 

Two months later, Lazarus is still talking about whales, dolphins, and fish. And Evalana wishes we could go back to visit Tompa and Grandma Nancy in California someday. We had a really great trip together. 

homeschool

I'm finally back to the blog! it's not that i haven't had any fun stories to share, but my computer time recently has been spent researching homeschool options. i wanted to get a good idea of what we wanted to do so that i could ask some questions and get more information at last weekend's homeschool conference. i was very glad i took the time to figure it out a little early because it turns out that i'm not early at all. i had planned to do 4yo pre-k with evalana this coming school year and then start kindergarten school when she turned 5 in 2013, but, after looking at the kindergarten curriculum, it turns out that she's already half way through the kindergarten reading level, so it should work out great to start kindergarten with her this coming school year. Of course i figure we can just go as slowly or whatever speed works well for her. Even though we've been fairly committed to homeschooling already, in my homeschool research this past month, i just keep realizing more and more reasons why i am so very thankful our family gets to do school this way! I've got our kindergarten program all ordered now, and I'm so excited for all that we'll get to do!!!! If you're curious, here's what we've come up with:
This is the pre-k that Evalana just finished up. We had so much fun with it. http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/pre-kindergarten.html
We've decided to use Sonlight for our school curriculum. Of course we can always change our minds and switch things up however works for our family, but I'm so excited about Sonlight!

They have everything so planned and put together that it will actually be quite a bit less work for me than the hubbard's cupboard pre-k preparation has been. You can click on the button above for lots more info, but basically Sonlight uses books (mostly real books rather than textbooks) to teach through stories. Obviously i have yet to actually use any of the program, but it sounds like just what we're wanting, so i'm very excited to use it.
Here's a breakdown of curriculum we're using by subject, if you care. You can also view it at http://pinterest.com/rachelkarleen/kindergarten/.
Sonlight has most subjects included in their basic curriculum. History and Geography are on World Cultures this year. Science is on Biology, Botany, and Physics. For our Bible time, we'll be reading through an entire Bible storybook, plus learning a Bible verse that goes with each letter of the alphabet. In reading and language arts, we get to learn phonics and start reading little books, plus lots of family reading aloud. And for handwriting, we're doing A Reason for Handwriting.
And for math we decided to use Math U See (Sonlight uses a different math curriculum, but we prefer Math-U-See).
Evalana's actually been doing Spanish since she was two, and i think it was a perfect time to start Rosetta Stone. And we do a little sign language, which is wonderful both for baby/toddler communication and helping with Bible memory.
For art we get to do ARTistic Pursuits and Come Look With Me. I ordered our art supplies, and I'm pretty sure we're going to have a lot of fun.
And for music we're planning to do Piano Wizard and The Story of the Orchestra.
That's it. We'll see how it goes, but I know school is going to be fun. I'm so excited and so thankful that we get to homeschool.

The 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum book was super duper helpful in helping me learn about various educational approaches and figure out what approach we like and then what curriculum works with that educational method.