Today....

we are making laundry soap.....via the Duggar recipe. Let you all know how that works out. We have made laundry soap before but the recipe I had involved more measuring than the Duggar one does.

We are also doing our first painting in our Picasso series. Totally stolen from the Confessions of a Homeschooler blog. I would post pictures of that process but Ki annoyed me so bad with his stupid faces in my pictures that I told I was never taking another picture of him. You can go over to Confessions and see some cute pictures of better behaved children!

Dinner is in the crockpot. The lady over @ Crockpot365 says that I can make baked potatoes in my crockpot. I am choosing to believe her and we will be having a baked potato bar for dinner tonight. Except for Alainna and I, it's her long dance night, we will be eating out. I might have planned it that way, you know just in case the potatoes don't turn out!

And finally, yesterday I went to a resale store in my area and purchased, 3 shirts, 3 pairs of pajama pants, a pair of pajamas and a pair of mittens for Alainna, a Halloween costume and 3 shirts for Kieran, 2 shirts, a winter coat, mittens and snow boots for Maximus, 3 shirts, a winter coat and snow boots for Emersyn and a race car track toy for $67.00.

Then last night I bought Alainna a pair of Uggs on clearance for $50.00 @ another store near me. I may or may not have run in 10 minutes before the store closed after I found out about the boots being on clearance.

Hmmmmm......do with that what you will.

'til next time,

Crazy Days

Mondays:

4:15-5:00 Ki hip-hop

4:45 Brenna pick-up Drivers Ed (through end of Oct.)

6:00-7:30- Brenna soccer (30 min. away)

Tuesdays:

4:30-5:00 Griffen music lessons

4:45 Brenna drivers ed. pick-up

6:00-7:30 Alainna dance

Wednesdays:

4:15-8:30 Alainna dance (not a typo)

4:45 Brenna drivers ed. pick-up

6:00-7:30 Brenna soccer

Thursdays:

5:45 Emersyn dance (too too cute!)

6:00-7:30 Alainna dance

Fridays:

6:30-7:15 Alainna dance

Saturdays:

Brenna soccer games (1+ away)

Sundays:

Brenna soccer games (1+ away)

This is our after-school schedule this year. And honestly most days we love it, there are more days than not that we still manage to eat dinner together, because we are really big believers in that, not saying that it's everyday but we do try to make it happen. And we make a big effort to spend time all together before bed on most days too. We have a few family shows that we watch (after Max and Emersyn go to sleep) and there is always some kind of craziness going on with Brian and the kids. I will say that homeschooling has really helped make this feasible. I feel like I can still spend time with most of the kids and not feel super guilty about running at night. And it's really helping Alainna not get exhausted with her craziness.

I know that I really enjoy peeking into other people's lives so I thought I would give you all a glimpse into, ours. Next up, our homeschooling day.

Champions!!

My daughters team rocked it out this past weekend in the Petoskey Autumn Blast Tournament! They won the U16 Female Division and have a very nice trophy to show for it!! You go girls!!

Wordless Wednesday....

School Room Tour

Our schoolroom is still a work in progress but I still am going to share some pictures! When we finally decided to try keeping the kids home this year one of the things that we were both pretty set on was having a room that we could dedicate to schooling (and more than likely a craft room). After a bit of discussion we have decided that the boys would move into the spare bedroom upstairs and that their bedroom would become the schoolroom.

That's when the chaos ensued! Brenna, who has been saving up to buy herself a Kin*le, made us a deal. Basically she promised that everything would be moved up 2 levels into the spare room, from the boys downstairs room, put back in good working order and that the downstairs room would be clean enough to set up our school stuff. She enlisted her brother and with the offer of 10 bucks a piece went to work! She learned a hard lesson pretty fast. Something along the lines of HOLY CRAP I AM DOING A LOT OF WORK FOR NOT NEAR ENOUGH MONEY! She quickly tried to renegotiate but her dad and I decided that this was a good life lesson for them!

It took them 2 days! Whew, good times!

So this is what we have, sorry my pictures are terrible! First is our awesome new desk! An Ikea special that seats four. It consists of 2 table tops on top of 4 of those drawer units. Each unit is turned so that the person in the chair can reach their own supplies. It's pretty big and takes up A LOT of space, I really love it though! I have to admit that I totally stole this idea from the Confessions of a Homeschooler Blog (she breaks it down much better over there). I think I get point for being smart enough to steal it though!

This picture shows our other IKEA special. We went with the 4x4 shelf unit so we could build it in the closet and save some floor space. This will hold all of my curriculum and some stuff for the babies (who are both 3 and kinda not babies anymore). And whatever else comes up. Notice my little monster guys! We are going for the "Monsterously Good Year"theme. I also grabbed a cheap wall clock @ the Mart. The white board in this picture is for the babies to use. And the drawer carts that you see are what "they" call workboxes. Which we scored for FREE from my mother-in-law. Thanks! It's a pretty cool system that I will do another post on later. On top of those are a bunch of little metal pails the I bought in the dollar spot @ Target. I am using these for crayons, twistables, markers, dry erase markers, scissors, glue sticks, etc.
Then we have our "big kid" white board, all ready with the morning Boggle game that they are going to play. Our monster calender, weather board, month and days of the week boards. I was sort of surprised at how fun this all was to set up. Everyone including Brian really got into it!
We picked up the map of the U.S. and the map of the world at the Mart for like 5 bucks. Also we have the color signs. The words are in both English and Spanish. And there is a small white bookshelf for the babies books.
The trays and bucket that you see on the desk are my first version of what they call Tot Trays. Basically they are just fun little ideas (busy work) for Emersyn and Maximus to help them with motor skills and to keep them occupied. I will probably do more on those later too.
That's all we have at the moment but I am hoping that it will help give us a good start. I plan on doing a few posts about homeschooling with the idea that many of my readers don't and might be interested in seeing how it goes or may be waiting for me to bomb horribly!

'til next time

Starting a New Chapter

Wow, it's been FOREVER since I blogged! I need to renew my commitment to this blog. It is a great way to chronicle what's going on around here. I just tend to get so caught up in everything that I don't make the time to write it all down. Time for that to change!

With a family of 8 there is always a lot going on, a lot of it is just the mundane running of life stuff but one big thing that is happening around here (starting tomorrow) is school starts. Things are staying the same for the older 2, they will be heading off to 8th grade (last year of Junior High) and 10th grade in the morning with all of their new school supplies, ready to see their friends and get on with another year of public school. But for Kieran, Alainna, Emersyn and Maximus we are going in a new and different direction.....this year they are staying home and we are going to homeschool. To say that Kieran and Alainna are excited is an understatement and I am also pretty excited and a bit nervous!

There is no huge major motivation behind our decision. It is something that we have tossed around for a couple of years and now just felt like the time to do it. I wish I had a bigger better reason to share but the truth is that we love our schools and the people in them and the kids were doing just fine there, so that's not it. Mostly we just felt like time was passing us by and we weren't getting that time with our kids we wanted.

We have invested a lot into making a "classroom" in our house (pictures soon) and trying to bring in the right curriculum. Oh and schedules are flying around like crazy! It got a little intense around here for a few weeks until I got some good advice on a Yahoo! group. :) Basically I was told it's not going to be perfect and that we will constantly have to figure out what works for our family and to not make myself crazy trying to get it "right" from the beginning! I decided to take that to heart and wow, it's really lowered my stress level!

Today we are just going to enjoy the last, cloudy rainy, day of summer vacation and then tomorrow....we start our new chapter.

'til next time

*Much harder to blog than I remember, hopefully if I keep it up it will flow a bit better!

What We Have Been Up To......

First we did this (above). One of the hardest things about our move has been WAY WAY WAY downsizing our laundry area. Like we went from a laundry mansion to a laundry box. Since we moved in we have had dirty laundry in one closet, and clean laundry pretty much all over. That was not taking me to my happy place. Not at all. So a couple of weeks ago Bri and I went to the Depot and spent a couple hours just staring at the storage solution stuff. Can you say quality time? Yeah that's how we do it! But with the space being so small non of the "conventional" units were going to work, so we got creative. We bought 3 of the "wood" shelves and then Bri cut them to the size we need and put brackets up for them. He also took down the shelf that was over head and moved it up higher. And last but not least we put in those 2 baskets for some additional storage. I kinda love it! It really works and makes it so so so much easier to get the laundry done. If I am honest though I still REALLY miss my family closet!

Also I picked up this new cork board to put in my kitchen. (below) After Brian put it up (Command Strips rock!) I thought it looked a little bit plain, so I pulled out the old scrap booking supplies (and by old I mean OLD, I am a scrapbook slacker). And found these little flowers and just pinned them on! Cute!

A few weeks ago I had the girls gather up all our pictures of OPK's (Other People's Kids) so that I could put them on this old giant cork board that I have. (below) I quickly came to 2 conclusions. 1. I need more pictures people! and 2. Old nasty giant cork board, still looks old and nasty when hung on a wall. So I gave Alainna and Griffen some paint brushes and had them paint it brown. I think I might add some ribbon to it but haven't gotten that far yet. But the brown looks much better! This hangs by our back door.

When we moved in about a year ago, we had a vanity war going on in our upstairs bathroom. Nothing fit, nothing looked good and as a special bonus, the builder didn't set the light fixture centered with the sink and faucet. 10 bonus points for that buddy! And let's face it I never go in there so we sort of forgot about it, until the piles or toothpaste in the "guest" bathroom started getting really gross. Apparently you must look at yourself in the mirror when you brush your teeth. So we bit the bullet and just grabbed Mr. Good Enough Mirror and a little storage shelf. WOW! That really helps, I can't really believe how much better it looks. Still don't go in there though.

Filled the girls cubby unit with cubbies. Let's face it, our stuff always looks better when it's hidden!

Put a little bookshelf in the playroom. LOVE my HUNGRY CATERPILLAR, don't judge.

Filled the fabulous IKEA shelf with cubbies, again hidden stuff=better!

And last we rearranged my bedroom. When we moved in we had the turned clockwise against the wall and the big tv mount had a t.v. on it. Lightning took care of the t.v. and we haven't replace it yet. The long chair was under the t.v. and it always felt kind of squished (real word?) I like it so much better this way!! Feels much more roomy! Now all I need is a computer desk (and maybe less computers, they are everywhere) and some decoration. Right, A LOT decoration. Interior decorator I am not!

We still have tons to do, but we are on our way!


'til next time

me