Back to School

We started school for the year on August 1st. It was pretty uneventful. Claire is set up at our dining room table with a laptop for now. Here she is at her station on Day 1.

David had his first day of preschool with teacher "Mommy" on August 1 too. When he starts his Parents' Day Out program at the end of August, he will do preschool with me on the three days he is home. But for August, I have him all 5 days, which is exhausting. He is a very good student though. Here he is hard at work on his Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tot book.

I have my work cut out for me with this guy! He is a silly boy!

My sweet girl ... cannot believe she is old enough to be in Kindergarten. I'm just glad I didn't have to drop her off at "real school". No tears were shed in our house on the first day ... except maybe tears of exhaustion by me!

Looking forward to a great school year!

Breaking my silence ...

I haven't posted in a while for several reasons:

(1) I am now working from home and I have been home with my kids all day, every day this summer. It has been great fun, but exhausting and leaving me very little time to doing things like blog. (The 4:15 am wake-up for the gym and subsequent 8:30 pm bedtime have not helped my free-time situation either.)

(2) We've had major computer issues the past month. We had some kind of worm on our home computed (which I also use for work) that I spent an entire day removing and installing new security software on our computer. Thank you to our IT guy at work and my brother-in-law for walking me through all that over the phone. Then, I found baby Luke playing with our external hard drive and it was making a grinding noise. After several minutes on Google, I discovered that this was NOT GOOD and the drive was probably broken. All of our pictures were on there (thankfully, all were backed up on Snapfish and most were backed up on CD or my i-pad so we didn't lose much at all), but since our 2004 Dell desktop has absolutely no memory (hence, the external hard drive), I am still waiting on my replacement hard drive from Seagate to get my pictures back in my immediate possession (and on my computer so I can blog).

(3) I am homeschooling Claire for Kindergarten. We started August 1st. I have kind of avoided talking about this subject. I am solid and confident in my decision to do this, but don't really like to discuss the ins-and-outs that much and most people really want to discuss the ins-and-outs. Will and I decided to do this for several reasons, but the bottom line is I feel called to do this for whatever reason. Right now, I feel like it is the best thing for Claire and our family life in general, but I also feel like God may be leading me to do this for other reasons that will become apparent down the road. I prayerfully made this decision back in February when God just kept throwing it in my face over and over again. He solidified my decision when I broached the subject with Will and he was totally on board. I was shocked.

Anyway, as you can see, I have been super busy and unfortunately, for the grandparents and the 4-5 people who read this, the blog has suffered. I hope to get back to regular blogging soon (once I recover all of my pictures) and get the boys started in their new Parents' Day Out program at the end of August. Until then, I have an extra "student" named David that I have to keep entertained with preschool activities while his sister does Kindergarten. I will also being doing preschool stuff with David on the three days he is home during the school year since he is not in a true preschool program.

My friend Amy and I were texting back and forth today and she asked me if I was going to blog about our homeschool experience and I told her "yes." (Actually, she asked if I was going to blog about my "honest oiling" experience. Don't you just love auto-correct?) I won't give you a daily play-by-play like a lot of homeschool bloggers do, but I will share some of our school activities throughout the year.

So, just to clear the air ... I am not pregnant again (like I was when I took my last blog hiatus), but I am very busy!

Stay tuned for more ...

Summertime

Well ... apparently I took a summer break from the blog. We have been busy, busy, busy. From swim lessons, dance camp and VBS to vacations, playdates and visiting grandparents.

I am now officially working from home about 10 hours per week. It has been great so far, but apparently it has really cut into my blogging time. Ha! Both of my big kids have stopped napping too so that leaves absolutely no free time for this mama.

Despite our busy summer, we did manage to meet up with our favorite photographer back in June for a quick family photo session (and to capture Luke at 8 months old). As you can see, I did manage to update our family picture at the top since my baby is no longer a newborn!

Here are some of my other faves.

I'm not optimistic that I will ever get this blog updated, but I will certainly try since this essentially serves as our family scrapbook for the year.

Almost Paradise

Will and I got the opportunity to go to the Masters this year. He finally got practice round tickets in the ticket lottery after trying for 15 years. Thanks to Will's mom for providing childcare, Will, his dad, our brother-in-law Jon and myself go to go down to Augusta on Wednesday of the tourney and watch a practice round and the Par 3 tourney that afternoon. It was a perfect day!

Amen Corner.

Hole 13. One of my favorites!

In the stands at Amen Corner.

That is Tiger in the gray sweater.

Phil in the Par 3 tourney.

I loved how some of the players had their families caddy for them during the Par 3 tourney ... so cute!

Three greats up next ... Player, Palmer and Nicklaus.

Here they come from the tee.

Palmer. He was so friendly and came over to talk to the crowd.

Player for birdie.

Nicklaus teeing off over the pond ... wish I had a better zoom on my camera!

For golf fans going to the Masters is a once in a lifetime kind of thing ... and Will has been twice now. I know he feels truly blessed!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Phone Dump

Will and I finally got iphones for my birthday in March. Do you like how he got a new phone for MY birthday? He was due a new phone and waiting for me to be able to upgrade and we got a special 2-for-1 deal.

Anyway, for the first time in FOREVER, I am able to check my email from my phone. WELCOME TO THE 21ST CENTURY. Now, maybe when my kids' preschool closes early for snow (none of which is happening at my house less than 5 miles away), I won't be 30 minutes late picking them up. And YES that has happened before.

I love taking pictures of the kids on my phone as we are out and about and emailing them to Daddy, grandparents, etc. Well, I finally figured out how to get my pictures from my phone onto my blog.

Here are some random pics from March to present.

Luke on his 1st shopping cart ride at Target.

Claire and David in their St. Patrick's Day green after school.

Luke playing with one of his favorite toys.

David with a creepy supposed-to-be Mickey Mouse at a friend's birthday party.

David with his friend Crews (the birthday boy at the creepy Mickey party).

Luke doing his swim crawl. I must get this on video before he really starts crawling.

Luke's 1st time playing with a sit-up toy that he got for Christmas from Will's parents.

Claire and David riding on Will on night after dinner.

Killing time at the park one Sunday afternoon while our house was being shown.

Playing with our neighbor Kate. For some reason, the kids all wanted to wear their bike helmets even though they were not riding bikes.

Ice cream treat after school on Claire's birthday. Can you tell she was so over the pictures.

Luke chillin' at Chick-Fil-A. He looks like a giant in his baby carrier.

Luke riding in his big boy car. Too bad he can reach the grass, which he then eats.

David praying at dinner one night. Look at that concentration.

Luke and David in the shopping cart at Publix one day. Luke loves driving the car!

Cute Monkey cupcakes at a party for one of David's friends.

David's friend Wyatt ... doesn't he have the cutest red curly hair. We loved his party at Monkey Joe's (see Monkey cupcake above).

Claire climbing the rock wall at Pump It Up (for her friend Alex's birthday). Have a mentioned we have been to about 25 birthday parties in the past 3 months!!

That is all for now! I need to work on holding my phone still when I take a picture. A lot of these are blurry!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Luke: 7 months old

This kind of sums up our life with Mr. Luke right now. Although he is not crawling yet (but he is oh-so-close), he is very mobile with all the rolling and pushing off things ...


He is sitting up on his own.


Reaching for everything. He is especially fond of paper.


Oh, and everything goes in his mouth.


You can find his hands there most of the time. Let's try this picture again.


Or maybe not.


Ok, whatever you want ... how can I resist this cute face?

A few bullet points from the 7th month:

-Weight: 17 pounds, 9 ounces (45th percentile)
-Height: 26 3/8 inches (40th percentile)
-wearing size 3 diapers and size 9-12 months clothes
-sleeping 12+ hours at night and napping 2-3 times during the day (I am working hard to transition him to 2 naps/day)
-holding his own bottle
-sitting up on his own
-a little more babbling and lots of raspberry blowing (for a big slobbery mess)
-lots of drooling and chewing on hands, but no teeth in sight yet
-he is happy as long as someone is holding him
-loves spending time in his jumper
-loves playing in the floor with his big brother and sister and watches every move they make

I'm glad I got this post finished before he turned 8 months old!! The clock is ticking!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad