My cute helpers

Ashton was sick the other morning so I let Landon help me in the kitchen. He sorted the silverware out of the dishwasher perfectly :) Thea also decided to help in her own way...

Ping cont.

We're having so much fun with Ping. Tuesday we "literature" day. We learned the difference between fiction and non-fiction and sorted books accordingly. We also learned about literary repetition (which is found in Ping) and what it means when a book is a classic. It was hard for Ashton to imagine that Ping was written before Grandpa was born!

Wed. was art day and we learned about motion lines and shading. Ashton learned to use the side of his pencil to shade and made motion lines behind a fish I drew. We looked in the book and found lots of examples of motion lines and shading. As we looked at a non-fiction book on China I was thrilled to see Ashton recognize and point out the great wall.

Being as it was art day I got out paints for everyone and let them be creative. This was Thea's painting debut so I took some pictures.



What's this stuff on my hands mama???

Ashton is very serious in composing his painting entitled "disappearing frogs".

Thea's 1st painting...

We have the sickies...

The last couple of weeks the kids have been sharing germs with each other. It started with Thea getting a high fever for a couple of days and then a rash for a few days. Just about as soon as she got back to normal Landon got a fever. He recovered by the next day, but Ashton woke up with a nasty cold. 2 days later he is down with a fever. It's 10am and he's been sleeping since 6pm last night. Poor guy. Now I'm starting to get sick...fun.
Please pray for us if you get a chance. I can deal with a cold, but a fever is dangerous to the baby within. Thanks!

1st Day of School!!!

Dan just got home from 2 weeks away and I am so happy! My mom was here to help me for a week when he was gone (thank goodness) and now I feel refreshed and pretty motivated. While my mom was here I was able to lesson plan for our first week of school. Today we started! I couldn't decide between Five in a Row (FIAR) and Rod and Staff to use for a circ. this year...so I decided to use both! FIAR is a literature based circ. that is a lot of fun and Rod and Staff is a very typical textbook type circ. I feel this way we'll be able to be creative along with making sure we get all the necessary stuff in, too.

Our first FIAR story is Ping. The boys love this story so they were more than happy to "do school" today. We started by reading the book, then we looked through the book for differences. Meaning...how is life on a houseboat in china different than how we live today. Afterwards we went to our big world map and found China. We sang the 7 continents song and we learned that China is in Asia. Looking up the Yangtze river on the Internet was my favorite part. It is so beautiful! Those mountains around it are amazing. Even the boys were in awe. We went to the table and colored a picture of the Chinese flag. Now they know the colors of it and are able to identify it. We put those up on the wall for Daddy to see. Before our chiro. appt. we went to the library and got a few children's nonfiction books on China and a Big Bird Visits China DVD.

Here's Ashton coloring his flag.

I feel they learned a lot today! They found China on a map, learned about continents and the customs of China. And we still have 4 more days on this story.

The finished flags! Don't look at the names...can you guess who colored which?? :)

A beautiful Park

We found a beautiful public park a few weeks ago. It was so much fun. We did a little hiking and lots of looking at flowers. The boys almost fell in the tiny lake about a dozen times. We also visited a big greenhouse and were able to see some flowers native of Hawaii. The buildings are made out of some type of bark or sticks...i don't really know. I was so happy to be someplace beautiful again. Just going outside in Hawaii was amazing. Here it's just not as easy to find those types of views. I am discovering that there are definite positives and negatives to each place we live.

The Invasion

Dan and I stayed up to watch a movie the other night. This is what we found when we came to go to bed...where the heck are we supposed to sleep???

USAF Museum

We had a wonderful time visiting the Air Force museum today. It was HUGE! The best part was that it was free! I think that's wonderful, as the goal of the museum is to honor those that have fought and served in the USAF. I had a horrible time getting pictures inside, but managed to get one kind of cute one outside of Ashton saluting.

We will definitely be going back again. There were some outside exhibits that we didn't get to visit and Ashton was quite upset at the short amount of time we were able to look at the rocket ships.