Friday Emily was watching TV. I was sitting at the computer working on something and only half listening to her answer questions on the show. It was Dora or Blues Clues. I'm not sure which one. I wasn't paying much attention. I just know it was one of those because she was shouting out the appropriate answers when the time came. You know how they ask questions for the kids to shout answers at the TV like they hear them? Anyway, I'm still not real sure exactly what the show was about but here is what I heard....

TV personality: "What is your favorite room in the house?"

Emily: "Mommy's room!"

TV personality: "Why is that your favorite room?"

Emily: "Cause that is where Mommy and Daddy are!"

To some this may not be a notable moment, but she could have said her room because of the toys, the living room because of the TV and video games, the kitchen because of the food, the school room because of the craft supplies but she said MY room because that is where her Mommy is found. How long will my room and my arms be her favorite places to be? Such a short time. Needless to say my determination that she must sleep in her own room that night slipped. She slept snuggled up to me and I dozed off knowing with out a doubt that being snuggled up next to one of my babies is my favorite place to be.

Today was a dreary day. What do you do on a dreary day? You read. So, off to the library we went!

BranFlake got two books:

Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke
The Ice Dragon by George R.R. Martin.

(Think the boy likes dragons?) The real trick will be getting him to read them before they are due back. He is not an avid reader. However, he would still do just about anything to have me read out loud to him. He’ll even sit and listen to me read little kids books to his sister! He is wanting the second book in the prophecy warriors (about warrior cats) but the library doesn't have it. Since he read the first book faster than he has ever read anything and he read it with out trying to talk me into reading it out loud, I guess I'll have to go buy that series for him. Soon the third book in the Eragon series should be out. (another dragon book) I’ll really have to buy that when it comes out. Of course I’ll end up reading that aloud.


Emily got several books:

Goodnight Moon (again)
Llama llama red pajama (again)
After Dark by Louis Baum
Winnie the Pooh Everyone is Special
Wild about Books by Judy Sierra
The Castle Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner ( This is the first non picture book that Emily has ever picked out. I really think that she just picked it out because of the castle on the front but we’ve read three chapters already and she seems to like it. I didn‘t notice until we got home that it was a boxcar children book. I‘ve been trying to get Brandon interested in those because they are more his reading level. May be listening to me read to his sister will peek his interest. Right now he wants these huge epics that are beyond his reading level and guess who he wants to read them?)
Just a Minute by Yuyi Morales (This is a cute book about an old woman that tricks death into waiting around for her until he gives up. It also has counting in both English and Spanish all the way up to ten.)


I like historical and fantasy fiction. I guess Bran has my taste. For myself I got The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwall and The Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott. I hope I can still time away to myself to actually read them! I used to read and read and read. But it has gotten hard to make the time to anymore. After all I'm always having to read to my kids! LOL

We usually don’t color coordinate our outfits but when I bought Emily’s little dress I just happened to see shirts in Brandon’s department that matched on sale. It was all lime for us after that! So here we are the lime family on Easter.



The kids had a great Easter. Emily has been talking about Jesus all the time for weeks now. I’m beginning to think it will soon be time for her to start asking about being saved and baptized. Brandon was about 6 or 7 when he accepted Jesus and got baptized.



They had more eggs than their baskets could carry and had to resort to plastic bags to help them out.



Brandon has always complained that the eggs are too easy to find so this year I hid some hard ones for him. This is him playing hot and cold. The prize is in the gas door of the car. It took him a long time to find that one.

Yesterday our home school group had our second annual Easter egg hunt at the Goodman Museum. There were two changes made this year. One is we invited the families staying in the Salvation Army temporary housing to join us. The other is that this year our tour through the Museum was guided.

The Museum has beautiful park grounds that we do our egg hunt in. The tour took longer than expected so after the tour the kids where really chomping at the bits to be set free to hunt eggs! It all happened so fast I didn’t even get a chance to take a single picture of the kids actually hunting eggs! In total we hid way over a thousand eggs but they were snatched up fast.

I did manage to get a few pictures of all the families sitting down together for a picnic after the egg hunt. The way everyone set down together, shared food, and laughed and talked like we were all one family really touched my heart. I hope we get another opportunity to serve the Salvation Army families again in the future.


We were worried about it raining or turning out too cold for families to want to be out in the weather but the day turned out to be perfect egg hunt/picnic weather!

Today on the other hand……It is snowing!!!!!

You got to love Texas! You have got to LOVE God’s sense of humor! Thanks God for waiting one day!

I love my daughter. She is me! She is beautiful and yes it is true I admit that she gets that from her Dad, but the personality is all ME! Sometimes when our hard heads bash up against each other it is a bit rough but for the most part I am thoroughly entertained by her. For instance…..

Curiosity Killed the Cat…

The other day I was trying to watch American Idol and cook supper at the same time. So, as I’m in the bed room trying to catch a song before I check on the food I hear my daughter crying and screaming and her father (who doesn’t do stress well) screaming “HELP!” OH MY Gosh! She did she get burned, cut, is she seriously injured? I run out of the room to find the screams weren’t from the kitchen they were from the hallway past the kitchen. “What on earth could be so wrong in the hallway?” I wonder until I come completely around the corner….

Did I mention that she is Daddy most precious little wonder and joy? Daddy is freaking out….. I run in and try to figure out why they are screaming....

Our front door, you see, has one of those little knobs you twist to lock and the door has been shoved open too roughly on many occasions and put a small hole in the wall. What do you do with a small hole in the wall? Why you stick your little finger in there of course! Then your finger swells up and won’t come out.

So Mommy sends Daddy away because his panic is feeding Em’s panic and uses a syringe to squirt oil into the wall around the finger…and when that doesn’t help you use a knife to cut around the finger. In the end she didn't trust Mom enough and Daddy had to come back to cut it out....

But Em evidently isn’t the only child like me, cause my son announced , “She must have pushed her finger in too far, cause when I did that I pulled my finger out when I felt it getting smaller and I didn’t get MY finger stuck!” LOL

A Box….

I was sorely disappointed when we bought our new fridge and it didn’t come in a box. So naturally I was overjoyed when our lawn mower did! Yes, a big box for Em to play house in. Not as large as a fridge box but she is a very petite girl. We handed the box over and yes she was thrilled! I knew she would be. What I didn’t know is that instead of a house she would throw in a blankie, pillow and battery operated night light and go to sleep! I wish I had a picture of her curled up in there but she never goes to sleep on time or out of my bed so I was too scared I’d wake her with the flash!

I’ll Learn What I Want… When I Want….

I have been worried that Emily doesn’t know what other kids her age know already. I am not worried that she is mentally slow. I am more worried that I never really get around to doing school with her on a regular basis and that I may be I am letting her down. Even her Daddy nags that I don't work with her enough. (Deep down I know there is plenty of time. She may pass the other kids in her age range and leave them in the dust when she really starts doing regular school work, but I’m tired of having her being questioned and compared now.) That and when I do bother she resists and plays games with me. By play games with me I mean she acts like she doesn't know stuff to avoid work. For instance she can count to ten one second and gets lost at 2 a moment later. I can tell when she really doesn't know the answer because that is when she doesn't want to do school anymore. If it is not easy or doesn't come to her naturally she would rather not mess with it. Also, she is five and doesn’t know her colors??? Is she colored blind? Well, I sat down to do a little school with her a couple days after complaining to a friend that Em was having a hard time learning her colors and not only did she say all her colors but several of them she could recognize the names of the colors in writing…. I guess I SOOOOO need to get over this. She is clearly going to learn things in her own time!

I've gotten the all kid's curriculum for next year all bought and a rough plan for the year lined out:

Language Arts:

Brandon
Journal-writing daily in a journal
Reading-The All-In-One The Pilgrim's Progress
Grammar- Easy Grammar Grades 5 and 6
Spelling- AVKO Sequential Spelling 2

Emily
Explode the Code
Handwriting Without Tears
Spelling and Vocabulary (Houghton Mifflin)

Math:

Brandon
Saxon 65

Emily
Various workbook pages from:
The Complete Book of Numbers and Counting
More Everything for Early Learning
Mathematics The Path to Math Success Texas Edition

Science:

Brandon and Emily
Flying Creatures of the 5th Day
Swimming Creatures of the 5th Day

Emily
Christan Liberty Nature Reader Book 1 (We're already reading this I probably should have bought the set)


History:

Brandon and Emily
Diana Waring's Ancient History and the Bible
Emily does have her own workbook for this, but I'm not sure if it might still be too hard for her. At the very least she can listen to the stories.

Bible:

I'm not doing a separate Bible curriculum this year as I feel it is already throughly covered in Reading, Science, and History.


I also plan to try to get Bran more computer literate.

Well I know I’m dangerously close to not keeping my blog up again. So here it goes.

My Mom’s gone AWOL weekend was great. We ate well, we drank well, we stayed in a fancy suite, we got manicures and pedicures, I won $50, and we shopped and laughed. What more can you want in a weekend away from responsibilities?

I am not sure if it was the break or that spring is coming but I really got my rear in gear with doing school with the kiddos. I have so been slacking with Emily. I keep telling myself she is only 5 we have years and years to teach her all she needs to know. But it is time to do way more than I do with her. Great news is Brandon is starting to work more independently. And he has caught his mom’s addiction to curriculum because next year’s stuff has come in and he is dying to start it! LOL

My husband, as any one that knows me will tell you, I adore. I do. He is wonderful to me. I am very grateful to God that He provided me with this man. But he was SOOOOOO great about this Mom’s gone AWOL weekend .Really I have never been so spoiled. Buy what you want, stay gone as long as you want, enjoy yourself, live it up, this is your weekend honey, don’t worry about us, and the whole time he was working and taking the kids to work, and rushing them here and there. What a guy! I could really get used to that. So, I have decided I’m going to be such an awesome wife that he’ll want to treat me that way all the time.

First step in that direction, one of the best ways to be a good wife is to be a great mom. If I have the kids and house running well that takes stress out of his life. So, no more kids in the living room and our room. Both children have TVs in their rooms and there is no reason they should bring all their stuff to the other rooms to play and watch TV. Plus it is soooooo past time for them to sleep in their rooms and not the living room or our room. I’m an attached parenting kind of mom but hey this has gone too far!!! LOL So, this weekend we are working on cleaning their rooms and organizing them so that they are such wonderful places to be that they never want to leave them.

Once I accomplish step one It will be easier to keep our room, the living room, and kitchen clean. My next step is keep clothes washed (not being 10 loads behind in other words), kitchen always neat with no dirty dishes, the bedroom a safe haven to come home to at night (right now it looks like his office) and supper by 6 o’clock.

Since he is working 12 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week, I also plan to start doing some the chores that are traditionally his. He bought a great self propelled lawn mower that will help. It is not a riding lawn mower but beggars can’t be choosers. But my absolute biggest goal is to clean out the storage shed and purge purge purge all this Ca- Ca this family has piled up around the house, yard and shed.

So if I’m not blogging for a while..... Hopefully it is because I’m working my tail off .....which hopefully will help with my other goal of losing 30 pounds! Send good vibes my way!

OK I haven't blogged in 2 whole months so here is all the wonderful stuff that has been going on that really deserves a full length page all by themselves but aren't going to get one right now.

1. A close friend of mine, Brandon, and myself went on a Biblical Daniel fast for 21 days. We had nothing but fruits and vegetables. It was all about discipline and putting God first for me. It was very hard and very much worth the effort.

2. Heather and Aaron got married on March 10th. Of course that is her and Em at the top of the page. Isn’t she just beautiful? There are new pictures running down the side of the page also. The last picture is of her and Aaron our new son. It was a wonder and sweet wedding service. I pray many blessings on their marriage.

3. My niece that came to the wedding had 2 children with a stomach virus. To top it off my close friend here at home has 2 children with a stomach virus and it was also going around in Houston. Regardless where we got it the whole family came home from the wedding sick and stayed that way for a week. Cecil and I still have moments when we fill the virus is hanging in there.

4. As you may know from my post around Christmas about Santa paying off our lawyer, Cecil is adopting Branflake. Well, the first court date got cancelled. The judge was busy? Anyway it was rescheduled for today. So, here is my morning so far…..

Just to set the scene… Panic has set in.
Cecil wakes me up around 6:30 this morning.

Cecil: "You have to get up and call the lawyer!"

Me: "What?"

Cecil: "You have to get up and call the lawyer!"

Me: "Why?"

Cecil: "I'm scared. What if I miss heard him?"

Me: "He said 1:30 right, the after lunch session?"

Cecil: "Yes but before he said all cases started at 9 AM and they just saw you as the day went."

Me: *lean over and look at clock* “Well honey I can't call him right now."

Cecil" "No, but ya'll better go ahead and get up and be ready to go by 8 in case when you call him it really is at 9 AM.


Me mentally: Sheesh doesn't he realize he's already got this gig? I mean he has had the kid calling him Daddy since he was 2 years old. (For the 1st year he called him SeeSaw.)


5. Tomorrow is my Moms Gone AWOL weekend. I am off for a whole weekend of fun with some friends. No kids, no housework, no spouse, no responsibilities, nothing but selfishness. We are going to stay in a fancy hotel suite, eat good food, get manicures and pedicures, and shop shop shop. I plan to make the most of it. I can’t believe Cecil is letting me go much less has agreed to spend the money this involves. I may never get a chance to be this self indulgent again! God is good. Cecil is good.


Other than those things the days have been pretty much the same old stuff around here. Lots of school work and lots of house work. We did get our taxes in and bought a bunch of much needed stuff and a few things we shouldn’t have. I went ahead and bought my entire curriculum for next year. I’ll tell you all about my new buys later. Your roughly filled in now on my last 2 months and hopefully I won’t fall off the blogging wagon again for a while! LOL

I know it has been forever since I've blogged. I just got side tracked really. And I know this isn't really what you want to read after looking at the same unblogged page for weeks on end. However, I did at least get rid of the snowmen and changed to a spring look. As I really just spent WAY TOO much time doing just That today, you'll just have to wait for me you fill you in on all the stuff we've been up to until...... tomorrow? Ok look I'll really try to update tomorrow. Promise!!!