Karate Kid

Despite my insistence that we're not going to overdo it on extracurricular activities this year, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to have Tristan take karate.  We have friends who just opened up a taekwondo studio in our town and were offering huge discounts to friends.  I never dreamed we'd be able to afford to do Karate with him, so I jumped at the opportunity.  I figure that any sport that professes to teach self discipline and self control to my child is a win-win for me!  He was SO. EXCITED.  when I told him!  He couldn't wait to get out there and he did awesome on his first day.  I think he felt like big stuff out on that floor!

 Practicing punches and kicks.  I have to giggle at him sometimes.  He's so serious about it, but he doesn't have the best balance, so he tends to wobble a bit.  I'm so proud of his focus and intensity, though!

 He loved the obstacle course they set up for him.  He looks adorable doing it.  Despite the fact that he's loving every minute, he frequently checks to make sure we're watching and paying attention. I have several friends whose children are taking karate at the same time as Tristan and I have to be careful to keep my eyes on the floor for fear he'll catch me socializing!

 So extremely proud of my Karate Kid.  I hope we've found something that he'll continue to enjoy as he gets older.  He's been collecting stars for good behavior, so it won't be long before his uniform is covered in patches too!

 Lorie caught these photos of the kids one day when she stopped by to watch the kids for a few minutes for me.  Apparently all four bigger kids were upstairs playing VERY quietly and she went to investigate.  They were all dressed up!  Hilarious!  Even Emerson looks like she wants to get in on the action!

 I thought that it might be time to get rid of the dress up clothes, but they've made a reappearance on several occasions recently, so I'll just hold onto them for a bit longer.  After all, what would Alexandra play with when she comes over???

I wanted to make sure I document Tristan's dobok uniform.  It's clean and white now, but I'm sure my little Pigpen will change it's color before too long.  He can't wait to earn his ten stars and get a super special patch for the front.  So proud of my little man!

Real Life

I find that when I blog, I tend to concentrate on events.  Every picture, every story focuses on some specific event that I never want to forget.  What I often miss are the other moments I never want to forget.  The snugly, noisy, everyday moments which are so much a part of our lives, especially now that we homeschool.  Our reality is books and pencils and reading, and lots and lots of together time.  Most of the time it's wonderful,  sometimes it's difficult, and occasionally it's horrible.  Most of the time the wonderful far outweighs the horrible and I love it.  Some days, I fantasize about the big yellow bus coming and taking my children away!  I'm glad I have a few photos of our everyday, though, to remind me of what our normal life looks like.  We read...a lot.  When life gets crazy, we read.  When someone is sick...we read.  When I need to step away from schooling...we read.  I love it and the kids love it and someday it will pay dividends in their reading ability.  I can't wait til they read to me someday!

 I love my kids...and they love each other.  I am thankful that there are a lot more giggles than there are tears even when those giggles turn into squeals and shrieks of laughter.  On this occasion, the kids found my Christmas boxes to be the most fascinating toys in the whole world.  Never mind that they received hundreds of dollars of toys just days earlier!

 On January day was so ridiculously mild that we blew off morning lessons and headed over to a  local Japanese garden to feed some fish.  We had a ridiculously good time throwing bread, examining rocks and keeping children from falling into fish ponds!

 Well, not all the bread went into the fish pond!  I'd like to take a moment to talk about my children's relationships.  This may come off as bragadocious, but this is just me chronicling these things to look back on someday when my kids don't like each other much.  It will certainly happen someday.  I hope not, but I try to be a little realistic.  I want to remember just how much Maura and Tristan love each other right now.  They are just the best of friends.  Every game is played together, with almost perfect harmony between them until Bennett tries to butt in!  Tristan just worships Maura right now and will do pretty much anything that she asks of him.  He is, by turns, her messenger, her sidekick, her courier, and her scapegoat.  I've seen him dressed in skirts and feathers at her bidding, and just a few days I witnessed him playing prince and dancing a waltz with all the grace of Fred Astaire.  He desires her approval so much right now and thankfully, she's mostly happy to give it.  She tends to be a good little encourager and peacemaker, which means that she's able to play with both Bennett and Tristan.  Now, Bennett and Tristan are a different matter altogether.  They're like oil and water at the moment, although I occasionally catch glimpses of what life will be like when they finally start to get along.  Someday soon, Bennett will be old enough to be Tristan's little stooge and the tables will turn a bit!  I love these three kiddos fiercely and I love to see their relationships grow and blossom.  I truly think that if our closer relationships are the only benefit that we see from this year of homeschooling, than it's been totally worth it.  

 We spent the morning collecting rocks, throwing leaves and looking for moss and animal tracks.  It may have been our best homeschooling morning ever!  We even found an old cabin and played Little House on the Prairie for awhile.

 LOVE this girl.  I think this may be the last photo of Maura without her front teeth and I just want to savor her toothless little girlness that won't be around much longer.  Already, she's blossoming into a beautiful, intelligent, intuitive young lady.  She truly is a special girl and I'm treasuring my sweet moments with her right now.  We're into reading the classics right now and I've loved sharing some of my favorites with her.  She's loved Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, Little Women and so many others.  I can hardly wait till her reading reaches a point that she's able to enjoy these books on her own.  She'll be a voracious reader very, very soon, so I'm enjoying the snuggle time I have with her right now before she wants to read on her own. 

I really need to remember to get my camera out more frequently and just document the day to day fun that we experience.  I know that these are the days I'm going to look back on with such fondness someday and I already know that I can't trust my fuzzy memory with anything.  I'm so glad I have this blog as my photo memory for years to come!

Out with the Old

It is our custom to spend New Years Eve with my parents.  Way back in 1999, my parents were very concerned about Y2K, and made preparations for the apocalypse.  Mom wanted to have all her chicks around her, so she came up with the idea for a New Years Ever party and it just stuck.   We've spent every New Year's Eve there since 1999.  Our celebrations have gotten a bit quieter and less populated by adults over the years.  Now, the first part of the evening is all about the kids.  We had delicious food and followed it up with sparklers.  Sparklers terrify me.  I remember being incredibly foolish with them as a kid and I have so many visions of how sparklers could go terribly bad.  We basically light a sparkler for our child, spread them out from everything and tell them to stand still.  So, maybe my children never experience the joy of running around with a lit sparkler like I did, but hopefully they'll keep all their eyes!

Deep breath, mom, it will be over soon!  But it wasn't over...the kids lit sparkler after sparkler until the air was so full of sulphur that you could taste it!  The kids loved it.  I just had to keep from hyperventilatating!  I figured out I could take some really cool motion photos of the sparklers, so the kids had fun doing that!

Even the big kids.  Aunt Katie was there, along with her friend
Britta from Chicago.  They're so cute!  Here are some examples of Brent and I running interference with the kids--one kid in each hand!

My Bennett William is a wild man with a firework and I have to be extra careful!  He's just so darn lovable, though!  He required multiple handlers, like Uncle Brad.

We rang in the new year at about 9pm with the kids, complete with noisemakers, poppers and silly string.  The kids, with the exception of Alexandra, loved it.  I think my mom may have loved it even more!

LOVE my girl!  She loved getting decked out in silly string.  She's pretty silly herself!  After our celebration, Katie and Emily took some time to help Maura pick out her dissection specimen.  That's because they bought her a dead animal for Christmas!  Katie called me a few weeks before Christmas to ask if I thought Maura would like to receive a dissection kit and a dissection specimen for Christmas.  My answer was a resounding "YES!"  Rather than order any old animal for her and wrap up a dead animal, they allowed her to pick out what she wanted after Christmas.  She picked a pigeon.  I was less than pleased.  Feathers...yuck!  She was so excited, though!

Emmers and Brad.  Bennett got a horsey ride before we took the kiddos up for bed.  It makes for a full house, but we always just stay over on New Years Eve.  None of us wants to pack up our kids at 12:30am and get out on the roads with the drunks.  Works for us!

Once the kids were tucked safely away, it was time for some fun games that made us adults look like idiots!  No sense having them think we're any crazier than they already do!

I tried to take a photo of Brent acting, but he wouldn't play!  Finally it was time to ring in the New Year.  I'm not sure why I didn't get a photo of Brent and I after the ball dropped.  It's kind of a tradition!

The next day was full of snuggles, cousin time, and games on Grammy's phone.  Fun times.  No New Year's Day would be complete without pork roast and saurkraut, either!

We've been so richly blessed in 2012.  Brent returned from deployment, we had some wonderful family vacations, we made a move to homeschool and we're just loving life.  We're looking forward to the new year and praying that God's blessings extend not only to our family, but to all we know and love!  Happy New Year!

Better Late Then Never

SNOW!!!!  The kids have  been praying for it ever since winter started and they really ramped up their desire for snow at Christmas time, just having returned from snowy Colorado.  It arrived a few days late, but just before New Years, we had a beautiful, gloriously sticky snow that the kids COULD NOT WAIT to play in.  It was the first real snow of the winter, and they were determined to do all things snowy!  Tristan set off for the pool in the yard to really do some snowball damage with a pool full of snow, but unfortunately got his foot stuck within moments of getting out into the yard.  I thought we might have to cut the plastic to extract him, but I managed to get him out!

Now, THIS is one happy girl!  I think the only thing that could have improved the day for her would have been some skis on her feet!

Oh, my boys!  I love them so!

This was our attempt at sledding!  I've kept this blow up sled in the garage for years and we've used it sporadically.  I had Brent blow it up for the kids, only to realize it has a pretty substantial leak.  One trip for Tristan down our "slope"  and his tail was dragging the ground!!  So much for sledding!  It made a pretty good snowball holder!

Snowballs were flying all around.  Tristan(unwisely) went up against Bennett at close range.  The results weren't pretty.  That kid has an ARM!

AND the weeping ensued!

This was some serious snowman making snow...sticky and wet, we just knew we had to make a big one!  Maura pushed the bottom of the snowman as long as she could, but it quickly outweighed her.  Thankfully, Daddy is a pro at snowman construction and we had a real beauty.  Maura's friend Aubrey joined us just in time to put on the finishing touches and pose for a photo before it was time to go in for hot chocolate!  I can't think of a more fun way to spend a morning of winter break!