The BEST BEST BEST days of Winter

Ok - second best, the first best winter days are snow skiing but this was an awesome day... 

Snow forts and snow angels, hot chocolate and warming up by the fire, christmas music and pink noses, all bundled up.. cold faces but happy hearts!

Memory making day!

I was incredibly blessed to only have 4 contactions and no cramps yesterday... that meant I got to be downstairs and take some pictures of my sweet daughters.

Days like this are what we imagine motherhood to be.  Sweet happiness, hot chocolate and giggles.

Emma didn't come inside until dark. . .  this is what childhood is all about.

Then we watched Polar Express.   Good times.

Ah, lovely, precious, SLEEP!

Have you watched this British Comedian?  This clip is HILARIOUS!

Seriously ... Tears Rolling Down My Face Funny.  Enjoy

"Sleep?!"  "Haha" "SLEEPING AT NIGHT!"

Love it.


Thankfully my girls are 5 & 8 and the do sleep at night.  Rarely do they wake up.

Rarely do I sleep. What the heck?!?!

Lovely Insomnia.

Lymes = Insomnia
Pregnancy = not sleeping
Bed Rest = not sleeping

So I RARELY sleep all night.  What do I do all night?  Well I always  crash hard and sleep soundly for a few hours... blessed sleep.


Then.... I stare at Kyle, (wondering if I'll wake him up) stare at the ceiling, try out different sleeping positions, count sheep, wonder if I turn on my phone will it wake up Kyle, play card games on my phone, read my scriptures on my phone, shop on my phone (I have a no purchase rule during sleeping hours) then repeat.

Im usually awake from 1 to 5 hours.

Last night...I was sleeping soundly! Lovely.  When BAM!!!!! WHAT THE OUCHIE!!!!???!!

Back Labor.

Seriously intense ouchness!

Uh oh!  Back labor is a new reason to wake up.  This called for serious intervention.  I am only 25 weeks.  It is not good to be awoken from labor, that usually means its the real deal and a hospital trip is on the horizon.

Not good.  Only 25 weeks.  And seriously, Kyle was been swamped with work so not convenient or safe.

Intervention was needed.

I have prayed for help sleeping before.  I never seem to get much help.  more like

"Good Luck."  ( seriously watch that video!)

But last night, I was desperate.

I gave a quick desperate prayer that the back labor pain would stop and I would be able to sleep.

Guess What?!?! It did~! Yay!

If only I have enough faith to stop all my contractions and be freed from bed rest, but faith is like a seed.  WAHOO! for no trip to the hospital last night!

"Good night."
"Sleep well"
"I will"

Video= funny.

life is full of struggles

Here is my intro... if you don't have time to read it all, skip to the Nitty Gritty. :)

I think the last time I posted I wrote something to the affect that I was gong to be posting a ridiculously large quantities of posts, since we are homeschooling and on bed rest.  But obviously that is not the case.  At first it was because I would want to do projects and such with my girls so that I could post about them.  How awful it that?!?!  Then in that effort I was not doing a great job about keeping down and keeping my growing baby safe and sound INSIDE the womb.  So I decided, rather quickly, that blogging was a good idea at this time.

Its just not honest to only post about what cool things you are doing.

Especially when you only do them so that you can have something to post about!  Silly desires.

So I just decided to not.

However, lately, I have been having some experiences that I need to share.  I don't like sharing very personal things because it makes me vulnerable.  But I feel very, very strongly that sharing my struggles and triumphs needs to happen.  If its for my benefit or others I do not know.

I have been on bed rest now for about 4 months.  I have 3 more to go.  Plus all the rehibilatation this will take to recover! And my Lyme's Disease symptoms are slowing coming back.. How dare it!


During my bed rest with Emma and especially Halie, I pretty much ignored the hardship as much as possible and LIVED in books.  I ignored everyone and everything.  I fell into a dark depression and it was not the happiest time in my life.

I decided to be different this time.  First off, when your kids are getting older, its just not possible to ignore them.  They can tell the subtle difference of a mom just nodding along and a mom who is engaged.  I knew going into this pregnancy I could not do that to my daughters.

So I have been trying my darndest to be PRESENT!  Its hard.  Its hard because it is just so in my face of all the things I cant do.   All the things that have to just fall apart because mom is not able to get up and fix.

NITTY GRITTY...

Its crushing to not have control over my life. Over my house.  Over what I can and cannot do to make our home fun and a wonderful place for my daughters and hubby to live.  I cant decorate for holidays or cook meals.  I can't go and do fun things with my children.  I cant control so much.  Sometimes it feels as though I can't control anything.  I feel like a bystander.  The only thing I have control over is how I respond.  Sometimes I respond well and other times I cry all day or withdraw within myself or at my lowest moments, get angry at my children or hubs.

At my lowest week (last week)  I cried pretty much everyday.  It just seemed like this has lasted long enough and I still have so long to go.  (yes I realize that this is just a small time, and my little son is worth it, but its hard to keep perspective at times.)

I was offered a blessing by a leader in  my church who didn't know what was happening in my life.  He really doesn't know me well at all.  But he asked me if he could give me a blessing, I could tell he felt nervous and presumptuous in asking but I am GRATEFUL.

The Lord spoke right to me.  HE KNOWS ME.  He knows the difficultly I feel and His direction to me was to STOP trying to depend on me and my strength.  Depend on HIM.  Come closer, He wants me to lean on Him, He wants me to come to Him.  I can't do this on my own, I have to rely on my Father in Heaven.  I was reminded that my sacrifice will bring untold blessings to my children.  I was told so many things, many that are just to personal.  But through His Preisthood, Heavenly Father, spoke to me and I know He love me.  I know he is watching over me.  He loves each and everyone of His children. My experiences will bless others in their times of trials.  We are not alone and we will all experience dark times in our life.

During the blessing I felt the Holy Ghost but I still felt alone.  Later that day when I was alone, I knelt down and prayed and prayed.  I opened my heart to the Lord.  He filled my soul.  I felt His warmth and love and knew He wants me to return to him, He wants me to be close to Him.  He loves me even when my heart is in the wrong place.  He is yearning for me to come back.  He is yearning for each and everyone of His children to come back.  I KNOW He heard my prayers and I know he hears my soul even when I don't think He is paying attention.  He was just waiting for me to sincerely reach out to Him.

To feel as though I am letting my husband and children down, everyday, not being able to be what I want to be for them is crushing.  But my soul was lifted, this experience is blessing my children.  If I can learn to lean on my Father in Heaven, then this burden will feel light.   The weight and negativity and fears that were ever so present in my soul have lightened and I am grateful.

It feels strange to be posting this but I couldn't get it out of my mind that I need to.

I am learning so much and have so much more to write but this seems like enough for one post. Please forgive me for the personal nature that these will be.

What we have learned this week!

So our first week is done.  We have learned lots and had some fun.  We learned that we need to do our "hard" subjects first.  Spelling, Math, as Emma is doing below, and reading. 

We have also learned that a timer is a good thing!  We were doing our memory work FOREVER ... because the girls LOVE IT!  However we were doing school forever each day and getting WAY  burned out to finish anything.  So we have a timer for Spelling, Reading, Memory Work and Lapbooking and anything else we do that day.  We DON'T have a timer for math.   Otherwise, the girls just sit there and play with the blocks until the timer goes off.  So we just complete certain section that needs to be done.

As we finish our work Halie or Emma gets to check off the schedule board.

Our Classical Conversation memory work.  What do we do?  How do we memorize and learn about the different subjects??? I was very concerned about this!  Here is what we have been doing.  MUSIC. Put anything to music and suddenly it become easily motorized.  The CD's that you can buy through Classical Conversations have the timeline, the History, Skip Counting, and the Latin set to music.  VERY HELPFUL!!!  Also helpful are some incredibly kind homeschool moms out there. Our english grammar and the science sentences were on You Tube put to music.  

 While listening to the music we wrote the sentence a small white board and erased words to see if we could still remember it.  We played toss, as Halie is playing with me above. On the ball I had written the different subjects.  Whatever your thumb landed on, is the subject that we recited.  We wrote the sentence, word by word, on different sticky pads, then Emma would organize the sticky notes into the correct order.  We also the played memory game, I wrote each each sentence two times on little red rectangles of card stock.  Then we played memory.  Each time we flipped over a card, we would read what the Memory sentence was.

   

Each day we worked in our lapbooks from Wisdom and Righteousness.  The day that I took these photos they made a little spinner of the different biomes.  The next day we worked on grammar and skip counting in our lap books.  

When our wiggles were too much, we did brain breaks, there are TONS of ideas around the internet.  I just wrote out fun things to do and slipped the slips of paper into our Brain Break Jar.  This is totally fun for the girls.  Below they did 5 yoga poses.  It was hilarious!

At the end of each day we do something FUN and of course educational.  One day we cut out pictures from the national geographic and made a Biome Book, then we painted castles, which was supposed to be learning on how to make art using simple shapes, Emma caught on very well. Halie just had fun painting.  The girls made up stories to go with their painting.  Our globe that I mentioned in the last post took us longer that I thought, so we did that for a few days as our fun things.

On  Friday night we went to the Spirit of Boise hot air ballon glow.  It was pretty and beautiful.  The girls mainly had the most fun running in the wide open spaces.  It was a trial run with my newly acquired wheelchair.  It didn't go as well as we had hoped.   My ridiculous uterus was NOT happy with me.  But you don't know until you try!  So any outing in the evening is a no go :(  But oh well.

Is not that gorgeous!

Emma took this picture of me :)

1st day of School At Home!!

Each year in the past, the day before school starts, we do a treasure hunt.  At the end of the treasure hunt is a treasure chest full of school supplies.  What is the link?   Well learning is a treasure.... I know cheesy, but its true to me.  Usually I make a map and we do the whole hunt outside and the girls have been known to dress up a bit.  This year, we had to change that just a bit.  Being on modified (thank heaven!) bedrest I could put together that huge event.  But we do have tons of fun new supplies so we did a modified treasure hunt of hot and cold inside our home....

The loot!

Ok!  So bed time!...

Here is our homeschool command center.  It looks a bit cluttered but i needed everything to be in sight at reachable by the girls so that I don't have to get up 1000 times.  Just to the left of that small open bookshelf is the armrest of our couch.  Where I am supposed to be sitting :)

We went to the front yard to take some pictures ~ it was so delightful to hear the school bus and not have my kids on it!  It was also AMAZING how  much smoother our morning was when our commute to school was just from the kitchen to our bonus room!  Love it!

I am biased, but dang! I like these girls!

Totally posing at their desks... they were so excited, which of course was thrilling!

We started off with our opening routine... primary song, prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, Calendar, and then we read a daily email from Brave Girls Club.   They have a darling truth email sent every weekday little girls and one sent for older girls.  The girls loved it and Emma wants to print it out and hang it up every day.

\

Then we did a first day of school book, we spend 45 minutes decorating the cover so we have to finish it today.   While we worked on that we listened to a book on cd from Story of the World about Charlemahne.  Emma was so fascinated  that Charlemagne didn't know how to read or write.  And because of that, he started school and made sure his children learned how to read.

We worked on our Classical Conversations memory work.  Learning the continents, the Oceans, A history sentence about Charlemagne being crowned Holy Roman Emperor.  We also worked on skip counting and introduced the 7 biomes.

Next was time for Halie to practice writing and work on her reading skills.  The pencil in her mouth was killing me.  It started behind her ear but kept falling out, so she stashed it in her teeth. 

Here is Emma doing her Math U See and enjoying a little smoothie.   (left over from breakfast)

Halie had to get her writing just right.  We are using the Bob Books, a little writing that goes along with each book that I found at teachers pay teachers, and Happy Phonics.

Next Emma worked on her cursive and then read to me from No Flying in the House by Betty Brock.  In the meantime Halie was supposed to be doing her math, but I lost the supplies!  So she just played with blocks.  Emma found Halie's math stuff while they were cleaning up at the end of the school day so today we are all set!

We breaked for lunch at this time and then....

We worked on a paper mache globe.  Yesterday we did the paper mache part and today we are going to paint it in the morning and finish it in the afternoon with the continents.  Tomorrow Emma is going to label!

We finished off our day by me  reading a shortened Original version of Repunzel.    We read that because Charlemagne was from Germany and the story of Repunzel is a  German Folk Story.  We are going to read a German Folk Story each day this week!

Hard parts of the day?  Halie wanted to listen to the Classical Conversations music CD while Emma wanted to listen to Story of the World, so we alternated.  Halie didn't enjoy the memory work but mainly because she didnt get to have her way.. go figure!  And Emma didn't want to do math.   We broke things up by interjecting fun Brain Breaks throughout our morning.  After lunch is pure fun stuff so no brain breaks needed!

All in all?  An outstanding success!  I LOVED being unplugged all day. I turned my phone to silent, and have all of my other "stuff" put on the side during our school time.  Once we were done, the girls wanted to watch one of Halie's phonics movies (mainly because I always say yes to those).  While they were doing that I wrote our schedule for today. When their 1/2 hour show was done they went outside to play.  (for some reason they didn't want to, but I forced them... so mean)  While they were outside I returned phone calls and read my novel.  Then it was time for dinner.  As First Day of School tradition dictates... we went out for ice-cream after dinner.  Yum!

Well, in 15 minutes they are going to be awake... so I gotta go!

Summer Lovin, Had me a blast!

Summer Lovin, Happened so Fast!

Park Time ...

Boating ....

Walters Ferry....

Pioneer Celebration!

Miss H. Learning to ride her bike!

Fun time at the river...

Camping for Miss E's Birthday ... 

Map Rock and a Fun Hike ....

Jackson Hole ...

BYUI's Dance Performance ....

Kite Flying 

Train Ride ...

Unfortunately that is pretty much all the pictures for the summer, I didn't take any at the houseboat or at the pool!? How did THAT happen?  Weird.

But it was a fun summer, everything summer should be, fun adventures, swimming, boating, camping (sort of), Snow cones, park days, bbqs.... man we live a blessed life!