Catch-up Post

Well, a lot of time has gone by since I last posted. My life has been a little overwhelming, to say the least, and my poor blog has been ignored. So I decided to do a general post to catch up on some of the things that have been going on.

Mexico Birds
I said that I would post pictures of the birds we saw in Mexico and never did it, but my son posted it on his blog, so take a look over there. There are some beautiful pictures that you won’t want to miss (and if you leave him a comment, you’ll bring lots of smiles to one little face). Here’s a link: John Deere Boy

Pregnancy
I finally got over morning sickness for the most part at around 29 weeks. This pregnancy gets an award for tough. I’m just hoping that the award coming my direction isn’t wimp. I’m now 31 weeks. Starting to get very anxious. I can’t wait to meet our new little lady. Oh yeah, we’re supposed to be having a girl. That will make two out of four, so I’m pretty happy about that, and so is the big sister. The brothers are happy too, although they’d have been just as happy if not more so with a boy.

Home
My husband decided that it is time for us to get a bigger house, so we have put ours up for sale. We have been inundated with interest, but no offers. Sigh… Every time somebody comes, the house has to be pristine. We’re a little weary of it all, but looking forward to where God will lead us next. And trusting that everything will happen in His timing.

School
For much of this year, we have been basically unschoolers. Amazingly enough, it has worked. I’m so amazed by it that I just shake my head in wonder. Through the months that I was so terribly ill, we tried to get reading and math in every day, but didn’t succeed. We did get it in a fair amount. During that time, my 9 year old, who was still struggling with reading, took off like a bullet on reading. She’s now reading her Bible in the morning and is working her way through Farmer Boy. I have long believed that reading comes with maturity, but I was pretty sure that I needed to keep working and working with her on it until it clicked. Amazingly enough, she “got it” while I was so sick and I was just barely working with her. Life has so many pleasant surprises, doesn’t it? Sometimes it has difficult ones, too, but it’s sure fun to enjoy the pleasant ones.

I had a few months where grading textbooks was completely out of the question, so all that we did for math was flash cards. This has also worked well. I’ve done some testing that I found online on my oldest and she progressed about a grade and a half this year. Makes me wonder if I make too big of deal out of math sometimes.

Last summer, I made a whole outline for what we would accomplish this year. I looked at it a few times while I was sick, now I refuse to look at it. I just get bummed out. So now that I’m feeling much better, we’re just finishing up this school year with some unit studies and having fun at it. We’ve been working for two weeks on one, and should have it done in the next week or week and a half, so hopefully I can post pictures of something we actually have done for school! Even if that’s not exciting to anybody else, it will be exciting to me!

Life Lessons
One thing that I have sure enjoyed watching while I’ve been sick is my children. At first, they all three had a hard time and made big messes all over the place. But they have grown up so much. Both my 7 and 10 year old can now cook some food. My 10 year old can make a full meal and clean up afterward too. They have been so helpful in keeping our house clean and ready to show too. They have also become better friends with each other. I think that is because I was too sick to settle the squabbles, so they’ve had to figure it out all on their own.

The Lord truly has been good to us.