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I have a new feature on my blog. You can now subscribe to my blog by email. If you click the little “By Email” icon in the upper right corner, you can subscribe to my blog via email. I think that some of you will find that feature to be nicer than having to remember to come check my blog.

If you use a feed reader, you can access the feed URL by clicking on the “Posts” icon.

Thank you for visiting my blog…and especially for leaving comments!!

Dear Blog,

So sorry, I’ve been neglecting you. I always have the best of intentions, but not sure how long I can survive on “It’s the thought that counts” theory and still consider you part of my life. So I promise to make my best effort to improve the relationship immediately and start posting.

Sincerely,
Rhonda

Just wanted to wish each one a Merry Christmas.

Thank you for all the kind comments that you left after my last post. I am still in my first trimester, not far left though. I have really had a bumpy start to this pregnancy: ended up in the hospital twice. We’re praying that the baby survives everything that I’ve been through.

Homeschooling has been very challenging while I’ve been so sick.  My kids have learned a few important things though–how to do the laundry, how to make meals, how to do lots of cleaning. All things that I had tried to teach them before too, but now they have to do it in order for us to survive. So I think it’s a growing experience for them too. We’ve managed to do some math and some reading, but otherwise it has been purely unschooling.

I was afraid we wouldn’t have Christmas at our house, but some very lovely friends gave us a tree and helped the kids decorate it. I don’t know why that makes all the difference, but though there hasn’t been much preparation put into Christmas around here, having a tree and playing music has made it seem festive and happy.

So a very Merry Christmas to each of you and hopefully soon, I’ll be able to report on the fun things and learning that is happening around our home.

We’ve been taking lots of time off from our regular school activities. Our holidays have been full of family time. Our favorite way to spend them. First off, Papa and Nana drove out from the midwest and spent a week with us at our home. They drove for two days to get to our house and saw snow covered ground on the whole trip. It was bitterly cold part of the way too. They even saw -24F in one place. Brrr. We were sure happy when they arrived safely.

Here we are with them after trying out some sledding.

Then after much contemplation and discussion amongst the adults on the danger of traveling on bad roads, we decided that we would head over to Grandpa and Grandma’s house. What normally takes us 5.5 hours, took us over 10 hours. It was a long trip of driving on packed snow. Airplanes and buses weren’t making the trip, but we did. We even managed to find out that a friend was grounded here and couldn’t get a flight out, so she hitch-hiked with us.

This turned out to be a special Christmas for us because Nana and Papa came to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for the day, so we got to spend the day with both sets of grandparents at the same time and lots of aunts and uncles and even great grandparents. That was special.

And a pose from my side of the family:

We might have to mark down that basically all we got accomplished for school in the last couple of weeks is social studies–as in learning about our family. But that’s important and we sure have been enjoying it.

Well, I’ve been looking at some other blogs and I found a  write-up on one of them about keeping your children safe. So, I’ve tried to remove all of my children’s names from my blog as well as our last name. I hope I succeeded. I definitely want to keep my children safe. I’d be horrified if something happened to them. Can’t even imagine it! Anyway, since this is a blog open for public viewing, even though I don’t have tons of people visiting my blog everyday, I decided better safe-than-sorry.

So from now on my children are by order of their age referred to as Zippy, JDboy (short for John Deere Boy), and G’tums (until he grows out of that and can pick one for himself.)

And if you notice that I missed anything, I would appreciate your bringing it to my attention. Since pretty much everybody who sees my blog, knows my family, I’m sure that you too would hate to see my children endangered.