question.of.the.day

Today, Claire was looking at our cheap stickers, the little circle ones that come in tablets of like 1,000.

Here are some examples of the stickers:
"Great!"
smiley face
star
"Yeah!"
frog
whale
"WOW!"
"Super"
various animals
and...

#1

Claire asks..."Is there a #2 on here somewhere?"

Hmmmm...I don't think they make #2 stickers...I think it has something to do with self-esteem issues :).

5.months

Happy 5 month birthday, baby girl! In the last month, Amelia has grown so much. She has gotten 2 teeth, rolls over from belly to back and from back to belly, and smiles ALL the time (especially for Mommy...I'm her favorite). She is such a cutie! What an easy baby. I couldn't ask for more with the craziness of this year.

She loves to look at her big sisters, and I'm convinced that she'll start pulling their hair this month! She is so patient with Claire (who loves to hold her)! We love you, Amelia!

open.season

Josh has the 7:00 shift today, so as he heard the geese fly over the house this morning, he decided to go out and shoot a few of them. mmmmm....gooooooose. Four down, lots to go. I can take this type of hunting outing any day. It was literally an hour from start to finish (cleaning and all!). Josh loves the country...I think I'm starting to like it a bit better as well :)

seriously.september 1

It takes me at least 2 full days to recover from a fun afternoon of tubing on the lake.

Please remind my body that it is 29, not 19.
Big difference.

Seriously.

made.it

I got up this morning at 6:40 and had breakfast with Josh! I finished reading Esther this morning...more about that next week.

I'm just pumped that I set my goal and accomplished it! Woohoo.

Now, if I can just do it next week, that will be great. Time will tell.

Happy Labor Day to everyone! We're going to the lake...sing along if you know it...
We're going to the lake, lake, lake.
Maybe have some cake, cake, cake.
Lots of fun we'll make, make, make.
When we're at the lake, lake, lake.

Yes, my kids sing this all the time. Yes, my mom made it up with them. Yes, it's borderline obnoxious, but they love it so I love it. Yay for Grandmas, yay for songs!

tooth.treasures

Claire lost her first tooth on Sunday evening. We were celebrating birthdays with Josh's family, and her tooth was extremely loose. It had been loose for several days, but it had become very wiggly over the weekend. It was just barely hanging on, and Josh said, "Just pull it out." And she did.



Instead of the whole tooth fairy deal, I decided to Google alternatives to the tooth fairy. We've come up with "Tooth Treasures". Instead of giving her money or candy or whatever, she gets a special activity that she gets to help plan. We wrote her a nice little letter telling her congrats and that we're excited for her. This time, she gets to have a tea party and plan the menu.



I printed out the little note and attached it to a piece of construction paper. She still put the tooth under her pillow, and she found her tooth treasure when she woke up in the morning. She was pretty excited :) She loves tea parties!

first.day.of.kindergarten

Monday was Claire's first day of kindergarten! As I write this, we've finished our third day of school. So far, we've done the following:

-3 lessons in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (After our first lesson, Claire replied, "But I still don't know how to read!" Cute.).

-We've plotted Germany on our world map (where Martin Luther lived...he was our first history guy).

-We've made designs using pattern blocks for math (Saxon Math). Meredith really enjoys our math lessons.

-We're reading The Boxcar Children for our read-aloud (Sonlight Curriculum). Everyone enjoys this as well!

-We've made some crafts to do our Olympic events. And today we did a special "Pet Shop Olympics" in which we set up all of our animals and did animal-oriented Olympics...very fun for the girls.

So far, things seem to be going smoothly. This morning, Claire was up a little early and Meredith was still in bed. I took the opportunity to get through our History lesson before Meredith awoke. It worked rather well, and we may take this approach more often! I am really looking forward to her reading her first word. I know she'll be so excited about it. It will come this coming Monday during Lesson 6. She'll read the word "me". She's currently learning the sounds (mmmmm, sssss, aaaaa, eeeee, nnnnnn). So far, so good.

Here are some pictures from our first day: