I just finished up reading Little House in the Big Woods to the boys for their bedtime story. Aunt Angie loaned us the book a while back and we started it earlier this month. Caleb and Adam enjoyed it more than I even expected, but I am quite sure that I took more pleasure in reading it to them. What a great book! I have always had a sort of "love affair" with the old days anyways, wishing that I had lived back then. However, I probably would have died in childbirth, so I will take the days of the C-section over that. In fact, I was born as a C-section because I was overdue and breach, so that would have wiped out me, Mom, and my younger siblings too. OK, OK, but I still love stories about the pioneer days. They were so darn crafty! It was great to explain to the kids how if they owned it, they probably made themselves. If they ate it, they grew it or shot it themselves......and that you can get maple syrup from trees and that they made their own soap......and that they had to grow wheat, grind it and make it into bread....and that they only got mittens and a piece of candy for Christmas---but they were so thrilled with them.......and how the only music they had ever heard was Pa's fiddle.........and how they had never been to town until Laura was six years old.....and on and on..... Oh my, should I have warned you about the spoilers in this post?

Reading stories has definitely been one of my favorite pastimes with my children. It is a little frustrating to me that they are all fidgety and squirmy (the nature of most boys) and rarely seem like they are listening. I quiz them as we go to make sure they have a bit of comprehension going on, and they always amaze me because they really are understanding and listening to the story. Tonight Kiah spent the night and it was just splendid to have a still, little child hanging onto every word I read. I could have started from the beginning and read to her all night long, but Caleb was having his nightly emotional breakdown and had to be firmly dealt with.

I'll just make this a "schooling" post because I need to write a bit about the Botany class last Friday. Adam loved it. I loved it. Caleb........hated it for the first hour and then loved it for the second hour. He was very nervous about it and for him, nervousness shows itself as anger. he was so MAD about going to class! He sat in his chair with the worst attitude at first. Then his friend, Gray, came over and talked to him a little which changed his attitude. In short, I am really excited about the class. We are going to do all sorts of projects together. We made a light box and are in the process of growing some herbs and flowers in it. I am secretly afraid that ours won't grow. I have a really bad track record with house plants. I don't suppose we would fail the class.......but I am sure that the boys would let everyone know if ours die or something. I'll keep you posted.








OK, I wrote all of that a couple of nights ago but didn't want to post it until I got a cute picture of the light box. Now it is Friday and I have a bit of time this morning, because school got canceled due to ice, thereby canceling my aerobics class. I am not letting it spoil my morning by trying to get a lot done before we head out to Botany and then later to our weekly band gathering.

Well, to be truthful, I haven't gotten anything extra done yet. I'll do that after I blog. It is just not spoiling my morning because I am generally in a very good mood in the mornings and things don't bother me so much at this hour.

I would like to say that some of my winter blues have been remedied by two new articles of clothing. I got a sweet ski jacket on sale at TJ Maxx the other day and a pair of flannel pjs at Old Navy a couple of weeks ago. I decided that one of the reasons I hate winter is due to the fact that I am always cold. No more will I be cold at night or outside with my cozy coat and pajamas. It really has made the days and nights better. Nana got Caleb this corny movie about snowboarding that he has watched every day this week. It gets him all pumped up about snowboarding and so then he spends the majority of his day boarding down the mulch hill out front. Guess where Annabelle wants to be. Right there with him, so I bundle us up and we spend the afternoon and morning outside in the coldness. He is getting really good at it all and asks daily when we are going to go snowboarding for real. I tell him very soon. I haven't been skiing in 8 years! Do you think it is like riding a bike and you don't ever forget how. I hope. We will see soon because we are planning on taking the boys in the next week or so. I have decided to try snowboarding since I will be on the bunny slope most of the time with them anyways. Plus, snowboarding is just much cooler and I definitely want to be cool. Seth and I have gotten very excited about the idea of our family going out west one day on a snowboarding trip together. We have even talked about getting some weekday family passes to a nearby resort next year. One of the better aspects of being homeschooled and self-employed is the freedom to go places during the week. Now we just need some money...............




Here are videos of the boys going down the mulch hill. Caleb's snowboarding is harder than it may look to you in this. He has gotten where he catches a bit of air on the jump now. I will have to get a video of that too.