Reflections

I can hardly believe Christmas is over. It was very nice this year. My mother and Phil, a friend of Paul's from school, spent the weekend with us. My mother was very sick, but she was with us and that is all that counted. The kids love Uncle Phil, he plays games with them and is a hoot.

I do not do New Year's resolutions so to speak. However, I do think it is a good time for reflection. Looking back at the year in review and praying for a good year to come.

Tonight is New Year's Eve and we are staying in. We might have some Wii matches going on, will probably watch some movies and snack some. We will also pray...pray for everyone to have a safe and blessed New Year.

Good night and Happy New Year!!!

12 Days of Christmas continues...

I am really enjoying our 12 days of Christmas. It is helping me to actually do some of the activities I always think about doing but never get around to it. It is also helping to us enjoy the spirit of Christmas.

Day 6 - We got some hot chocolate and drove around to look at Christmas lights (one of our friends Nicholas has a great display).

Day 7 - We watched more Christmas movies -The Birth of Jesus (highly recommended show focusing on the true meaning of Christmas, Kirk Cameron is in it and we watch it every year) and Santa Clause 3 and some Mickey Mouse shows.

Day 8 - We made candy for our neighbors. Again, something I have always planned to do but never did. I had bought these cute little boxes from Oriental Trading, they worked well to deliver the "goodies" in.

Day 9 - Even though things are tight, and it might be a small Christmas gift wise, we are still very blessed and want to share this. We have four bags to take to the local food pantry.
Day 10 - (we actually did this one on Day 9, Day 10 is just going to be too short) We made snowflakes and paper chains.
It is really fun, each day the boys look forward to seeing what is in the stocking. I hope they will remember this year.

Day 5 Ice Skating

This morning Matthew could not wait to check the stocking for today's activity. They were very surprised and excited to see it was Ice Skating. They have wanted to go for a long time and something always seems to come up, so what better time. Our next door neighbor ended up going with us. I think it was a lot harder than they expected, but they all seemed to have a good time. Of course I forgot my camera again, so it is cell phone pictures again.

My video turned out better than the pictures.

We finished up at CiCi's.

12 Days of Christmas

I borrowed an idea from my friend Kathleen.  We are (hopefully) starting a new tradition with the 12 days of Christmas.  I bought 12 mini stockings and used glitter and glue to number them.  Then I put a different Christmas activity in each one.  Now Kathleen is doing 24 days of Christmas, I could only handle 12 - plus we like that song.  :-)

So far we have:

Day 1: Watched Elf and enjoyed a Christmas tin of popcorn.
Day 2: Went to a Gingerbread Decorating Party.  (this was a lot of fun, pictures to come later)
Day 3: Went to Dave and Buster for my company Christmas party.  The kids love this, they each received a playing card loaded with points to play games.  Daddy was able to come this year, and we all bowled one game.  I forgot my camera though :-(
Day 4: Christmas cookies - I am going to a Mom's Night Out tonight and it is a cookie exchange, so we set to baking this morning.  Most of the decorated ones will be staying here, but it was a lot of fun.  I actually think is was the most fun we ever had making cookies.  This could be partly due to the fact that the boys are older now, but I really think it was the cookies.
I always, ALWAYS, have trouble with sugar cookies and cutting them out.  It just never works for and then we all end up frustrated for spending so much time and then the cookies are a flop.  This year we found the neatest thing - refrigerated cookies already cut just for people like me.  We bought two packs (thanks to a B1G1 sale and a coupon) and made 48 cookies to to decorate.  It went smoothly and therefore was much more enjoyable.

 

 

 

 

Forgotten pictures

We have two memory cards for my camera.  I had forgotten that and just recently checked the second card and low and behold there were pictures there.

Austin and Matthew played baseball at Buford this past Spring.  Austin made it to the All-Stars for the first time.  One of the other parents works for the Gwinnett Braves. We got to go there for batting practice one day.  Pretty cool!

 

They let Matthew bat too.

The boys also competed in a Homerun Derby.  Austin came in first place out of about 50 kids.

 

This is a picture of the boys with my Grandmother.  She just turned 91, also just broke her hip and had replacement surgery.

Paul's mother came to visit.

 

We took her tubing in Helen, GA.  About half-way down her tube popped and she lost her shoes in the river.  She then climbed the bank and started walking back to the center.  Luckily someone had pity on her and picked her up after a little bit.

It can be fun finding pictures, it's like remembering it all over again.  :-)

Good Deals

I just love getting good deals, and we scored pretty well today.

We went to our local library recently for WII game night.  The boys decided it was fun, so they set out in search of a way to make some money.  They decided to sell some things they did not use anymore (PSP).  We have been looking, trying to decide whether to buy new or used (Ebay or refurbished).  Then Walmart came to the rescue - they offered the Sports WII for $199 with a $50 gift card, in essence bringing the price to $149.  Good deal!

 

The deals were not over though.  I went to Walgreens and Publix and got this:

4 boxes of cereal, 3 bags of candy (Iknow), 2 packs of Betty Crocker cookie mix, Farm Rich cheese sticks, Solo plates, Edy's ice cream, and bananas for $15.  Not bad at all.

 

Random Stories

I take a lot of photos with my cellphone.  The only problem with this is that I forget to download them so that when I do I have pictures from the past.

Here are some "stories" I downloaded, remember this is cell phone so maybe not the best quality.

Here are some from football practice (back in August or September)

 

Matthew's team - he is #67

Here is Austin's team - he is #40

Here is a beautiful tree this fall - notice how one half is red and the other is green

This is from when we went to the Gladiators Ice Hockey Game (I think in Oct or Nov)

 

 

Here were some friends of ours at the game, they were on the other end.

Here are a couple from the skating rink - homeschool skate day in Nov.  It is pretty hard to get good pictures in a semi-dark skating rink while everyone is...skating

This is Matthew and one of his friends, Michael

I attempted to take this for a friend, (Kathleen here it is) though the quality is pretty bad

And this was a very sad day for Matthew.  He had a pet turtle that we had in a aquarium, all by himself.  He had stopped eating recently and we discussed how he would be happier with other turtles in a larger environment.  We could not afford to keep getting larger tanks, and he was...by himself.  So we went to Bogan park where we normally see MANY turtles in the pond.  Matthew said goodbye.

And finally some recent photo stories.  We went to Home Depot yesterday for the kids building shop and the boys made these cute little wagons.

 

 

 

Christmas Tree

Our tree is up, but we have however decided to get a artificial tree next year. Actually we might get two.
This year had us at Home Depot on a very cold evening picking out a tree. Left to the boys and me, this process can take quite a while. Daddy tried very hard to be patient and willing to pull each tree out and let us give it the "look-over". The cold weather helped to speed things up and we decided on a 7 foot (not too bad for $30).

We stopped on the way home and the boys picked out an ornament to hang. We started unofficially collecting these a few years ago and thanks to we decided to make it official. Austin picked out a Georgia Bulldog ornament; tap it and it hollers "Go Dawgs", tap it again and it plays the Georgia Fight song. Okay. Not my idea of a winter wonderland type, but it is not my ornament. Matthew picked out a cute one that shows Santa stuck in the roof of a house. His head is on one side and his bottom is haning out the other side.

 

I then had a case of brain dump.  I looked for my lights for almost an hour, going thru box after box of decoration only to realize that for some reason I had put them in my bedroom. The boys did help me look, in between asking every five minutes if they could just decorate it now.  Finally the lights are found and checked and put on the tree.  Then my next dilemma began.  The boys wanted to decorate the tree.  Our ideas of decorating the tree are somewhat different (i.e. I am a control freak).  However, I remembered how my grandmother always used to let me decorate her tree and how happy and proud I always was.

We could not work together on this (yes I have problems) so I sat back and smiled and let them take control.  The end result was two happy children and a relaxed mom.  Oh and a nice tree. 

My pictures are a little fuzzy...

We talked about it and decided that since the boys did such a good job, next year they could have their own tree to decorate - and I'll have mine.  :-)      

 

School and life updates

This is the first year in a while that I do not have my tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving.  I have decorated outside and most of the inside - but no tree yet.  Part of this reason is that we have been going back and forth on whether to get a real tree or artificial.  We both grew up with artificial and said that we wanted real trees.  I still love the real trees, especially when we go and cut one down.  Recent years has seen us at Home Depot for our trees.  It has gotten to be a chore though, at least putting the lights on.  However, I believe that we have decided to keep it real again this year.  Maybe tomorrow will be the day.

School updates:

I am very happy with both of the boys' progress in Math and English.  Austin just finished writing a persuasive letter.  Granted it was not that "deep" and we discussed it as he was writing it, but I think overall it was pretty good.  Matthew is coming right along as well, not much writing this year (other than copy work) but he is getting the basics pretty well.

Science: we will soon be finishing anatomy and heading into astronomy.  I strayed from some of the projects and ended up with a lot of videos to cover our various "systems".  We also ended up putting a child-size skeleton on the wall (thanks Kathleen ).  We had traced the boys' outline to label and post with projects we were doing, but they did not fit well.  For instance, we did an eye project in which the eye was as large as the entire head.  So, we are posting those along the side of the body and labeling the bones and general body areas.

History: I admit, we have strayed from MFW.  I am still using it as a guide, but am mostly using Story of the World.  They appear to be similar, yet this appeals to me more.  We are supposed to build our castle this week sometime.  I will post pictures.

I really enjoy our homeschool co-op.  Our regular weekly classes ended the week before Thanksgiving.  We had a great Mom's Night Out that same week.  This week we went to the Nutcracker ballet, granted it was a toned down school version but it was still tolerable enjoyable.  I do not think the boys could have stood the entire version, but a little culture is good for them.  Then Tuesday some of the ladies set up a program called Art from the Heart in which the children spent one hour making Christmas gifts for family and/or friends and the other hour watching Charlie Brown Christmas and having snacks.  What more could you want as a kid?

I guess I can not let history pass without mentioning Austin's antics recently.  He knows Christmas is coming up, and then realized that a certain little girl has her birthday this month also.  So he bought her a present (a reindeer webkinz) and gave it to her.  It was really cute to watch this transpire.  He was very gung-ho in the beginning, he even bought a tiny (4 pieces) box of chocolate for her.  However, the closer he got to giving it to her the more nervous he got.  In the end he decided the chocolate might be too much, his words "that is for when you are older, like teens".  Then he gave it to her at co-op in front of their friends.  He survived his first...gift giving experience.  In our discussion I said, "why are you nervous, you take on giants on the football field" - his reply was, "THIS IS A GIRL, MOM".  Like I said, it was very cute to watch.  Thankfully I do not have to re-live those years.