November already? Yay!

I thought I'd share some of what I've been up to lately. Oh, yeah. And the kids. They're interesting too, I guess.

But first me.

I've recently discovered Delicious. The website is a social bookmarking site. I don't know about you, but I bookmark things like crazy and then I can never find them. This website allows you to "tag" items and give them category labels, which you can then use to search. So for instance, let's say I find a great tortilla soup recipe on a website. I tag it, and then assign labels to it such as: chicken, tortilla, soup, recipes, mexican. Later when I want to find that fabulous tortilla soup recipe, or maybe I just want to search for any soup recipe, I can search by those labels. One of the reasons that I decided to try this, is that you can share bookmarks (thus the social part), but you can also access them anywhere you have internet access. So when I visit Mom if I want to find that tortilla soup recipe I will be able to search for it in my delicious account. It might sound complicated, but it's not. I don't have time for complicated.

And that brings me to what else I've been doing lately...which is cooking with my Crock-pot more often. What a gem of an appliance! We've been loving it. I made the tastiest butternut squash soup the other night. And then I made 40-garlic clove chicken a couple nights later (which got rave reviews from Josh and Darwin). Tonight I'm making Salsa Chicken Black Bean soup. Yummy. I have found a lot of good recipes at the blog A Year of Slow-Cooking, but I can't always find the ones I want easily without poring through tons of posts. So I've started tagging them with Delicious and suddenly, I can find them again. So far it's worked out really well.

Ok. Enough about me.

Josh is still studying for his CFP exam. We're collecting tomes of boring math-y looking stuff. He took a big test today and did great. We miss him (he's got class every Tuesday and Thursday nights), but the kids and I are filling our time with movies, reading, and going to the Church to play basketball.

Hannah has been writing a story for school this week. I read her first two chapters. She has a great imagination and writes very nice creative pieces. She's reading like a banshee and doing math. I've been making her review all her 5th grade stuff to see how well she actually knows it. She's very patient with me. She's cruising along in piano - finished her theory book already this year. I swear she knows more piano theory than me. She's created her own piece of music and is fine tuning it and spicing it up a bit. I love it.

Brynne is loving school. Sometimes I think she doesn't miss us at all. She loves her teachers, loves her friends, loves her independence. She has one last soccer game next week. We have parent-teacher conferences later this month so we'll find out how naughty she's been at school. I'm sure it'll be quite revealing. :-) She is doing speech therapy right now for the /r/ sound and is working hard on getting that difficult sound under control.

Logan has been begging and pleading to play soccer so I think next year he'll get his chance. I don't like to start them too young. 7 is young enough, I think. Josh and I might coach his team.
Logan is whipping through his math book. I'm still making him work on strengthening his fine motor skills. We do lots of handwriting, tracing, drawing sorts of things to help with that. I can see the difference between Logan, who has never liked coloring much, and the girls who were big colors from a young age. But we're getting there.

Kenna is talking a LOT. If you are not a family member it will take translation, but she has a lot of ideas and she manages to get them across. We all think she's quite adorable...most of the time. A couple of our complaints: she wakes up grumpy in the mornings far too often. And she's getting picky about where she sits at the table (apparently she thinks she is too big for a booster seat). Fun stuff. Don't you love two-year olds?

Natalie's newest hobby is crawling. And rolling. And eating tiny things that she finds on the floor. And crawling some more until she finds another tiny thing to eat. I sweep and vacuum like crazy and it does no good.
This past week I've been sleep-training her. I could really use some positive thoughts regarding this. I have tried really hard not to cry, but it is soooo hard to listen to my baby crying and not feel like a terribly mean mother. I decided to sleep-train when Natalie started waking up three times a night. And not only that, she wasn't waking up to eat. Oh, she'd have a little snack, but she wasn't really starving. She just wanted company and a little help getting back to sleep. So I decided I'd just have to stop going to her. To make it easier on me I have been moving her bed downstairs to the playroom so that I can't hear her as well. The first two nights were terrible. I woke up to hear her screaming from downstairs. I let her cry. She didn't seem to cry very long - was only awake for 20 minutes or so each time. But she cried several times throughout the night. And she was grumpy during the day - which made me wonder if she was feeling unloved and abandoned. But I knew once I started I'd have to see it through. Consistency is important!
Anyway...skipping ahead. The third night, last night, I didn't wake up until 5am, so I assume she didn't either. That, my friends, is doable. Here's hoping she keeps it up!