September 29 - October 4

As always, a busy, busy week! I'll try to think of some of the highlights.

Kenna has been oh-so-cute as I have posted below. She's definitely our loudest child - she demands attention with her voice I think. She likes to vocalize and hear herself talk and she does it with a lot of force. I don't think we'll have to be reminding her to "speak up" when she's older. More like the opposite!

Logan is so hysterically funny. He's very patient with us not-so-smart parents. He's very proud of his math skills and we've been focusing more on handwriting, too. He's working on forming his numbers better. He likes to do simple worksheets with adding and subtracting. He's essentially finished most of my Kindergarten math curriculum. I still have a couple more things from the book that I want to introduce to him. This is why I never recommend purchasing a Kindergarten curriculum if you are going to be homeschooling. It's essentially advanced Preschool and then you move right into first grade. It's a year of exploration, stories, and discovery.

I finished up a history segment about Mary, Queen of Scots, and then her son King James I of Scotland (who was also James VI of England after Queen Elizabeth died). It's the time period when the first explorers were sent to North America and founded Jamestown. We made an old English cake called Parkin as part of that activity. It's pretty tasty. Not as sweet as we might think cake should be - and gingery! But good!

Brynne is reading like a maniac. She's reading a book that I just finished called "Dragon Slippers". It was a fun book. It was a little older than I thought Brynne would be interested in - she usually sticks with shorter chapter books. This book is more around 200 pages or so and has bigger, more advanced vocabulary. She's enjoying it! Her soccer game took place in the rain today - much to my dismay and the delight of 10 little girls on our team. :-) And if you read my post about soccer woes, you'll be wondering how it went. Well, we didn't win. We held the other team to 1 point per quarter in the first half. They changed their strategy in the second half and scored a few more times. I wasn't really keeping score but we think we held them under 10 points (which is HUGE for this team) and definitely kept their star player from scoring 9 points on her own. :-) The girls felt really good about their efforts and they played really hard. Brynne thought it was a lot of fun.

Hannah has been working really hard in school. She and I played Multiplication War last night and it was such a good review for both of us. We used cards from the game "Phase 10" (which is super fun if you've never played it) and those worked really well. We took out the skips and wilds and just used the number cards (1-12). So we can now multiply up to 12x12...can you? :-) Hannah finished Eragon this week so now she's ready to choose another book for her silent reading. I think she really liked it!

Josh is....working hard. Is that any surprise with the current state of the financial world? He's coming home so much later at night than we're used to! He and Logan like to go out in the fading light and play a game like frisbee or basketball. Kenna loves to sit at the back door and watch them. In all Josh's spare time he's been making salsa. We were given a HUGE boatload of tomatoes. Some were to share with Josh's parents (but they didn't come up this weekend to get them and they won't keep). We're sharing with our ward and STILL making more salsa than Josh can eat. That's saying something! He's in heaven with all that salsa and we're enjoying the bounty of tomatoes.

We've been picking apples from our tree. I think we'll have to get around to making applesauce or pies. Just the thought of peeling and coring all those apples doesn't sound too appealing (no pun intended). They are a little tougher than the kind you buy in the store, so it's harder for the kids to help me. Their little hands get tired so fast. But it would be a good activity.

I realized today that I'm very close to halfway through this pregnancy. It's going so fast. I'm feeling the baby kick quite a lot (though I don't think anyone else could yet). I have so much on my mind and so many things going on I don't focus on being pregnant as much as I usually do. It's kind of nice. Some days I even forget entirely! I guess that's a sign that I'm feeling really good. I just hate looking stout!!!! I'm trying not to gain too much weight. I did really good with Kenna and I'd like to keep it under control again.

The last thing I want to do is introduce you to a cool website called Goodreads. I don't have to check it regularly and if there are updates they go to my email, so it's very low maintanence. It's a site to share what you're reading, rate it, and review it if you wish. You can connect with people you know and see what they're reading and how they liked it. It's nice to see what my friends have liked because we often have similar tastes - and I hear about new books to try! Josh, Hannah, and I all have accounts (Hannah likes to see what her cousin Mandy is reading)!

Hope you all have a wonderful week!

Soccer woes

We've been dealing with soccer woes. Our little team is composed of the loveliest girls. Couldn't ask for better. They are very positive and compliment each other and try hard. But when it comes to games...that is different.

We are not only one of the youngest teams with the least experienced players, we also have one of the smallest teams (in terms of number of players). So fewer subs which results in more tired children.

There's another team on the league that has some really, really fabulous players. For their age, they are awesome and they should have been playing up a level. But they're not. The major problem with this team is that they are rude. They usually win about 10-0. During the game they consistently make comments to our team such as "you suck", "you losers", "you can't even score", etc. I didn't know 8-9 year old girls had such vocabularies! The real downside is that we play this team a total of 4 times this season (the most we play any team).

Yesterday Christe let the girls do all sorts of complaining about the other team and tell her all the mean comments and frustrating things. Then, she said, they had to put it behind them.

She laid out some goals for the girls. Winning, in this case, is not the ultimate goal. And since the other team makes it harder to even just have fun, that's not a good ultimate goal. It's hard to be a good sport when the winning team is rude!

Our goal is to slow them down - particularly R, their star player. Christe spent the entire practice yesterday teaching a portion of our team how to double-team effectively. I worked with the other girls on how to play more effective defense and help protect the goalie. They are such hard working little girls! They love playing and never give up!

We play the "mean team" again on Saturday (twice in a row - not fair!!!). We'll see how our double-teaming works out. Christe picked our fastest players (of which Brynne is one) to shadow R and slow down her scoring. And she told the girls, "when the other team gets frustrated, they start saying mean things. You'll know our secret plan is working when they are annoyed that they can't score as easily as they want to!" The girls were very excited to have a 'secret plan'. Hopefully it works out alright!

Last week, continued...

I actually posted my week review on Friday, already. But I did want to add a few photos and stuff.
The kids got better. Brynne was able to play in her soccer game on Saturday.

I was thinking today about how much I love to just watch and listen to my kids. Logan always has funny things to say. Some days I wish that I could video record his entire day for him. He's going to get a kick out of the things he says someday. Nina told me that he confessed that he loved her so much...as much as COSTCO! This boy has such a loving heart. He can never find things big enough or endless enough to express his love. Last night he told me that he loved me, "space, space, eternity, eternity AND infinity! And that's a long time because it's space AND eternity AND infinity!" He was pretty sure I couldn't come up with something bigger to hold my love for him.

Kenna is making more strides. She is taking one to two crawls on her hands and knees before she flops down on her belly and resorts to her army crawl.

We've been reading books like crazy around here. Hannah is starting Eragon - it's a pretty long book for her....500 pages! I read a fun book called Dragon Slippers yesterday, and re-read "The Witches" by Roald Dahl. Brynne has been whipping her way through several Rainbow Fairy books a day. Good thing there are about 30 of them!