Documented - 4/26

Life This Week (& last)

I'm trying to quit using the word "busy" to describe our current days, but sometimes it's all I can come up with.  It's been busy y'all.  Thankfully not a Rush Around, Always Behind kind of busy but more the Man This Is Fun, Lets Do It Again Tomorrow kind of busy.

We've had two weeks of awesome Spring weather and we've been soaking it up.

Spring makes me feel social so we've had lots of play dates and field trips.  All that outside time resulted in my floors and bathrooms being semi disgusting so when it rained last Friday I decided to do some scrubbing.  The house is now spic and span so we can resume our lives living outside.

My friend Amber is having a baby in a few months and was instructed to up her water intake.  She's cut out almost all caffeine and downs a billion glasses of water a day.  I was feeling inspired and thought I could use a caffeine decrease so I bought a pretty water bottle and attempted to down two of them a day.

Ah, 64 oz is a lot of water.

I ended up chugging most of it way too close to bedtime and I'm sure you can guess the results.  I'm not giving up yet, but it's going to be a work in progress.

School This Week

We've done a lot of unconventional school this month.  While we were in Arizona, she did some workbook work, kept up with her reading program, wrote a journal for everyday of the trip, and went on quite a few great field trips.

Last week we went back to regular school and it went well.  The break did us good.

I've been assessing where we are in each subject and trying to see how much we will finish before we break for Summer.  It's been kind of fun to watch my teaching style relax as I'm figuring out Josie's learning style.  She does best when we hit the swing set first thing after breakfast, work through the 3 R's, break for more outside time, and save the artsy stuff for the afternoons.  Wish I'd learned to relax 7 months ago.

Josie's been writing a lot of books lately.

"Josie's Bible To Read"

She glues a ton of paper together, comes up with a title, then illustrates and writes her story.  We are killing a lot of trees over here, but she is writing and enjoying it so I'm letting her run with it.

She also took off with reading this month.

I bought a few books and put them up for when she was ready only to catch her reading them later that week.  I underestimated her ability to figure out the harder words.  She has taken over reading to Gabe before naps and I can say that it does something magical to a Mama's heart to see one kid reading to the other.

Going & Seeing

We've been doing a whole lot of going and even more seeing.

It's a miracle we've stayed caught up on school work with how much we've been out of the house.  In the past two weeks we went on four field trips (atlanta history center, garden center, strawberry patch, and a play), had ballet and AWANAS, a charity baseball game, and decided on Tuesday to pack up and head to the beach for the weekend.

On top of that, Andrew's been working 16 hour days so I've pretty much been flying solo.  Scratch that.  I have been flying solo.

It's been busy.  But after a Winter cooped up, we were all itching to be out and about.

We also got our garden planted just before we left.  Check out the cute garden markers that Josie and Gabe made.

DIY Garden Markers

Thankful

For Spring!  Open windows and an over abundance of fresh air.

And for five unexpected days at the beach.  It's fun to sneak away for no reason other than you feel like it.  It's just me, the kids, and my Mother In Law and we are having the best time.

I'll be EXTRA thankful when Andrew's work schedule levels out a bit.  We haven't seen much of him lately and we are all missing him.

Quotable

"Gabe is THE WORST lion EVER!" - Josie the circus trainer after her lion took a face plant trying to jump through her hoop of fire. 

* No children (or lions) were seriously injured
** Unless you count Gabe's pride

Happy Weekend Friends.