Week 12

Okay, so it's been another month since I've posted. Whoops!

We are on week 12 with Christopher which means we just flew over to Europe and are in Norway. We've read about Romania in our "Window on the World" book and I also bought a book called, "Material World: A Global Family Portrait" that is very eye opening about just how blessed and materialistic we are in the United States. With Thanksgiving tomorrow and Christmas just a month away, I hope we can show our children just how much we have to be grateful for. Sadly, I don't think we could ever really know, short of going to a country like those where most of the population have close to nothing. We also have borrowed the same sort of book from the library called, "What the World Eats". Seeing the weeks worth of food that a family in Chad, Africa who were living in a refugee camp has to eat is sad as well.

We finished South American last week and it's wonderful to see Christopher learning so much about other countries. I can even say that I've learned much about the geography of the continents that we've studied. LOL, it's fun to be able to label a map of South America and I'm already getting good at labeling the countries in Europe as well!

We still have a few more chapters in our missionary book, "Nate Saint: On a Wing and a Prayer". If you've seen the movie, "End of the Spear", you'll know the story. We read the summary of it last week and I could barely read it through my tears and voice cracking from the crying. That's mostly to blame on being pregnant and crying about everything, but it is a great story about faith and compassion. I can only pray that my children will grow up to be that great. So hopefully I'll get through reading the last few chapters aloud; if not, Chris will have to.

Matthew is doing well with his reading. He likes doing math a lot more though and doesn't care to practice his reading outside of 'school time'. He's learning the books of the Old Testament very well and we are up to the story of Joseph in his Bible reading book.

We still deal with complaining and I think the computer has to do with that a lot. We've had to make it a rule that no one plays on the computer until after school is finished and if there is any complaining during school time, computer time is lost for the day. That helps a lot. The boys are up for a few hours before we start school so they have to find something else to do and can't argue about who's had more computer time.

We finished our semester with co-op and ended with an expo on November 13th. Here are some pictures of the boys with some of their class' work summaried.

I'm not sure if we'll participate in co-op in the spring yet. It starts January 24th and I'm not sure how old this baby girl will be then and her temperment and sleeping schedule, etc. If we do, I'll be doing my teaching hours in the nursery so it won't be too hard. Getting up and there by 9AM is the hard part!

Gabe turned four this month and Leah's now 18 months old. She's been walking for a month or so now but is finally starting to choose to walk over crawling most of the time. Little Anna should be making her debut in the next eight weeks. I'm hoping for four weeks, but am not counting on it, although now that it's getting closer, I'm starting to think about how much crazier it will be around here with five kiddos eight years old and younger, including a newborn and a toddler who's barely toddling! I will be nice to be able to breath and walk without pain again though. I'm sure having enough semi-painful contractions that it shouldn't be a long labor though! I've noticed that she favors my right side as to where to put her little bottom and it's funny to see it poke out further than my left side of my tummy.

Okay, some recent pictures...

Gabriel at his birthday dinner

Leah sitting pretty