Week 14

Bonjour! We flew to France this week, leaving Norway behind. Actually, I'm not sure if we've actually landed, but we are learning about France anyways. We've all had colds except Christopher and so I asked him to "fly" by himself there while I just sat at the table instead of running around the house with our arms out airplane style. He got his toy airplane and flew it around our globe the long way and I'm not sure if he ever actually said it landed. We are however, on day 3 of France. Still not feeling 100%, but I really don't want to take a break before the baby gets here. And the boys don't seem to be lacking energy, just have an excess of snot coming out of their noses, yuck. And lots of coughing.

I'm 33 1/2 weeks along now, and we are hoping for 2 1/2 more weeks, but it will probably be more like 5 1/2, with her getting evicted via Pitocin! Are we ready? I am so ready to not be pregnant anymore! We really have nothing to actually get ready. Wait, two things...the bassinet can come out of Leah's closet and into our bedroom, but I already told Chris he can just do that when I'm at the hospital so it won't be in the way in the meantime. Also, we need to get Leah switched over to her big girl car seat and out of the infant car seat! Speaking of which, she had her 18 months check-up and is now 22lbs 12oz, which is at the 25%! Three months ago she was still well below the chart so she's had a huge growth spurt! Whoo-hoo Leah! So technically, she is now 12 oz too big for her infant carseat and will be switching to her new one the next time I drive somewhere.



Okay, back to the whole school subject...I wrote about bad attitudes I believe, in my last post. Well, over a week without computer games and things are so much better! The boys have not complained about school for the past two days...or complained about much else for that matter. I'll do a test next week to see if things get bad again but really, it's so much nicer to see my kids PLAYING with each other all of the time rather than watching each other or fighting with each other in front of the computer. I've read blogs of families who allow no computer time, even for educational stuff (which really, anything can be called educational these days!) and I've secretly thought it was a great idea. We'll see how things go.



So Christopher looked ahead and is excited about the French food we will be making for our French celebration. So am I! Truffles, yummy! He also started a new cursive handwriting curriculum from http://www.queenhomeschool.com/ that combines art and cursive copywork and he did not like it at all at first because it was review, but now he enjoys looking at the paintings and finding the words he has to write. He's enjoying math more now as he's done with fractions for a while and is doing math that deals with converting days and weeks, hours and minutes, etc. He's about to finish up his Singapore Math 3b workbooks and when he starts the 4a workbook, he'll be starting 5th grade level math! I do not ever have him do more than one lesson a day now, even if it only takes five minutes to do. So I'm not sure why he continues to get more and more ahead, but as long as he understands it, I'll let him continue. I still rarely have to actually "teach" him math, which is nice, but I'm sure I will have to in the future. It's so exciting to see how well we both are learning the countries of Europe. We still review the previous continents we have studied so hopefully they'll stick in our brains. I've always been used to asking my husband, "Where's that?" when I heard about a country on the news or wherever. Now I'll probably know, as will Christopher.

Christopher has started more with writing things that are not school related, such as stories about his handguys, dialogue from movies that he's memorized and today he showed me a full page report that he wrote about the Concorde airplane using a book that he has. When we do english and he has to write or finish a story from his english book, I've been letting him change the names or write what he wants as long as it follows the grammar teaching that the book is trying to get across. He writes very silly things, but I figure that he's still learning what the english book is trying to teach him. He also likes to read his stories aloud that way, which helps with his public speaking I think. He needs all the help he can get with that!

Matthew is getting better with his reading. He still sounds words out rather than read them 'smoothly'. For example..."c-a-ca-t-cat" with all the sounds seperated at the dashes. He doesn't do it for every word, but one I can always expect is the word "said". This is how it goes, "s-a-i-d-sid-said". I think along with it in my head each time and find it funny/cute how it's a word he reads all the time and still sounds it out. It might be just from habit, I'm not sure. But he is improving a lot still. He seems to be getting lazy (messy) with his handwriting lately but I'm more focused on his spelling and putting things like capital letters and periods where they belong. It's still very readable, so it might just be his normal. Hmmm.

Gabriel is still his same sweet self. He wants copies of all the flags, and whatever else he can get copies of. He is great at cutting and pasting, as well as coloring, and gets compliments quite a bit from his teachers at church. He's so excited about starting kindergarten work when we start up the new school year. He tries to sound out words and is pretty good at it, but he makes his sounds so hard and emphasized that he can't always figure out how to blend them together. It's actually amuzing to listen to.

Alrighty, I'll try to keep up with updates. It's a busy time of year, but I have a big belly to slow me down a little bit!