Monday, May 27, 2013

Geocaching Adventures

 After the first attempt at geocaching was an epic fail Mike had to soothe their broken hearts at not finding treasure with frozen yogurt.

 I had read about geocaching before and thought it sounded like fun but never got a chance to try it. Recently a friend posted a picture of her kids finding a cache on a hike. Keira and Israel are at the age where they love little treasures and I thought they would love to go on a "treasure hunt." A quick internet search revealed that their are literally hundreds of caches within a few miles of our house.  Some are even specifically for kids. Anyways Mike went out with the older 3 last night and attempted 4 caches and failed at all 4. The kids were so disappointed. We did some more research on finding them and Mike set our this am with Keira and Israel and they were much more successful.  The kids brought things to put in the caches because one of the rules of geocaching is that you may take something from the cache as long as you leave something of equal or greater value in the cache. So if you are looking for something free and fun to do with kids....

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Learning our ABC's...






Israel has been asking for me to teach him some letters ( because he sees us doing homework and reading with Keira) and at this point we don't think preschool is in the budget for the fall so I dug deep and put together a few things for him too do. He seems to like it and has learned A,B,C, so far. We do a few games, a few worksheets and 2 letter games on the Ipad. I don't know how you home schoolers do it. The homeschooling world seems so overwhelming that I just want to totally tune it out. The resources and methods are overwhelming and there are just so many blogs about it. It stresses me out to be in charge of what they ( my kids) know and don't know and to try and find the time to do anything with the baby and toddler..... AHHH!! Maybe I am lazy but I do NOT want to home school. I am eternally grateful for Keira's Catholic School and so glad that I do not really have to home school. Israel's birthday is 10 days past the cut off so he actually won't be eligible for Kindergarten for two more years so there is TONS of time to learn the basics.
Don't judge me on the disaster zone of a desk that he is working on. Its Keira's art zone and no matter how many times I organize it and make it tidy she destroys my handwork in 5 seconds of beginning an art project, and she starts projects about 20 x a day so yeah...

Happy 2 months Samuel!

 Birth
 1 month

2 months

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Painted

The front is fully painted.  Still need to finish up the trim in the back and garage doors...but overall...this is the look we were going for...we LOVE it.

Before (shortly after we moved in and removed 2 tall bushes)

And now...new color. We still need some major help in landscaping and Mike destroyed our Rododendrons.  But the red door, black shutters and grey house are a major improvement over the white house with green shutters.

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Spring = outdoor projects

 There is blog neglect happening because of the crazy chaos that goes with a new baby and because of this. The re painting of the whole house. We are not  naive enough to think that Mike can tackle a project like this by himself. We hired our favorite painter but Mike is working with him on the weekends to decrease the overall cost of the project and save us some money. As with any project there is always a can of worms to be opened. We had a general idea of what this can was. Rotten wood and windows. We have alot of windows and no extra cash so the window replacing cannot happen at the moment but Mike has replaced any rotten trim or pieces of wooden siding that needed to be done.
 We are changing the whole color scheme so its going to look VERY different color wise when its finished.
And the kids are ecstatic that their Christmas present of a new trampoline with a cage safety net now resides in the backyard and not in a box in the garage.