A Busy Summer

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge..." Proverbs 1:7

 So, I know that I ended my last blog saying that I would continue posting throughout the summer, but I had no idea how busy things were about to get for us. Near the end of May, we started house hunting and by the beginning of June, we had found a house and had a closing date of June 28th. The packing and paper work and address changes began and the stress level started climbing. I had heard several times from various people that moving was one of the top ten most stressful things in a person's life. I knew that statement had some truth to it, but I had no idea exactly how much.
   At home with the boys while Adam was at work, I tried to do as much packing as my busy little guys would allow. It proved to be a challenging task with having to stop every couple of seconds to change diapers, take potty brakes, clean up messes, have snack time, make bottles, play, discipline, and have a nap time thrown in here and there. It was definitely an exciting time though and we could see God's hand in every situation. But through all of this, I learned an important lesson in "home" schooling. As Christians, our homeschooling involves so much more than teaching about numbers and letters and science and nature. As J. C. Ryle writes,

"We live in days when there is a mighty zeal for education in every quarter: We hear of new schools rising on all sides. We are told of new systems, and new books for the young, of every sort and description. And still for all this, the vast majority of children are manifestly not trained in the way they should go, for when they grow up to man's estate, they do not walk with God." (The Duties of Parents)

  How deeply this quote touches me as a mother because I do NOT want my children to be grouped into that category. I long to see my boys walking closely with the Lord and handling every situation in life in a way that glorifies Him. I know education is important. The book of Proverbs holds wisdom in high regards, but we must be aware that wisdom comes from walking closely with God, not just knowing all the right answers.
   Our AMAZING family and friends served us in a mighty way by conducting the fastest move known to man! Starting at 9am and ending just a little before 1pm, everything was moved from one house to another. Our neighbors all commented that they couldn't believe how fast it all happened. God is good! But, the stress did not end after the boxes moved from one house to another. It was a new place for the boys and it brought out new emotions and attitudes for the both of them. They both became rather clingy and I couldn't seem to walk two feet away from Bug without him screaming. I did most of the unpacking with him on my hip and poor Jayce was feeling left out, so he too, wanted and asked for Mommy a lot more than usual. This was also the time that a heat wave came about and our new house was not equipped with central AC. This wasn't a huge deal for us UNTIL two out of the three of our window units gave out, when the temperature outside was 104 degrees. So we were left with one little ac unit(praise the Lord for that little ac unit!!) in the very back of the house in the boy's room. Not to mention, our vacation started in less than two weeks, something else to pack up for and plan for. And this is where the lessons begins, the Lord says...

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates." Deuteronomy 6:5-9

And Elisabeth Elliot says,
"Nothing trains and teaches so powerfully as love. Love attracts; it does not coerce. If the aim of the parents is to teach their children to love God, they must show their love for Him by loving each other and loving the children."

  With all of the stress, excitement, and challenges going on, I was tempted to lose it, every day, and most of the time, every hour! Whiny kids, boxes EVERYWHERE, dirty floors and windows, a million fixer-upper projects laying around, hubby gone at work, HOT HOT HOT in the house, and a family vacation looming over me, tested me to my limits. I regret to say that I did NOT win every battle, but the Lord is gracious. He would remind me "How would you want YOUR children to act in this same situation years from now?" Of course, I would want them to pray, rejoice, find the good and blessing in all things, laugh, and share God's love. So, I would ask Him to do that through me. When I was melting down (and so were the kids) I would pray, pray that my kids would learn the lesson of loving God with all their heart, knowing He would provide. I want them to remember that as Christians "we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our 'God is a consuming fire.'" (Heb. 12:28-29

   During those hectic days, we laughed and jumped and danced A LOT, but we also whined and complained and cried A LOT! But, like I said, we are LEARNING! Praise the Lord that He is slow to anger and abounding in love! God has reminded me in all of this that the most important thing I can teach my kids is to love Him first and with everything we have, if they can learn that, they will be the smarted kids on earth! "The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." 1 John 2:17

The boys enjoying our new backyard!

Y AND Z!!

Wow! What an adventure it has been going through the alphabet with Jayce over the past year. We are wrapping up his first year of homeschool with letters Y and Z. For the letter Y we made a yo-yo out of paper and yarn. This motor skill exercise was a little bit tricky for Jayce. We worked together on putting the string through one hole, then pulling it back through another. After a while, he got the hang of it.

We also tried cutting a picture of a yo-yo into three pieces, then putting it all back together. Teaching Jayce to look at the picture, see what's missing, then try to piece it all together to make the picture complete.

And since this was our last week of school, I wanted Jayce to be able to do some of his favorite exercises,

like the dot worksheet. Using the yellow dot marker of course.

And painting!

For a fun fieldtrip, we went out on a yucky Wednesday to get some frozen yogurt. Jayce loves looking at all the toppings and picking out which ones he wants. The chocolate chips are his favorite!

This was a fun fieldtrip!

Jayce's Springtime Flowers

Jayce's flowers that we planted at the beginning of spring were getting too big for our little pots, so we needed to transfer them some where that they could grow bigger. Grammie was happy to let us use her garden.

Jayce was very good at watering all of his little plants.

But he was more concerned with watering the rocks. He was very thorough with this, making sure to water every single rock in Grammie's garden.

We planted his sunflower right by the back door and made sure to show Pop Pop where it was so he wouldn't run over it with the lawn mower.

His sunflower is doing really great, it's already twice this size!

AND Z

We made a neat zoo craft. Jayce colored some of the animals, then we glued the gates on the front so we could open them and see all the animals inside the zoo. And of course we made a fieldtrip to the zoo with Aunt Susan and cousin Kristian. Jayce's favorite part is always the farm.

We practiced pulling a zipper up and down. It was neat to see how it worked.

  So, now we are all done with our curriculum for the summer! It has been amazing to watch Jayce learn and grow so much this past year. It's hard to believe that he now knows 27 Bible verses, all of Psalm 91, the pledge to the flag, the 10 Commandments, all of the shapes, colors, numbers, different weather, days of the week, months of the year up to May, the entire alphabet and all the sounds of the letters, and countless facts about all kinds of animals from all over the world! God is so good to give us such wonderful things to learn about.

  This is definitely not the end of the blog for the summer. We plan on taking lots of fun trips and learning more about God's wonderful world and doing lots of fun crafts and projects as well. If you feel led, please pray for us as we attempt to put together some sort of curriculum for next year that focuses on teaching Godly character, something we feel is incredibly important for children to know and understand. We don't know if it will be ready for the next school year or not, but we'll see what God does. This is an exciting time and we are filled with joy as the Lord directs our each step!

We're Getting So Close!

Okay, again, I KNOW I'm late with this one. Some of you may have seen my post on facebook and you know that we are actually done with school for the summer :) HOORAY! But we have been very busy with wonderful things like celebrating Mother's Day and college graduations and looking for houses and even a little mini vacation, so I haven't had the chance to update our blog in a while. So, here we are with W and X.

Letter W

 We made a Walrus puppet. This is Wackford Walrus.

 Jayce did a great job following directions, putting the eyes in just the right place.

 This is Jayce making Wackford say, "Hello Jayce. What are you doing today?"

We also had a little bit of water play. This has been one of Jayce's favorite Tot Tray exercises. We took blue water and yellow water and made GREEN.

 It got kinda messy after a while so we moved it to the bathtub. Jayce got covered with green water, but he had a BLAST!!

Letter X

 Letter X was a bit difficult to find "hands on" activities for. So, we did a treasure hunt. If you're wondering where the connection is in that..."X" marks the spot :) I printed out several pictures of different things throughout our house, as he opened the paper and saw the picture, he would know where to go next.

 Here he is opening up one of his clues.

 The treasure is under the "X"

 HE FOUND IT!

YUM! What a great treasure! Resee Cups!!

Well, I did have a video of Jayce doing his treasure hunt, but for some reason it took the blogger.com site WAY too long to load. So, sorry, perhaps I can share it on facebook soon.

I hope you've enjoyed our activities for W and X. Our final letters are soon to follow!

Doubling up with U and V

This was the first week of doing two letters at a time. We started with U on Monday and Tuesday, took a break on Wednesday and followed up with our new letter V Thursday and Friday. It seemed to work out really nice and though we didn't do as many activities as we did with the other letters, we still had fun discovering lots of exciting things about both letters.

Letter U

We talked about under and umbrella. I called out some toys and asked Jayce to put them under the umbrella.

Now Jayce is under the umbrella.

Can you put Josiah under the umbrella?

We also played other positioning games (sorry I don't have pictures for those.) Putting toys under chairs or covers and also learning about upside down. We would turn toys upside down, and of course, hung upside down on the couch. :)

We learned about the amazing Umbrella Bird and how unique it is. It has a crest on top of it's head that looks like and umbrella and a wattle that hang below it's beak that looks like a pine cone. God is so creative!!

 Letter V

We learned about veterinarians. A very hard word to pronounce, so we just said vet. A vet is a doctor for animals. Jayce practiced being a vet by looking in his doggie's ear,

and giving his fur a nice brush. God has equipped people to be able to help and take care of animals.

We also learned about all kind of vegetables.

God made vegetables when he made plants. God gave us vegetables to keep our bodies healthy.

Again, I didn't get as many pictures as I wanted to this round. I'll try to do better with our other letters. We'll definitely have some updated pictures of Jayce's plants that he planted at the beginning of spring. They were all getting so big that we had to transport them to Grammie's house. Stay tuned for letters W and X!

T is Terrific!

We had lots of fun with the letter T! Daddy made us an EXCELLENT tent!

 It had a tunnel and everything!

 We've also been looking for a fun chair for Jayce to sit in while we have Bible time in the morning. We looked for months and didn't really find anything that worked. Then, we found this! A giant turtle pillow. And how perfect, we found it on letter T week!

 Jayce has been really into Toy Story lately. So we were able to print out a Toy Story Tot Book from http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/

 He was so proud of his "matching" animal toys and people toys exercise. You can find this tot book at http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/2011/05/toy-story-preschool-pack-free/

You can see the tool box in the background. We spent some time working on different furniture throughout the house with our tools.

 We had a GREAT find at a yard sale one day. We got a Vtech VReader for $10! It included a Toy Story 3 game. We spent some time looking through that for our letter T. It has great listening games and spelling games on it, but Jayce particularly likes to read through the story and click on each character to see what special things they say or do.

That's our journey for letter T. Mommy's getting a little anxious about finishing up our school time, so we're going to start doing two letters a week. A little ambitious, but since Jayce is already so familiar with each letter and it's sound, I think we'll do just fine. We're SO close to finishing!!

What's In the Bible?

  As a Christian Mommy, I'm always looking for creative ways to sow the Word into my children's lives. We do daily Bible time together and make sure to memorize Bible verses, doing our best to explain them and teach Jayce how to apply them to his life. So, I was so excited when Jayce took an interest in VeggieTales at a very young age. I don't know if it was Bob's bright red color or Larry's goofy innocence, but Jayce was in love! Whenever we asked him what he'd like to watch, the answer was usually the same..."Bob". Adam and I have also enjoyed the creative little show. It's very quick-witted and had such an intriguing way of presenting each Bible story. We would all find ourselves singing the songs and quoting the characters as we went about our day. So when Phil Vischer (the creator of VeggieTales) came out with a new series called "What's in the Bible?", Adam and I were quick to check it out. We were able to rent a copy of the first DVD in the series from the library, and we were very impressed by what we saw.
  The characters were terrific, no surprise, the humor was ingenious, but most of all, the delivery of the Gospel and the Word, was astounding! The Truth, the hard parts, and the wonderful parts, was presented in a way that is easy for children to understand, but was not watered down. After watching that first DVD, we bought the whole six DVD set (and can hardly wait to buy the rest of them as the come out).
  Here's what I wanted to share with all the parents out there. My son, Jayce is only 2 1/2, so I know there are some things in these movies that he doesn't quite understand. The parts about the church history and the Pentetauch can be a little hard to follow for someone so young, (although Jayce does sing the song about the Pentatauch quite a bit) but I was surprised at how much my little warrior WAS following!
   One night, while getting Jayce tucked into bed, Adam and I were talking to him about some decisions he had made throughout the day. It had been a tough day for Jayce, lots of whining and disobedience, and with that came some unpleasant discipline. I looked at Jayce and said "God allows us to chose everyday Jayce. And we need to choose what is right, not what is wrong." Jayce looked at me and said "Like Adam and Eve." A little surprised at his response, I said, "YES! Just like Adam and Eve." He then replied, "Disobey God." Again, Adam and I were surprised at how much he seemed to be uderstanding what we were trying to explain to him. Although I had told Jayce the story of Adam and Eve, it had been some time ago. We knew his answers were coming from the"What's In the Bible" DVD that he had been watching. In a certain part it explains what "sin" is and when it was introduced into the world and how God has given us the power to choose. So much delight went through me as I realized that God was using these movies to teach Jayce about Him! 
  Of course I understand the importantance and absolute necessity of God's truth being taught through our lives. We know we can't just sit our children down in front of the television and expect it to do all the work and we, by no means, do that. But, like I said, as a Christian Mommy, I'm always looking for ways to confirm what my husband and I are trying to teach my kids about God. In fun ways, practical ways, interesting ways, and exciting ways. And "What's in the Bible" has definitely done this for us. So, I just wanted to send a recommendation out from one Mommy to another, letting you know that this has helped our family and I know it's something that will continue to help encourage our children in the way they should go.
  Now, when asked, "Jayce, what do you want to watch?" He responds with "What's in the Bible? with Buck Denver. Man of neeeeeeewss."

http://whatsinthebible.com/

Better Late Than Never R & S

  This is the first time I've ever tried to be faithful with a blog and I've come to realize that I really dislike being late on my posts. By the time I finally get around to putting everything together, I have forgotten a lot of what we've done and what all I had in mind that I wanted to say with each post. The whole point of having this blog was to help me keep track of Jayce's progress with school and jot down some of my thoughts, successes, and failures along the way, but it's hard to do all of that when you forget what those things were by the time you post them haha. So, after this, I am going to really try to stay on top of our little school blog.

Letter R and Spring Celebrations

We learned about Rusty Rooster, where he lives, what he eats, and what he looks like. This page tested Jayce's listening skills, he listened well and remembered that Rusty Rooster sometimes eats corn.

To celebrate spring time we planted some flowers.

 We planted some sunflowers, daisies, and I forgot what the other ones were, maybe some forget-me-nots, which would be ironic!

And of course no spring celebration is complete without making cupcakes!!

 The Lord is so good! We learned about rainbows and how they are God's promise to us, and lo and behold, He provided us with a sweet surprise...a rainbow right outside our door!!

                  Then, we spent some time playing in the rain! A perfect way to end a spring day!

Letter S

For the letter S, we made a special craft. A sock puppet!

We named him Sammy Sock. Jayce was thrilled! He wanted Sammy to have snack with him, play dinosaurs with him, and he even wanted to take Sammy to the grocery store. For a couple days, Jayce and Sammy were pretty good buddies!

Our special baking proect (which involved no baking at all) was a strawberry shortcake. I was sure that Jayce would love this snack, he LOVES strawberries and cake, so I figured the added whipped cream would be a combination of delight. Instead, he ate the strawberries off the top and left the rest. Oh well!!

Soon to follow will be letters T, U, and V. Almost done! WOOHOO!