Following Foundations 5/15/09 May 16, 2009

It was a dark and stormy night….. Well, actually it wasn’t dark yet, but it sure was stormy when our power went out last Saturday. After the power company gave an estimation for the power to be back on the following morning, we decided to jump ship and head to a hotel. The kids were ecstatic.  EG and AZ had to share a sofa bed (actually it was a ‘loveseat” bed that wasn’t much wider than a twin-sized bed). They thought it was fun at first, but by 3 AM the complaining started. Let’s just say I didn’t get much sleep. My Mother’s Day breakfast consisted of a bagel and various other things from our “free” continental breakfast. Towards the end of breakfast, the lights went out. After a couple seconds of wondering why the flat screen TV was still going and the juice machine was still lit, I hear behind me “ME TURN LIGHT OFF!” There was the Z-man at the light switch. Oh my. We apologized and made a hasty departure. Exit, stage right.

The real highlight of this week was a trip to the North Carolina Zoo. The weather was in the 70’s and absolutely beautiful! It couldn’t be beat! Many of the animals were active and the polar bear put on a good show.

EG (4 yrs old):

We completed week 35 of Sonlights p4/5. One week left!! We finished A Reason for Handwriting K this week. She read A Big Ball of String and finished Little Bear’s Friend. She has only one book left of Sonlight’s Readers 1. I can’t believe we’re almost done! In Why Do Tigers Have Stripes? we read about how spotted skunks show off their pattern to warn enemies. And then at the zoo, we saw a spotted skunk (and a very active one at that)! I just loved how we had read about it the day before! Of course, she wasn’t nearly as giddy about it as I was, but I thought it was great all the same.

She completed memorizing 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, which says “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” We also worked briefly on Proverbs 17:22 which says “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.” It turned out she already knew this verse from listening to Steve Green’s Hide ‘Em in Your Heart CD’s. She also memorized question 61 of the Baptist Catechism which asks “What is forbidden in the third commandment?”

She’s still moving along slowly on the piano. I have a little video below of her playing “Marching Song”. By the way, please ignore all of the stuff piled up on my bar in the background. The bar only stays clean about 2 and a half minutes per week.

AZ (2 yrs old):

The Z-man worked on the letter F this week and made an F page for his alphabet notebook. Also, for the first time I was able to give him a few letter sounds and he would give me the letters. Woohoo! Thank you Starfall!! He’s working on memorizing Psalm 119:105, which says “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”

Potty training hasn’t progressed as much as I would have hoped. I found poop on the bottom of my shoe today, if that tells you anything.  This boy is going to be the death of me.

I included a video of the Z-man singing a medley of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Jesus Loves Me” with a little heresy thrown in. He obviously hasn’t been paying attention during our devotion time. Enjoy!

SA (12 months):

The little man had some firsts this week. He ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,  he played with trucks (as in pushing them around instead of just chewing on them), and he signed “more” (as in sign language) for the first time at breakfast today. For the rest of the day his siblings had him performing his “sign” like a trained seal. He also tried his hand at a little Jerry Lee Lewis. Goodness Gracious! Great balls of fire!

Me:

I got a new camera this week! Our old digital camera was a 3MP Casio that was top of the line back in the day. Although it still takes great pictures, it has gone the the way of the dinosaurs and is much too clunky to carry around with me all the time. My new camera is a Canon PowerShot A1000IS. I love it! All of the above pictures and videos were taken with my new camera, with the exception of the soccer pictures. The image stabilization is awesome. I wasn’t sure how the picture of the lion at the zoo would turn out because it was heavily zoomed and shaky, but I think it turned out great! I reduced the recording pixels down from 10 MP to 6MP. That’s still probably more than I need. I’m not planning on printing poster-sized prints anytime soon.  Happy Mother’s Day to me!