Saints among us

Can you guess who they are???
Blase picked St. Andrew.

Stephen picked St. George.

Cormac decided to be St. Patrick.

back view

And Rex is St. Nicholas.

His backside view.

It was fun to make the costumes and see the excitement on the boys' faces. We had a small party with another family from church. It was a fun time for all of us.

Where oh where went October?

I haven't been on here much - as you could tell if you checked. I would like to say that October went by too fast for me to post, but quite the opposite happened. It was a l-o-n-g d-r-a-w-n o-u-t month.

First off I had mastitis - which is not fun, especially when you are still nursing.

Then two weeks later - we ALL got the H1N1 flu. I had it the worse and took the longest to recover. It was miserable to say the least.

I have managed to keep somewhat of a school schedule going. I did take off one week for the H1N1 recovery attempt. The boys are doing good in school and we seem to have a routine worked out.

Darren is bow hunting. He hasn't seen any "big bucks" in person, but there are a few on the trail cam. There is one spike buck that literally follows him around. He says he can't even scare him away. It must be some good bait corn Darren's been putting out.

I have been busy working on things for church. I made some chapel veils and typed up the words to some hymns for singing. I am glad to help out, but its been interesting finding the time when we are sick.

I am hoping November is a bit kinder to us and I will have the energy to even care about posting.

Flicker

We were treated to the song of a Northern Flicker this morning. He was very close to our back door and VERY loud. Blase insisted I take a picture, but I wish I had my video camera out and quiet children. My camera doesn't take very good pictures at a distance, so this is the best I could do. We have seen them eating in the yard quite a bit lately. I actually got fairly close to one a couple weeks ago. Today is the first time we remember hearing one of them "sing" to us. It is a beautiful song.

Gnomes

Our Gnomes the little boys use for school. I have caught the boys making up conversations between the different gnomes. I love the baskets! So far they have enjoyed our Gnomes and Gnumbers adventures. I wish there were more stories on the website, but what is there is great.

Planets

We are studying astronomy this year in school. This is the first time I am using the Apologia's program (Exploring Creation with Astronomy) by Jeannie Fulbright. I am IN LOVE with this book so far. Its simple, informative and most of all appealing to the boys. We are also doing some of the accompanying notebook and a lapbook I bought from Knowledge Box. The boys are putting both the notebooking pages and the lapbook activities into a 3 ring binder.

Here is the balloon planets we did yesterday. The boys can name all the planets in order faster than I can write them down. They were pretty proud of themselves. The big green balloon is Jupiter is not big enough, but we did the best we could. All the little ones are the sizes they are suppose to be. Do you like our rings around Saturn?? Can you name all the planets? We came up with our own version of a mnemonic sentence.

My Very Early Morning Just Seems Unusually Nice and Peaceful

Letter A Week

Last week was Letter A Week. Here is a few pictures from Cormac and Rex's school work from last week. We had a great time and so far the boys are begging to do school. I am using a lot of ideas from the Serendipity website ( http://ebeth.typepad.com/serendipity/ ). I am finding their ideas both easy and refreshing for all of us.

Rex's Letter A color page. He likes to use every color he can.
Cormac's Saints who start with A. You can't see it, but he did write his own letter A at the top and did a great job. He decided that St. Aloysius is his favorite Letter A saint.

This is Cormac's review page of 1-5. He colored the gemstones himself. We are using some ideas from the Gnomes and Gnumbers posts on the Serendipity website. I like their idea of teaching the Roman numerals at the same time as the regular numbers. One of these days I will have to post pictures of our gnomes.

This is Cormac's sponge apples he painted. I did help him paint his name, but other than that he did it by himself. I had trays of painted mixed and the boys would decide what color their apples would be. Cormac painted his own stems on the apples.

This Rex's drawing of Paul Cezanne's Apples. He did this 100% by himself. Not bad for a 3 year old. I am impressed with his love for drawing and color. I cannot wait to see him advance as he develops more hand and eye coordination. I might even learn a thing or two from him.

We are using the fairies ABC ideas from the Seredipity website as the main schooling for Cormac and Rex. Stephen does sit in on some of the sessions as well. I am enjoying all the ideas they have suggested and we attempt at least one idea from every subject.

This is Rex's coloring page of the Apple Blossom Fairy.

We ended the week with a Letter A Teatime. It was a great time for all of us. Blase and Stephen helped make the food and everyone helped eat!

The boys sitting at the table. Notice the tea cups, THANK YOU Mrs. Fameree! The boys were actually very excited about using real tea cups. We had apple pie and apple juice.

We read some of these books and look through the others. We used the apple pie recipe in the back of How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. The crust tasted very good.

Here is the apple pie. Blase cut out a bunch of letter A's that we used to form the top crust. Stephen cut out 5 airplane shapes and said they were army airplanes (one for each boy).

We made this felt "Wee Saint" of St. Anne. She made a wonderful addition to our table.

NEXT TIME....Letter B, bananas, birds and St. Bernadette

Distractions

The boys and I say morning prayers everyday (except Saturday if Darren lets me sleep in). It is the same every morning and I normally do not let anything distract us from our prayers........unless one of these comes into the yard.

It isn't everyday you see a spike buck in your yard. He walked around like he owned the place. He had two beautiful does with him as well. The boys were super excited and I had to take a picture, so prayers were put on hold while we admired God's creatures.

Here is a doe with "Spike". They are eating acorns. Darren talks about sitting on the roof during bow season as the deer enjoy coming close to the house to eat the acorns.