Happy Birthday To My Sweet O

Mary's First Sign!

We are so excited to see Mary telling us whats on her mind! We've always loved baby signing at our house and I've posted about it here before. But today our youngest signed EAT for the first time. We were all cheering and happy, so we kept giving her cheerios to get her to keep signing it and then I got a picture!




Please go visit Signing Time for more on Baby Signing

Diapers!!!!

Diapers ... Can't stand to live with them, but then can't really live without them (well some people do). I've used cloth diapers with some of our kids and disposables with others. Right now I have two in diapers, YIKES! So we've been using all disposables for the last year. While we were in WA for a funeral a few weeks ago I stayed at a friend's house and she uses cloth diapers. She let me use her diapers for Mary while we were there. She renewed my love for cloth diapers! And yes, I've been ooooggling the cloth diapering sites like:

Diaper Chatter
Cotton Babies
Diapers Etc
Green Mountain Diapers
Diaper Pin
Simple Wonders Diapers
Thanks Mama
Banana Peel Diapers


The two types we've used the most are:
FuzziBunz
Kissaluves Diapers

I spent some time trying to find some cloth diapering pictures, but have not come up with too many and I need to get to bed, but I did find this one of our little Z-Man from back in 2006. He spent many a day in his FuzziBunz and tie-dyed t-shirts. Too cute!


If you loves cloth diapers or just want to know more about cloth diapering for todays babies (its nothing like when we were the ones wearing the diapers!) please come join the Diaper Chatter Carnival

Just love buying all the girly stuff!

What fun it is to have a little girl to shop for.
Just look at the bow we bought at the mall today!
And its not just bows on her head that I'm enjoying,
we've decorated her blog really cute too, come see:
http://www.myfirstdaysoflife.blogspot.com/

Homeschool Memoir #25

Please come visit this fun mem started by Miss Jocelyn over at http://homeschoolblogawards.com/

This weeks theme: Laundry
Now this is something a mother of 5 blessings knows something about!

Question: Watching the Duggars, and other mega families [our family of 11 is small in comparison!] I was astounded at how many loads of washing. Do all large families do 7 loads a day and more, as I was thinking it sounds a little OTT?
So share all about your laundry. It’s on very rare occasion that it’s suitable to air dirty laundry. Ha!

My thoughts on laundry ...

Do at least a load or two a day because if you let it get out of control its like a big gigantic snowball plummeting down a mountain! But getting to those one or two (or more) loads a day can be tricky with toddlers underfoot and babies needing to nurse and kids needing to be schooled and chauffeured to various activities. Since the whole family wears these clothes, and dirties towels I feel quite fine about having them help me accomplish our couple of loads each day. My dd (13) and ds (10) have taken very well to putting in a load or two a day, of course I still need to run down and change the loads to the drier or ask one of them to do it. And I am very blessed with a dh who does not mind folding clothes, so very often when he is home in the evenings he will watch his tv shows and fold a basket of laundry or two. I told ya ... I'm blessed! But honestly if we skip a day or two it really adds up fast and that can feel very discouraging, so I try to keep us on top of the laundry situation.

A couple other "tricks" I've learned form other moms with bigger families over the years are:

Keep sorted laundry baskets (ie one for the whites, one for the reds, one for darks ...etc) Since our laundry room is down in the basement we keep our laundry baskets just inside our master bedroom door, so in the evenings the kids bring their dirty clothes and deposit them in the appropriate laundry basket.

Having more than one dryer is a good idea and time saver. I know some families that have more than one washer two, but we have a large capacity washer and two driers set up. Works out great since the wash takes less time than the drier usually takes. If the second load of wash finishes but the first load is still not dry we can get that second load drying at the same time!

Happy washing everyone! I'll leave you with a picture of our youngest "helping" dad fold the laundry the other day

Signing Time!

Well, I hope we are reaching the end of our marathon of illnesses over here. We've been hit by the cough, cold, yucky nose stuff since New Years and then the stomach bug has made TWO rounds through my kids ... ick ick ick! All these germs have kept us from any sense of normal routine. But we seem to have finally got rid of most the germs! While in our lay-on-the-couch-all-day type days the kids rediscovered several favorite dvds. So today I'd like to tell you about one of our favorites. Well, share a picture of my girls watching a Signing Time anyway. Whenever Mary (8 mos) sees the intro song that is the same on each dvd she gets all giddy happy and claps her hands. Its very cute! Mikayla gets to work on her second language and Mary is learning baby signs.





Signing Time has great books, dvds and stuff. We love their websites:

Signing Time and Baby Signing Time

Homeschool Memoir #23

Over at The Homeschool Post they are hosting a weekly meme, I've really been enjoying, but not been very good about participating (I am hoping to improve that here in 2009). Please come visit this week's Homeschool Memoirs and join the fun:

This week’s theme is going to be on unit studies. Some people are really big on unit studies, others aren’t, and some use them as their primary learning tool. I think they’re great a fun way to encompass everything in what you’re studying. please share your favourite unit study and if you’ve never done one before share one you’d like to do.

What is a unit study?
It is defined as an in-depth study of a topic (space, trees, cars, etc.) that takes into account many areas of the topic, such as geography, science, history, art, etc. It is a complete immersion into the topic so that the student will see things as a “whole” instead of bits and pieces learned throughout their education.

All of the unit studies we've done have been lap books, here are a few of our favorites:

Hawaii

Horses, Eagles and Beavers


And the week we are starting a lapbook unit study on CS Lewis's book Prince Caspian

She can crawl!

Our house has reached a new level ... we now need to keep an eye on our mobile 8 month old

"I really want that puppy toy over there"

"I can get it ... I know I can"

"I can get there, I know I can"


"keep going"

"just a little closer..."

"Whew ... this is hard work..."

"... but I'm almost there"

"Ha ha!"

"Got it!"

"Yes! I am mobile!!! Look out world!"