The BIG 40!

What a fabulous February we had between Jay's birthday, Jutem staying for 2 weeks, Valentine's Day, our anniversary and a trip to Vegas.  I am going to blog about each event separately.

Jay's 40th birthday was the first event in February.  It was so much fun to plan and I kept it a secret from him for a time anyways.  :(   He of course eventually found out but he didn't know who all I invited.  So as everyone arrived it was a surprise to him.  I have to say my favorite part was the slide show I made for him.  I was quite pleased with how it turned out.  I am trying to figure out how I can upload it here.  We will see if it works.

We had people arrive from all over.  Even Mrs. Siler, Jay's high school drama teacher and now family friend drove all the way from Payson.  I have a lot of pictures and tried to just pick a few to capture the day.  I realized though that I don't have any real "intentional" pictures of good group photos.  We were all busy enjoying ourselves.  :)

                                            The Johnson's (our old neighbors)

                                                 Mrs. Siler
                                                

                                                  Auntie Nicole and Camden
                                                 

                    There were a lot of pics that didn't turn out so well.  But these two are still beautiful!

                                              Cousins

                                                  Papa

                                               Friends and family

  The CAKE!  We just went for store bought this time! 

                                             Can he get all the candles out?

                                                   Jadon sharing chips with the dog.

Ok trying to take this picture was worse than trying to get all 6 of my kids to stay still for a decent picture.  lol  These are 3 of Jay's best friends and I was so glad they were able to come.  The three of them are not friends but they each have a special friendship with Jay that is great.  Another great friend of Jay's, Mark, who lives in Oklahoma, was not able to make it but he had a pizza delivered to our house during the party.  That was pretty cool!

Thank you to all who were able to come to Jay's party.  It was great celebrating with all of you!

I love you Jay!!!  Here is to another 40!!!
                         

Artists Unit Study

This unit study has been so easy and yet so much fun! You can find this unit study for free over at: Confessions of a Homeschooler scroll down and it is on the right hand side "Worlds Greatest Artists". We have started with Pablo Picasso and I was able to find the book at the library. Each morning I would read a couple of pages and we would discuss it. Then at the end of the week I had the kids pick their favorite painting and try and copy it. They AMAZED me! Their paintings were incredible. I really knew what they were learning sunk in when later the next week, Alexa was watching the Toy Story movie. There is a scene in which Mr. Potato head turns around, rearranges himself and then turns back to the screen and says "Look I'm Picasso". Alexa totally got it! They have watched that movie over 100 times and now they understood that reference. I thought that was pretty cool.

Ok so I copied these three pictures below from the internet to show you which originals they each chose:

Now look at what they did:

Savannah

Alexa

Joshua

I can't wait to start our next artist!

Back to School

We enjoyed our looong Christmas break and now it is time to get back to work.  Here are some pictures from this past month.

We took the kids to the Gilbert Riparian Reserve one day for a morning walk.  It was really nice, they got to see ducks, rabbits, and lots of different birds.  We even packed our lunch and ate there.

We love Dr. Seuss and one morning we had Green Eggs and Ham:

Jadon can keep himself quite busy during school....sometimes a little too busy!  :)

Jay was reading our Bible study one morning and Jadon had to sit just like daddy!  Too cute!

Who says school work has to be done sitting at a table?

One day we tried our hand at homemade pretzels and they turned out really, really yummy!

What better way to learn to add than to use oreo cookies! 

Best part of us being together all day is the love these two have for one another.  I caught them napping together. 

My Laundry Room

My laundry room is a catch all room with lots of room for improvement. I stumbled across an organizing blog and got some great and inexpensive ideas. So one night while the kids were at Awana I took Jadon to the Dollar store and we found some great baskets.

I was quite pleased with the results. I should have taken before pictures but just picture everything in disarray on the shelf and in the closet. LOL

Now if I want to get really fancy I can label the baskets, but this is good enough for now. ;) I just love how uniform it makes everything look.

The most exciting part however was the shoe closet. If we all just have 2 pairs of shoes that is 16 pairs of shoes!! I constantly battle to find shoes. We used to have one large basket, yea that didn't work so well. Then I tried to be really cheap and used Wal-mart boxes and nobody could remember whose was whose. I bought 6 baskets, one for each of the younger kids and one for my vacuum parts. This has been wonderful!! And the kids even love it.

Stay tuned.... I will be using baskets for many more organizing projects. ;)

An afternoon at the Park

January is beautiful in Arizona and a wonderful time to be outside. One afternoon we packed up a lunch, our marshmallow guns and headed to the park. The kids played on the slide, we ate lunch and then had an all out marshmallow fight. Lots of giggling and fun! The guns work great and even Jadon was able to blow and get us. And of course we cleaned up all of our marshmallows when we were done. ;)

They ended their afternoon at the park by rolling down the hill. :) (It made me dizzy just watching them.)