Jumping Back In

Five months later and I still need to "jump back into my blog"!  Here goes.  I am excited to post once again just about our family life and homeschooling adventure.  I am so ready to get back to a routine and schedule and leave the lazy days of summer behind.  I can't believe I am saying that but it has been kind of a blah summer taken up by moving once again!  I know the kids have had fun and we have done some fun stuff but there was no camping or family trips this summer and the summer heat here just sucks the life out of everything.

So we are settled in our new house, I have lesson plans complete for the year!!  ( I will post separately about that) I am ready to embrace the business of our upcoming semester.  Natasha will be officially joining us in school as a Kindergartner! Anastasia is in volleyball and Chemistry co-op.  The younger ones are going to be in a co-op once again and I am so excited about that!!  Three of them are going to be in soccer and one in gymnastics.  We are back to doing unit studies and notebooking and I am so excited and feel as if I am getting out of a slump.

We are going to keep plugging away and working hard until October and hubby is working hard to qualify for a vacation for all of us!

So here is to "jumping in with both feet" back to blogging.  :)

Happy Resurrection Day!

Happy Resurrection Sunday!!  I love Spring, Easter and the celebration of my Lord and Savior and everything it stands for.....new life, new creations, new beginnings.  We had day packed full of celebrations.

The kids acutally got their Easter treats before church this year since our church service wasn't until 11.  Last year I don't think they got to even see their baskets until 10pm that night!

Baskets were filled with pool toys, new flip flops, candy treats and some new movies.

After eating our Resurrection Rolls and I am sure a bunch of candy... ;) it was time to head off to church.  Our church plant has been meeting for 1 year now and we have been in Awhatukee for a year!  Time does fly by!

The kids did an Easter craft activity. Then it was time for some pictures:

My Beautiful girls!

My Handsome boys!

Trying to get a group picture!  No easy feat with this group!  LOL

After church we went home and changed and then headed to the park for food, fun and games.

Getting ready for an egg hunt!  

After the park we headed back home and Papa and Grandma came over and helped us color some eggs.

Where has the time gone....

I thought out to lunch was a good start to this post.  I feel that sums up where I have been in relation to my blog for the last SIX months.....  Wow I almost feel like I don't know how to blog or where to get started again.  I love keeping my blog like a scrapbook and in time order so I will probably try to keep it up to date while trying to get "caught" in the next month or so.  I don't know what happened, every time I want to sit down and blog other stuff gets my attention (or I just feel overwhelmed by it).  I think maybe the last few months I have loved the "idea" of blogging rather than actually blogging.  LOL

Well with our Party of 8 there is a lot to catch up on.  There is never a dull moment around here except of course the last FIVE days we have all been passing the plague around to one another and I think I might have gotten it the worst.  It is not good when Mama is sick and needs to take care of her sick babies!  I am tired of laying in bed and am not really up to doing anything else though so I thought I would take some time to work on my blog.
I have been reading other blogs and I really want to get back to "blog hopping" and sharing of topics that others are sharing about especially when it comes to homeschooling and family.  We have also gone through some changes to our homeschooling this year and I will share about that.  I am so excited already about what I am planning for next year.
I guess I just need to dive in and start posting.  So here goes.....

Halloween

The week or so before Halloween the kids and I went shopping to find some costumes and costume parts.  One of the days I took them to Goodwill and we were looking all around .  While we were there, Anastasia went off to another section of the store with Jadon and a mom and son came up to her.  They said as part of a church activity they were looking to bless someone else and they wanted to give her $50.00!!!  So she had them come back over to me and we could both tell by their reaction that they first thought Jadon was her son.  ;(  but they still wanted to give her the money!  It was a total blessing to Anastasia and I told her "It really does pay to shop at Good will"  LOL  So between Goodwill, our dress up tub and a couple other stores we found everyone a costume.

Halloween morning we made face pancakes.

Then for school we weighed, measured, counted seeds and carved our pumpkins.

The kids actually got to dress up two nights in a row.  The first night another local church was having a trunk or treat and I took them to that  and then on Halloween Papa and Grandma came over and took them around our neighborhood.

And of course the next day's math was sorting, counting and graphing our candy!

Block Party

After weeks of planning our big out reach event is happening.  We have been brainstorming lots of different ways to reach out to the community and so we pulled together a block party.  We didn't get quite the turn out we hoped for but it was still a blessed afternoon of fun!

We had music, food, games and even a raffle.

Pumpkin Patch

I love all seasons and the uniqueness that comes with celebrating them all!  After a long hot summer I am ready for fall and all the wonderful smells and cooler weather.  We celebrated one night by going to a local pumpkin patch.  The kids got to do all sorts of fun activities and we even got lost in the corn maze!