Birthdays and Boxes...

The past couple days have been moderately busy. We celebrated a certain little girl's 3rd birthday yesterday. She told people at church that she was turning "leven".



Today Scott had the morning free and took Elyssia into town to get supplies to fill Christmas boxes. They mail them out next week, so thankfully we're in before the deadline:). We've been getting birthday boxes off and on for the past couple weeks, so it's honestly seemed like Christmas came early. It has kept the kids occupied during the cold snap, so I'm quite thankful for that. Today it's starting to warm up and we hope it stays that way for at least a week(or more).

It's almost time to return Calico Jack, the boy goat and I'm REALLY looking forward to that. His stench in the barn means the kids and Scott come in smelling "not so nice" each morning after chores. Hopefully some of the smell will go away once he's gone and we put new straw in. Only time will tell whether he's done the job he came to do...

Other than that we're trying to have a quieter week. We had a big laundry and baking day yesterday in order to free us up for a trip to the library later in the week!

Homeschool is going quite well. Caleb was able to read quite a bit of a new book that I pulled out and I think he even surprised himself with how well he did:). The boys both took their 2nd Science quiz and did great! We're moving on to the second section-Animals, which I think they're looking forward to more than they did the plants section. Elyssia is doing more in depth study and Scott is helping her to prepare a list of seeds to order for next Spring. She will have more "hands on" work to do then, but I think she's looking forward to that. We're 1/3rd of the way through our spelling lists and so far they usually only miss 1 or 2, sometimes 0. Math was a bit of a challenge for Garrison at the beginning of the year, but I think it's not so bad now. He's multiplying quite well and seems to really like it.

Samuel is managing to get into all sorts of things. He's the first one that heads for the bathroom and tries to cause as much trouble as possible. When you find him, he gives you an innocent expression, "what, what did I do?" He's also able to climb onto the couch, push all sorts of chairs, small tables and the kids bench around the living room. He's standing up without help, but not pushing to take steps without a "finger help" yet. His teeth have been quite and annoyance to him. There are 6 that we can see, but it seems that 2 of them like to keep going back under. He swats at them in his sleep and we're hoping to see a break soon. He's now 10 months old!