The Winter Season

This has been an absolutely bizzare winter for us on so many different levels. First, the weather. This is Texas and snow is supposed to be a rare treat here. Not this year. This year winter began with snowfall and ended with snowfall and then had about two or three more snowfall days in between. Is that bad? NO! My kids actually got to experience the fun, flaky white stuff that is great to play in without us having to go on vacation.

This winter also began and ended with health issues for the family. It began on New Year's Eve when Henry fell off my parents trampoline and broke his collar bone. It ended with Bethany fighting a high grade fever for most of a week because a virus thought she would be a good host. In between there we have been fighting one sickness or another thus making it very difficult for us to participate in park days, field trips and fun outtings because we might expose others.

We did have some fun times that will be posted in later blogs of 2 field trips, snow days, and genral fun times. We are definitely looking foward to spring and all that has to offer; warmer, longer days, baseball games, park days, field trips. I love watching the earth come back to life after winter, the new green shoots of grass and fresh bud of leaves on the trees. Not to mention the beautiful flowers that we should be seeing in the next couple of weeks.

Thank you God for every beautiful day that you give us whether they be filled with hardship or happiness.

Are you ready for school?

Are we? Who knows but school is coming one way or another.



I have mostly put our daily schedule together and have worked out the timeline for all school material. Just have to finish integrating Elizabeth into the family plan and work out chore routines and we will be ready to go. I had wanted to have the kids start their at 6am but since we have been sleeping in so much this summer I decided to just make it 7am instead.



I had orginally planned to school throughout the summer but there has been too much going on and with Todd home, currently unemployed I didn't want to take time away from him.



It is going to be a culture shock for the kids when we start on Aug 31st since we haven't done any real schedule this summer. I have started working on their life skills so that the summer was not a total waste. They now each have a meal where they are the helper and are expected to have the table set and ready to go for their particular meal. This has been very helpful to me since I was usually still getting waters and such as the kids were ready to eat.



Took the last couple of days to go through the kids clothes and weed out things that don't fit, figure out what we need to get for the fall. We are planning to take advantage of the TX tax free weekend this weekend.

Another day in the life. The boys love to play with their sisters and the girls love to play in our dog bed. It has been a favorite for all our children, have no idea why. I will try and post a picture and documentation of every day over the next school year. My children's youth is going too quickly and it needs to be better documented.