My thoughts on Memorial Day...

I just posted a few of my thoughts over on the Good Grief Blog and, not wanting to simply repeat myself, will ask you to please check it out there. ;) Hope everyone's enjoying a safe and happy weekend!

Water fight!

Wow. Two posts from me in one day! Woohoo! 

Just wanted to share a couple pics from the front yard water fight the boys just had...Noah has a friend over and they went to town:

For those who haven't discovered the joys of those blasters, let me assure you that they work way better than traditional water guns. ;) We fill up the kiddie pool and a big bucket of water in the yard...makes for easy refilling.  

Yay for almost summer weather! (To clarify, I'm not inviting incredibly high temperatures, but I need a break from the snow and wind, thank you very much, LOL!) 

Still here...

Oy. May just doesn't seem to be a good month for blogging for me. ;) I'm here now, though. Since my last post, here's what's been going on:

We went to the local CSU Water Festival. This is an annual event and our homeschool group attends most years. We hadn't been in a couple years to went this year. In our first "class" we all got to sit inside this cool giant globe and talk about the earth (from the inside):

The boys weren't overly thrilled with all the classes we were assigned (we don't get to pick), but did enjoy the giant globe, learning about the Poudre watershed and doing the journey of a water droplet activity. Cool. 

Micah and Asher finished up their soccer season, complete with green frosted cupcakes galore (the green is the "grass" and appeared to be popular with the bakeries around town...and the boys. :) Did require some washing to get clean. ;) Here's Micah with his trophy:

 
We were on the ball enough to hand out trophies *before* cupcakes for Micah's party...not so much for Asher's. ;) And I didn't manage to get a good picture of Asher anyhow. Oh well.

Noah's regular season is finished, too. But his team will play in the spring tournament next weekend (June 4-6) so they're still going. :)

Other than that, just continuing

• ...with reorganizing house stuff (after we cleared the front room for the yard sale, we bought some bookcases for that room and are now filling them...unfortunately, we didn't think of that till after the yard sale and now have a number of miscellaneous little bookcases that could have gone in the sale, lol)
• ...with homeschooling (though Options is over for the year, we'll continue through the summer with a 3 weeks on, 1 week off sort of schedule...finding that works better for us) 
• ...and with Good Grief blog stuff (my layouts were up earlier this week and also please check out this cool interview/article)

Oh, and we registered Asher and Micah for local martial arts classes! They'll start next week and you can be sure I'll take some pictures. :) 

That's pretty much it. See? Nothing too exciting that you're missing. :)

Hanging my head...

Yes, yes. I know it's been weeks since I updated this. (My father in law told me so, lol!) Sigh. I'll work on it. ;) By way of apology, let me catch you up on what's been happening in May...

OPTIONS ENDED
Yup, our "school year" with Options is officially over. The boys had their spring program on May 3 (both sang with their classes), and then the final day on May 10. Both Noah and Asher were happy to receive a little certificate of recognition from their PE classes...for achieving various levels on the national physical fitness "tests." Noah scored his highest on the push-ups and Asher (unsurprisingly) did best on the flexibility dealio (the sit and reach).  

As a special thank you for the boys' teachers, I made up these little shadow boxes:

We also added some chocolate for good measure, lol! Ended up making seven of these. Though the boys each have six different subjects, they have some of the same teachers, thank goodness. ;) Big thanks to all those teachers for inspiring my boys throughout the year!

HOME PROJECTS STARTED BACK UP
Yes, I'm still working on home projects. We took a bit of a break there after our big trip but are starting back at it. Here's one that we finally finished for the dining area:

We took three 12x16 shadow boxes, found some sheet metal that Nathan cut to the same size, spray painted that black, and added the magnets we've been collecting from places we go. Yes, since before we were married, Nathan and I have been collecting magnets from each "destination" we go to. As it happens, we had roughly the same number from before kids and after (first shadow box is before kids...second is after). We deliberately hung the empty third box as a reminder to get out there and go more places. ;)

BETTER THAN AVERAGE YARD SALE HAPPENED
Speaking of home projects...this past Sunday we had our "Better than Average Yard Sale"...or so said all the signs I made. ;) With our boys manning their own little snack, drink & origami stand, I don't think anyone could argue with me that our sale was, indeed, better than average, lol. Here, btw, are our little entrepreneurs:

Noah made up the signs and (thanks in part to his Options AmeriTowne class) worked on explaining economics to his brothers. It really was quite educational, as they worked out their expenses (we relented and only charged them for the stuff they sold instead of the total costs of the supplies...but I did make it into a fraction exercise, lol) and debated where to set their prices and counted their money and divided it by three. Yay for math! ;)

And, yes, they sold origami (that Noah had folded) filled with Jelly Belly candy. (They originally were just going to sell the origami, but I figured that they'd sell more with candy in them so prodded them a bit in that direction, lol. Fortunately, Noah "got" it...the other two money-hungry boys still thought selling things for $5 made more sense, lol.) All in all, after expenses, they made about $23 ($7.50 per boy I think) and were happy.

In case you were wondering, the yard sale part went pretty well, too. ;) We made a decent amount and, perhaps more importantly, finally have use of our front room again! (It's been filled since January when we got the bright idea to clean out the basement, lol.) Here's what it looked like just before we started lugging stuff to the garage:

Scary how much stuff we'd accumulated that we totally didn't need. ;) (Keep in mind that we had a fairly good garage sale last August, too, so this is mostly just from the basement. Oy.)

Anyhow, yard sale is over and as soon as we finish transporting the remaining few boxes to Goodwill and the like, we'll get the garage back, too. ;) Feels good.

(Oh, and for those who have asked how I manage to get the boys to be okay with selling their stuff...it was easy. Our boys are money-hungry. ;) We offered them 5% of the total take if they helped with moving stuff around and all that. You'd be amazed how quickly they can offer things up when they know they'll get a portion of the profit.)

SOCCER CONTINUES
And, of course, May has been full of soccer. I missed Noah's first ever goal but managed to get a shot of the second one:

(I missed the first goal because of the overlap of games. I was at Asher's game that weekend, while Nathan was at Noah's. It would happen that way, of course. I lug the camera to pretty much every game for six seasons and miss the one where he finally scores a goal, lol.) 

With just one game left in the regular season, Noah's team remains undefeated. We're just so happy that they're having a blast and get to play this season together as a team that's all played together before. Next season, they'll all go different directions, as the age brackets require the boys to choose between intermediate or recreational play for the coming year and then competitive or recreational after that. Since intermediate and competitive require additional expense and travel, we'd agreed that all of our boys would have to remain recreational. It just wouldn't be fair to the others on weekends when we wouldn't make all the games. (Obviously, we already have enough issues with overlap with all three in rec, lol.) 

I may have missed Noah's first goal, but I did manage, then, to see Asher's first time at goalie:

He's actually a pretty good little goalie, though he still prefers playing forward. Since the first time, he's played goalie at least a couple more times and has only been scored on once, I think (and that, honestly, was more because his defenders were in the wrong place). He really has no fear and just gets right in there. :)

And then there's Micah. I really thought that being the third boy to play soccer would give him an advantage or something. That, though, presupposes that one *wants* to have an advantage. Oh, he knows all the moves and strategies that his brothers impart to him. He just doesn't care. ;) In reality, Micah just loves to be on the field...doesn't even matter if he's near the ball. ;) At last Saturday's game, I managed to capture some true "Micah moments"...complete with all the little hand gestures he makes throughout a game. My favorite is the "force lightning"...like the emperor uses in Return of the Jedi to try to kill poor Luke Skywalker:

Yup. Micah just loves being on the field. ;) He's cute, though, so it's okay.

Been busy editing pictures from all three teams and prepping team/individual pictures. I volunteer to take team and individual pictures rather than pay the high prices that the assigned professional photographers charge. I make up a nice little 8x10 for each boy and print a handful of 4x6s of that boy in action and then just charge parents the printing costs. Here's a peak at what this year's 8x10s look like:

The end of season parties for Asher and Micah are later this week, with the last game being Saturday. Noah's team will again participate in the spring tournament so will do their end of season stuff then (June 4-6). 

OTHER STUFF OCCURRED 
And, amid all this other stuff...Asher had two more teeth pulled (poor kid has a tough time biting right now, lol)...Micah continues to need to count how many pages each book has (boy loves to count)...I finished up the 200 wedding invites/rsvps/directions for my sister's wedding this summer...we had snow on May 12 for reasons unknown...another Good Grief Blog challenge went up...and homeschooling continues to go well. :)

Whew. So. That's what I've been up to while not blogging. ;) May always seems to get me like that. Will work on updating more regularly, though. Do you forgive me? :)

Science Fair

Okay, lest I get distracted again and neglect to post this... ;)

So, last Sunday, we had our second annual homeschool group Science Fair. It was awesome. We had roughly four dozen kids participate this year and it just makes me so happy to see all the fabulous projects. Being as science is, um, not my strong suit by any means, I love, too, that I can do this with the boys. Like last year, I made all the kids little notebooks to go on their tables and folks left positive feedback as they walked around to see everything. Man, the boys love reading those after the fact. :)

This year, Micah insisted on having his own project (having helped his brothers last year (scroll down) but not receiving a participation trophy like everyone else since his name wasn't on the project). After much debate, we finally settled on "wind energy" as his topic. (He originally wanted to show how a hybrid car works, but since I didn't understand it as well as Noah and couldn't explain it to Micah as well as Noah and couldn't convince Noah to work on it with Micah...well, we switched, lol.) So. We bought him a little wind energy kit, which Nathan helped him put together. Then we just had him draw pictures with the simplified steps of how we turn wind into energy. Viola. (He is only four after all, lol.)

(You can click on the pictures to make them a little bit bigger.) Yes, blowing "wind" makes the light turn red. Even with all the boy's hot air, though, actually blowing wasn't enough...hence the blow dryer. ;) Micah was so excited.

For Asher's project this year, he did a little experiment to see which top spun the longest. He took tops that were identical and added weights to some so that he could test light vs heavy and skinny vs wide. He also gathered a good number of tops to show the many types:

Needless to say, we all had lots of fun with Asher's project! ;) Special thanks, too, to the owner of Science Toy Magic in Old Town Fort Collins (an awesome little science toy store just north of Ben & Jerry's) who not only helped talk Asher through the science of why some of his tops spun longer but also generously gave Asher a few tops from his own collection (no longer for sale in his shop, though we also have picked up a number of those over the past year or so anyhow, lol).

Finally, Noah. This year Noah did almost all of his project by himself. I assisted with punctuation and printing out the materials he asked me to print (to his specifications). He, though, came up with the idea, wrote out all the information (well, we let him type it this year), found all the pictures, designed how he wanted the project board to look and made all the molecule models on his own. His topic? The many forms of carbon. (The boy loves the elements.)

(The little blue tags are on anything that has carbon, btw. Totally his idea.) Cool, eh?

And that, my friends, was our Science Fair experience this year. The boys all received participation medals this year (which Micah wore around town the following day) and are happy. They're already talking about what they want to do next year. :)