Random spewings forth . . .

*Curse words - I hate them. I mean I hate the real, vulgar ones. But I am not perfect, and sometimes the frustration of a situation just calls for a little verbage. So I have, over the years, created my own vocabulary of completely non-sensical but relatively clean "dirty words." Here are some of my ugly words: PIG! PIGGLY WIGGLY! Sometimes PIG CRAP! (now I know that one is getting a little vulgar). And if the situation is just overwhelmingly frustrating, I just might drop the f-bomb. The queen mother of all my own little personal expletive vocab: FRICK ON A STICK WITH A BRICK! So I guess it is a good thing that my curse words are a little counter-cultural, because the other day when I must have displayed some frustration on my face out in public (way over-crowded restaurant), Analese looked at me and said, "Piggly Wiggly on a stick with a brick, mommy."

*The other night, Analese and I were out in the kitchen when we heard Mariele start to fuss on the baby monitor. Analese says, "That's your child, mommy."

*Potty training is going awesome. Analese has not even had an accident in about 3 days. She goes to bed dry, wakes up dry, stays dry in her panties all day, and puts all of her body waste into the potty. She is also learning human physiology. (YAY home school, once again). Today she was enjoying a drink in the kitchen after lunch. She told me, "Mommy, this will turn into pee-pee in my body." I asked her if she needs to go to the potty. Her response was, "It is still turning into pee-pee mommy."

*Speaking of homeschooling, I learned that a mommy of one of Analese's fellow dancers is homeschooling! I got to have a nice conversation with her while our daughters were dancing today. She is the third homeschooler I have talked to out here in the past 2 weeks! Turns out that homeschooling does exist and is, in fact, thriving out here. I was glad to know this!

*Analese was in a bit of a mood this morning. I was trying to take pictures of both of my girls smiling at the same time. Hmmm, maybe someday? She was pretty much flat out refusing to smile for pictures this morning:




This is the closest I got to pleasant expressions on both girls' faces:



*Analese's mood carried over to Little Gym class. For the first time ever she was clinging to me and not wanting to go into her class. One of her favorite teachers, Miss Allison, came over and got her from me. She was fine then. She adores Miss Allison. Then when it was time for shoe change she did the same thing - started clinging to me. But when Miss Allison came to get her she was on her merry way.

*Miss Shanna, the main dance teacher, told me after class that Analese is so mature for her age and she listens so well and learns so quickly (beaming with pride here).

*A child (23 months old) from Mexico died of swine flu at a medical center in Houston yesterday. This swine flu thing is scary and I am hoping and praying that it will stay sparse in the U.S. Also praying for the other affected areas in the world, of course. Scary that there was a case in the metro area where I live.

Wordless Wednesday - Then and now . . .

Desk and homeschool . . .

First off, the desk is GREAT! It is very sturdy and comes fully assembled out of the box. Seems to be excellent craftsmanship. It came from amazon.com, as does the majority of everything that I own LOL!



Now a few words about homeschooling. I have dreamed of homeschooling for a long time now. I was pondering on this even before I had kids. My degrees are in science and healthcare, not in education. Although sometimes I do wish I had an education degree. It would come in so handy now that I have found my life's calling! Now that Analese is pre-school age, I have decided to try my hand at some informal pre-school homeschooling. I do not use just one particular curriculum. I have customized a curriculum that works for us. Real life experienced homeschoolers have told me that homeschool is not limited to a curriculum anyway. Homeschool is a 24/7 venture, and to do it effectively I must be on the lookout for constant educational opportunities in everyday life.

Here are some of my favorite homeschool materials:


For pre-school workbooks, I am using these two (both from Amazon):





I found this cool dry erase alphabet manuscript pad at Wal-Mart. Analese likes to trace the letters with her washable crayola markers, although we really are not focusing a lot on writing letters at this point. We are still just working on letter recognition and phonics:



And speaking of letter recognition and phonics, this book is great! My mother-in-law got this book for Analese. Not sure exactly where, but I would venture to guess Sam's since she gets a lot of stuff there. Either that or TJ Max (do they sell books at TJ Max?)



Three year olds learn from play, so I make sure to get Analese plenty of playtime, indoor and outdoor both. One educational activity I found that she enjoys is making the homemade play dough. We made blue (well, actually turquoise) play dough just this morning. And we had an entire numbers and letters lesson with these cool cutters that I got from....guess where....AMAZON!



I try to teach her a few virtues here and there. Well, yeah that is most important. So I've found this book from Amazon to be very helpful. It teaches such virtues as patience, kindness, forgiveness, obedience, sharing, manners, truthfulness, and few others.



I also want to teach her some Bible. Here are a couple of the better picture/story Bibles out there for young kids. They can be found at Amazon (I need to buy some amazon stock):




Analese has a pretty good home library, and we also try to get to the local public library once a week to check out a few books. If we don't get around to doing anything else school-wise, we at least read every single day.

Extracurricular: Analese does ballet/tap/gymnastics once a week for an hour at The Little Gym. This is great for providing her lots of enjoyable physical activity.

I think homeschooling is a very efficient way to educate. My dream is to one day be able to homeschool my girls Monday through Thursday and finish by early afternoon so they can do fun extracurriculars and develop whatever talents they have, be it music or dance or ice-skating or underwater basket weaving. Then I really hope that we can take Fridays and go out to serve the community in some capacity. I volunteered once a week at a community service center run by my church before I had Analese. I am realizing lately that I am really missing that aspect in my life - the aspect of servanthood. I know that I am doing a very important job right now in raising my two little ones, and taking time off from volunteer service is expected and understood. I just wish to instill a servant's heart in both of my girls. When they are both school age I do want to take them out to serve people who are less fortunate than we are. So many kids grow up very sheltered and have no idea the situations that other kids are growing up in. I just want my girls to have an awareness and a desire to try to make the world a better place.

There are plenty of good socialization opportunities with homeschooling. More and more people are homeschooling and forming communities that get together for various classes and extracurricular activities. So I really don't worry about lack of socialization. My girls will probably have more free time to socialize than a traditionally schooled kid.

Anyway, if you actually read this entire lengthy post, I hope you got a good insight into homeschooling. My personal goal is to take it one school year at a time and then to asses how we are doing and what we should do for the next year. I would like to do standardized testing along the way, no matter what the state laws are requiring. I learned that the state that I am currently residing in (Texas) is extremely lax and does not have any testing laws for homeschoolers. I want to test anyway, just to see how we are doing and to determine if there are areas in which we need to improve.

WHEWW! Can't you just feel my excitement jumping out of your computer screen? I've been pretty pumped about this idea for a while now.

Answer to the teaser post . . .

Here was the teaser:



Here is what it looks like if you pull it apart:



It is Analese's new desk and an early birthday gift for her! I decided that since I am taking on the pre-school home school that it would be nice for Analese to have a little desk. She has really been wanting one and she LOVES to sit there and do school. So the guesses that came the closest were Kaycee (high chair) and Carrie77 (potty seat) since they did guess chair and seat. The desk does have a seat with it!

Here is a picture of the storage area underneath the seat. Analese likes to store her "school supplies" under there:



She is so proud of her new desk!



Here is the scholar at work. I found this dry erase alphabet pad at Wal-Mart. It works well with the washable crayola markers that she already had:




I also bought her the giant box of crayons and threw out her old crayons. I thought having fresh new crayons might encourage her to color. I guess I am trying to encourage her to color with crayons, because she only seems to want to color with markers. She loves her new box of crayons, but she is more interested in counting them than she is in coloring with them.





And a side note: Here we are 1 week later, and I think we have completed potty training! She is having very few accidents and is wearing panties around the clock! WOO HOO! Now I just have one child in diapers!

Of wildlife - the cute and the pesky . .

We live in an area that has an abundance of natural wildlife. Truth be known, we moved in on their habitat. We live in a forested area and when the community was planned, efforts were made to preserve as many of the original trees as possible. We also have several ponds in the area where we live, and a couple within walking distance. I will start with the cute wildlife. I took these pictures at the duck/turtle pond just down the street from our neighborhood. The essence of spring:




Now for the pesky wildlife. Earlier in the week I packed a simple picnic and strolled the girls over to the park near our house. There was a squirrel there that was just getting a little too close to us. This squirrel was obviously interested in our picnic and could maybe smell our goldfish crackers or something. Squirrel wanted in the stroller very badly and I kept shooing it away. It would then run up a tree and perch there watching and waiting for me to turn my back. And when I turned my back to help Analese when she fell and got a boo-boo, the squirrel was almost in the stroller again!





Don't forget to make a guess on my teaser post a couple of posts down. The winner gets . . . . . . well, the winner gets the sense of pride that comes from winning!

The birthday celebration has begun!

A week early! Analese's birthday is one week from today, on May 2nd. This morning, Analese's church class sang happy birthday to her as she blew out a candle. The other little girl has a birthday on Monday, so both birthdays were celebrated today. Analese got to wear a party hat and have one of those noise-maker things. She also got to choose a wooden pink tulip to take home. She was so delighted that her birthday was acknowledged!

Teaser post . . .

Can anyone guess what this is?

My girls!

Cute video, etc . . .

Here is the reason for my lack of wordiness earlier. I had a killer sinus headache. 800 mg. ibuprofen and a claritin finally killed it. I have not been incapacitated by allergies in several years. I was living in Arkansas the last time I had an allergy attack that bad.

But ANYWAY, here is a video of the girls in dance class yesterday that Yng Yng took with her new cool little camera. Yesterday was bring a friend to dance class day, and Analese wanted to bring Anita naturally. They look pretty cute dancing together. Keep in mind that this video was shot on the other side of a pretty sound-proof glass window. So any background noise is just that - background noise. I wish we could hear what they are doing in there. I know they were doing some kind of chicken dance LOL!



We had a play date with our neighborhood pals in a cool new park today. Well, the park is not really new, just new to me. It is actually a park for disabled children. I did not realize that until I chatted with the mother of a disabled boy there (he had leg braces). I just thought all the ramps leading up to the playground equipment were pretty cool, but they actually serve a purpose!

Lee has gone to a nationwide Dave Ramsey town hall meeting tonight. Oh, how I long to go sit in a nice air conditioned auditorium and hear a nice Dave Ramsey presentation. The peace and quiet of listening to an adult topic without kids climbing on me. Can you tell I'm jealous?

Progress report on Analese's potty training. She has done GREAT! Much better than I even expected. Yesterday it seemed that everything just clicked into place. Before her bath last night I removed the same dry pair of panties that she had worn to bed the night before - definitely a record for her. Now today as I was bragging about her at the park, she proceeded to wet herself. And I THOUGHT I had an extra pair of panties in my bag, but I only had a pull-up. So she got to wear a pull-up for a short time today. Oh well, can't win em all. But I am overall very pleased with her progress. I probably should have done this a year ago.

Wordless Wednesday - A day late on Thursday

Analese can SWIM!

With no floatie on!

Today was 92 degrees. Our pool water temp was 77, but the hot tub was 102. Analese did not find the pool too cold, but I did. Here is a short video clip of her swimming. She has been doing this for a couple of weeks now. She loves to play this game where I "save her" or "rescue her" with the pool noodle:

We are over 24 hours diaper free!!!

I finally dug in my heels and made this commitment to potty train. None of this getting discouraged and putting her back into pull-ups for naptime, bedtime or car time. And when I dig in my heels on things I don't back down. That is my personality. So the last disposable pull-up she wore was to bed on Saturday night. She has been in panties (well, actually training pants) ever since. And she is doing remarkably well! No poopy accidents. Some pee-pee accidents, but we are dealing with it. I even took the girls to the library this morning for story time and she stayed dry and used the potty while we were there! She is sleeping on her special potty training bed, which is a twin sized plastic air mattress. She did wet herself early this morning and Lee took care of taking her to the potty and changing her panties. I washed her sleeping bag this morning because Lee thought that she leaked onto it a little. She likes her special bed. It is a novelty to her now. Although she did want to come to my bed around 6 a.m. and snuggle this morning. I have a stack of chux pads that the hospital sent me home with. I just made her lay on one of those! But she did fine and went to the potty as soon as she woke up around 8:00. I think we are almost there, folks! Here are some pics of her special bed. Naptime yesterday:



Bedtime last night:

Mariele is 3 months old today!

I did an exact re-creation of the 3 month photos that I took of Analese. Mariele is wearing the same outfit and is posed on the bean bag with the same pink blanket spread out on it. So I will post up the comparison photos now. The top photos are Mariele and the bottom photos are Analese:

A little bit of a smirky smile:




Very similar facial expression:




Another similar one:




This will probably be the last monthly photo where they are wearing the same outfit. From now on they diverge seasons! Analese was 3 months old in August in Colorado and Mariele is 3 months old in April in Texas. So the little yellow cupcake dress worked for both 3 month photos.

A good idea in theory . . .

I've noticed in parenting there are many good ideas in theory. One great idea I had this morning was to have a birthday tree for Analese. Kind of like a Christmas tree. I thought we could just pile her birthday presents under the ficus tree in our foyer. So lo and behold she gets a birthday package in the mail. It is from my super talented friend Carrie. I know it is a hand-knitted doll blanket, but I tell Analese that we are putting it under the birthday tree and she can open the package on her birthday. I have a couple more birthday gifts for Analese hidden in the closet, but luckily I have not wrapped them yet. Because here is where this birthday tree idea kind of fell apart. Today was bill pay day in my house. It is the big, once-a-month day that Lee and I sit down together in the office and run all our monthly expenses through our budget. I had Analese in the den watching some PBS kid's programs that we had on the Tivo. After a while I thought she was being pretty quiet, so I went out to check on her. I called her and she answered back, "I'm upstairs, mommy!" I asked, "What are you doing upstairs?" She said, "I'm having a beautiful picnic!" So I thought, uh oh, and I went toward the stairs and there in the foyer was the evidence that she had ripped into the package that Carrie sent. Sure enough, she had the beautiful pink blanket spread out at the top of the stairs and she was having a pretend picnic on it. I guess that nixed the birthday tree idea!

Piano recital

Last night we got to attend our young friend Alanna's piano recital. She won 2nd place out of all the first graders in the competition! We are so proud of her! Afterwards we celebrated at Shogun (also know as the Fire restaurant by the kiddos). We sat at the hibachi grill and the chef did all kinds of tricks with fire and food. I think Analese even caught some rice in her mouth!



Here is a close-up shot of Mariele's outfit. She had worn it to church and she also wore it to the recital. Unfortunately I think this was her first and last time to wear this 0-3 month outfit. It looks so cute on her, but is already too little!

Lofty Aspiration!

No more pull-ups. We will be potty trained by next weekend. I may have to do 17 thousand small loads of laundry this week, but that is OK. I can do this. Analese can do this. She is past developmentally able to do this. I have to go now and order her a waterproof mattress cover for her bed. Huge celebration next weekend if we are successful! I will do anything for her (with the exception of Chuck E Cheese).

Highly Recommended movie!

We just watched this:



It is an older movie, but it is so good! A great family movie and perfect to watch during thunderstorms! It is about a 13 year old and her father who take some orphaned goose eggs and raise the little goslings (who have become imprinted to the girl - they think she is their mama). Then they help them fly south for the winter in their ultralights! Very cool idea! Beautiful scenery too. This movie was filmed in Southern Ontario, Canada. We watched it in high-def and it was breathtaking!