New things

Sadly, I have been neglecting updating things here. Life has been going quickly and we have just been trying to do our best to keep up. In December we will be adding another little one to our crew. The boys are so excited to have a new baby boy to the family. In the mist of this we have been working on planning an addition on our house. It has always been a plan, although we have dragged our feet due to all the other things we need to do. The first being putting in a new septic/drain field. We suspected ours was failing, but did not know how bad it was. So for the last 2 months we have been trying to get the new site for the septic prepared. Partly due to incompetence (hired work) and partly due to the weather, it has been severely delayed. We are anxious to get that part done so we can begin construction and hopefully have a good bit done before the baby arrives in December. It is not looking to good right now so we will see.

We have enjoyed about 6 weeks off of school. Owen and I went to Winston-Salem for the NCHE Conference and love it. It was so inspiring and fun, we met lots of fun people. I am now racking my brain trying to figure out how I will swing going with a 5 month old next year. I love checking out the curriculum first hand and attending workshops. Think I need to hire a Nannie for the weekend to come with! We also went to Boone for a week and enjoyed beautiful weather and relaxing time as a family.

This week we started back to school for Owen. I changed a few things with his curriculum and am excited to see how things progress. We chose a different core curriculum called Trail Guide to Learning Paths of Settlement. It is a US History based curriculum based on living books. I can say two days in Owen is already doing fantastic. He has written more for me than I ever got out of him last year. We are also changing math and using Teaching Textbooks it is an computer based program which I started back in May. He does well with it and enjoys it so for now we will stick with that. I am continuing on with All About Spelling, Handwriting without tears and Easy Grammar also. I found a new writing program called Bravewriter and plan on incorporating these ideas in with our work this year as well. My plan is to hopefully have quite a bit completed by the time the baby arrives to take the month of December off to get situated.

Wyatt will also begin more formal school this year as a Kindergartner. I love the excitement he has right now when I work with him and my main goal is to keep that with him. I have My Fathers World Kindergarten for him, as well as Singapore Early Bird Math, Handwriting without tears,  and Five in a Row.  This week we are just doing pasting, some math and stories. As we go on I will add more as I see how he does.

Pixie is doing good, we are currently working on potty training and she is a breeze right now. She enjoys painting while the boys work on their school and always wants to draw and color. Pixie loves dressing up and playing ballerina or Fairy and is even quite good at convincing the boys to play along with her. She totally rules the boys here it's quite funny. Can't imagine how it will be with a new little brother to boss around!