No time for writing this week so all I have are pictures! Today we are going to a Military enrichment conference at a large church in Manhattan (Kansas). We were asked to sit on a panel in one of the workshops on parenting children in the military life. There will be a lot of Q&A. Please pray that Robert and I have the wisdom to help these other parents.
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Robert and I have been talking about toys for the last few months. With more children comes more toys. That is obvious! And our three oldest have birthdays around Christmas. So every year I am cleaning their rooms out, getting rid of toys, and organizing before and after the holidays so that we will have enough room for all the toys and clothes. About a year ago I minimized all of our clothes. Ten short sleeved, ten long sleeved, and four or five bottoms is more than enough. More than that and things get cluttery! But I kept ramming my head against a wall on the toys!
Anyone can tell you there are tried and true toys! My boys have a whole box of cool toys and they spend most of the play time playing with dinosaurs and small cars. I love this because these two toys allow for more imagination than their blinking "educational" counter parts. Blocks will never go out of style! Every child spends some time of their childhood building castles and towers out of blocks! Our girls play with dolls. Not Barbies but baby dolls. They dress them up and mother them endlessly! Again, I prefer these games more than I do the flashy toys. It's not even because of the noise either. I easily ignore the noisy toys. It's because I see how much more the simple staple toys encourage imagination and brain power! Add that to the fact that we are trying to minimize unneeded things in the house and we have our solution! We are slowly weaning ourselves from the flashy expensive toys. It is my goal to have a good supply of staple toys that are universal for most ages. Such as: -Wooden blocks -Legos -Cars -Baby dolls (and accessories) -Dress up clothes (less princess stuff and more adult stuff such as fire fighter, doctor, police officer, knights) -Balls of all shapes -Animal figures One day, we would love to adopt and we don't know if the Lord will bless us with more biological children. So as a family that is growing (and growing, Lord willing) we realize what that does to family members in regards to birthdays and such. So here is my solution! First, our kids would prefer to see you above all else. Skip the expensive toy and spend it on gas to see us! We will feed you and put you up in our guest room! Toys mean nothing beside a weekend with Grandpa or Auntie or whatever! Second, here is a list of toys/supplies to help support the kids' education. These are things that I would like to have but will likely never splurge on or at least it will take a while to get around to buying, but they are cheap! I keep my eyes open for these things at Goodwill or flea markets a lot! -an abacus -Johnathan Park audios -Adventures in Odyssey audios (this is a favorite for all the kids) -any Imagination Station books (Darby flips for these! She has the first 3) -dinosaur books by Ken Ham -any books or films by Ken Ham -sports equipment (baseballs, basketballs, baseball gloves, goals, etc) -toddler puzzles (poor Deakin has only one so far that I found at Goodwill) -simple sewing supplies for the girls -crocheting supplies for the girls -yarn -a car play mat -any Dandi Daley Mackall books (she does all age levels!) -a globe -legos (the normal small type without a theme) -a lamenator (for schooling, they are as cheap as $20 on amazon! Who knew? Not me! Also, this is more of a mommy gift) -a fastener toy for basic skills (like below) Not doing a blow by blow of each day this week. Mainly because I've had a rough week emotionally and didn't sit down to type out things we did. I'm not emotional about anything in particular, I seem to be content to be emotional and hopeless about everything! You know those times, don't you? Feeling hopeless and discouraged is a sin. Repent!! As I am praying for the strength to do. ; ) Without fail, when I am feeling hopeless and discouraged it is because I am focusing on ME or my circumstances and NOT on the perfectly forever faithful and loving God! Why in the world my focus would veer away from Him I can not fathom. Feeling better today however. I found this song: I have worn this song OUT!! Over and over and over, replay. I also felt compelled to listen to the full sermon by John Piper that they have an excerpt from. It's here: http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/conference-messages/do-not-lose-heart Phenomenal!! Such a blessing to listen to. If you're having one of "those weeks" I highly recommend it. Stop looking to yourself! You make a crummy god. Look to HIM!! But enough of that! He's a God of redemption!
So we are still on our unit in Science about Living Things. This week, however, we took an opportunity to look in the Bible to see what God has to say about the living things He made! We will continue this subject next week as I didn't get all done that we needed to. In History we are still in the Revolutionary Period. Last week the girls learned the 13 colonies. They started some worksheets this week to test their memory on the things we have been learning and next week we will finish those up and put on a fake interview with George Washington! In Bible we are up to Jacob and Esau! One more week and we will take a week break and then start on Joseph and head into Exodus. Exciting! I bought Tender (and Hurricane, but mainly Tender) a weaving loom that was on clearance at Wal-mart. So that is a big deal in our house right now! She's weaving like mad! I can't seem to keep enough "hand-crafts" tools around the house. Plus, I just have a limited knowledge of sewing. So crocheting, knitting, and weaving are severely limited for me! I've just been looking up youtube videos to help them learn more. Well, turns out a local church is having a craft night once a week. So Tender is stoked and we will hit that in a few weeks. I imagine she will have little old ladies tripping over themselves to help her learn more! : ) I learned this week a better way for my cleaning schedule now that we are full school swing! And I think it will improve things a lot. We also started Awanas this week and the kids are so happy! In two weeks we will have our first field trip with a few other homsechooling family friends! So excited! Here are some pics from this week! We went to the pond today to ride bikes. Hurricane learned how to ride without training wheels last week. How, you might ask? By us taking the training wheels off. She was like, "Thanks!" and just took off! But I was riding bikes with the girls and busy watching The Boy and Wild Man on their plasma cars (Jack's leash pulling Wild Man for the last half) and enjoying fellowship with my man so I didn't think to take pictures. : ( Sorry! We make our own chicken stock. I have friends that taught me how a few years ago, and it's so easy and so healthy that we do it all the time. Talk about saving money, too! http://www.kitchenstewardship.com/2009/03/26/food-for-thought-health-and-nutrition-of-traditional-homemade-chicken-brothstock/ After I cook a whole chicken or pull all the meat off of a rotessouri chicken I throw the bones and fat into a big pot. Then I cut large chunks of a couple carrots, celery stalks, onion, and 3-4 garlic cloves and add those to the pot too. A splash of apple cider vinegar, a couple bay leaves and then I fill the pot with water! Put over low heat after breakfast and simmer all day. At the end of the day strain and refrigerate. Give the now brittle chicken bones to the dog. If he is like Jack he will leave the carrots! : ) The End!
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LindseyI'm the mama and wife. Updating you on our life! Archives
January 2022
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