Let’s talk about Halloween costumes for a hot minute. Growing up, my mom always made our costumes. Anything we wanted to be, she would make. So, naturally, when I had children, I intended to make all of their costumes. I don’t consider it a burden because I like crafting ~ sewing, hot glue, cardboard, fabric, paint. Whatever. No biggie. Fast forward to 2020 when there’s a worldwide pandemic and it’s a huge pain to go to a craft store, wear…
I was at Home Depot last night to get some drywall screws because apparently the people who hung the projector in our house thought it would be fine to just hang it from a drywall ceiling without anchoring into studs (side note: this is NOT how a heavy projector that hangs over your head should be hung!), when I came across this Halloween candy dispenser. I saw a photo circling on Facebook of a similar thing and thought it was…
Fall always has been and always will be my favorite time of year. Cool weather, jeans and sweatshirts, hot apple cider, pumpkin flavored everything, gorgeous leaves…..makes me smile just writing all that. It also means time for another family cook off! We started 7 years ago with a chili cook-off and bonfire at my parents house, has now turned into an annual event but with different cook-off themes. This year, everyone had to use pumpkin as an ingredient, which sounds…
Eli and Ava were sooooo good during the move and being flexible with eating schedules and not getting as much 1:1 attention from Sam and me as usual, so I decided to treat them this week with a Halloween surprise. I told them if they got all their school work done in the morning (which meant doing a LOT to catch up on what we didn’t do during the move!) I had a surprise for them. Worked like a charm!…
I never knew just how stressed I was this past month and a half until Thursday rolled around and we closed on our old and new house. A huge chunk of stress rolled off my shoulders knowing that all the signatures were in place and a move was actually happening. Selling a house – while homeschooling during a pandemic – is not for the faint of heart! Ha! Browsing homes for sale on Zillow is a favorite past time of…
Sunday, I spent about 3 hours working on Eli’s school lesson plan for the week, so I knew exactly how Monday was going to unfold….and it was spot on! Up until this point, school work took roughly 2 hours total each day and when I say school work, I really mean school review what I already know. Well, after talking with a couple other moms of first graders at different schools, I realized just how little Eli was doing with…
We are one week away from moving and my house looks like a warehouse of boxes and smells like cardboard, but today, I am grateful for boxes – the perfect medium for building a wall! My children love each other, and most of the time even like each other, but today it seems they can’t look at each other, be within 5 feet of each other, or hear each other without feeling the need to report it to me. Ava:…
Eli and Ava have fairies that visit them at night and leave goodies, notes, tricks around the house, etc. This all started with 2 wooden fairy doors I bought on a whim at JoAnn’s a couple years ago and Ava found in my craft room during a quarantine clean out in the spring. She and Eli painted the doors, set them on their desks, and waited to see if the doors would turn magic to let the fairies in our…
With the amount of protesting Eli does every time I ask him to write a sentence, one would think I was asking him to walk across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope while blindfolded with a monkey on his head – no way! Nope! Can’t do that! Kryptonite is to Superman what a pencil is to Eli, but since his letter formation is atrocious, his sentence structure is atrocious, and his spelling is atrocious, writing is the one thing he…
I decided that every week needs to have something fun in it that also relates to school because I don’t want Eli and Ava to think school is all about doing worksheets and computer programs. Being with friends is an equally crucial part of school, but since that isn’t happening right now, I decided to bring a little socialization to our homeschool room! Introducing Baking with Math…Colleen’s Cooking Classroom….Kitchen Math….something like that. Haven’t settled on the name just yet, but…