Easton::6 Months

Don't you hate when your whole post gets deleted and then it immediately saves your new deleted version? Shoot!
I'm writing this for the second time now.....

Easton is 6 months!!! Half a year. Crazy.

Well time is flying by and Easton-ton (as Rand occasionally calls him) isn't getting any smaller! He weighed in this week at a whopping 27lbs 9oz. sheesh. The 4.5 year gap between him and Wyatt seems to be getting smaller. He is 29.25 inches. So he is big all around. 100th percentile for both weight and height. I think he's thinning out! Remember at 4 months he was "off the charts" for weight. What does that even mean anyway? At 100th percentile it means that there are 0% of kids that age, that are bigger. So what does "off the charts" mean! :) The doc said I have "VERY rich milk." I guess!
Easton is such a sweet boy. He never cries, just yells when he wants something and has the best laugh ever. Wyatt can make him laugh the most. He is eating some table foods but isn't all that interested so I'm not trying all that hard. Obviously he is getting plenty from me, right? He is sitting up great which I can't even tell you how awesome that is. I haven't been able to carry him in that darn infant carseat for a couple months now, let alone lifting it in and out of my car! So what do you do with a big dude that can't sit up when you have to go grocery shopping for example?? FINALLY, he can sit up in the cart!!!
Now, I anxiously await the day he can walk.
Here's our boy, 6 months.
(It's too hot for clothes still!)

Science Experiment #8::Magnets (and other schooly things)

School has taken off like a rocket and there is no stopping it! We've been sticking to it pretty good even though all the work is taking us a good hour and a half (or more) longer than last year. In Science we have been studying MAGNETS! This is soooo perfect for the boys because they are still everything Star Wars and what is better than finding a REAL FORCE!!! Last weeks experiment was right up their alley. We measured from how far away a magnet could pull a pin across the table and then compared to pulling it up, off the table. Then we made a butterfly suspend in the air with a string and some tape without physically touching it with the magnet. They boys just about dropped dead at this one! They thought I was "strong with the force". :) The pictures are lousy because I am still having major camera issues and with science, it moves fast. So I get what I get and that's that!

In other schooly news, we've been learning about Ancient Egypt. The boys made Egyptian collars and decorated them.

And look who has been joining us at school. As you can clearly see, he is studying about Noah's Ark and pairs. I can already tell he's as smart as a whip! :)

Wyatt is 5!

Over the weekend, we had a birthday! Wyatt is officially 5. I find that so hard to believe. He was just a baby when all our moving around began, just 18 months old. Now look at him! We looked back through all of his birthdays. He turned 1 in Washington, he turned 2 in Arizona (our first move), he turned 3 in Kansas while we were moving to Pennsylvania, he had is 4th birthday in Pennsylvania and last weekend he turned 5 here in Arizona. There is a huge part of me that feels really sick about that. If you asked him, on the other hand, he probably wouldn't change a whole lot of his last 5 years. He thinks he has the best life, and that is all I want for him. I wish I could say it is over and we're settled, but sadly it can't be said yet.

BUT, we had a super-kadooper (as Wyatt would say) fun day celebrating him! When you turn 5 at our house you get a new bike. He learned to ride the little 12 inch without training wheels last year on his birthday and he's been mastering it ever since. Brendan got an 18inch for his 5th birthday, but Wyatt, being a little more timid, we thought he would do better with a 16 inch. He LOVES his new bike. I think he said 'thank you' spontaneously about 20 times. It's so fun to surprise your kids with the perfect gift! We had all his friends over for a swimming party and he asked for a star wars cake. He got some Star Wars cookie cutters from my mom, so we made those too! Wyatt said being 5 is super-kadooper awesome! I think he's super-kadooper awesome!!

just waking up for his big day!

Super Cool Dude(s)

Look who's sitting up! (my almost 6 month old tank!)

Brendan requested I post a picture of some of their projects that are on the board this week. He had a title for the post as well, but I told him to get his own blog! :)

That's a scary Humpty Dumpty and some coloring pages reflecting Ancient Egypt and their Bible lessons.

Field Trip::Superstition Farm Tour

This year my goal is to incorporate a lot more field trips into our school year. Since we do school Sunday through Thursday and Rand has Fridays off, Fridays seem like the perfect day for educational trips around the valley. We ended our first week with a trip to a farm in east Mesa. It's a relatively decent sized dairy farm. We got a hay ride tour, food to feed the animals in their "petting zoo" and a sample of their homemade ice cream. We had a blast. The weather wasn't too hot (we went early) and we learned a lot about dairy cows. Mostly they have Holsteins (for milk) and a few Jersey cows for butter. We saw several baby cows that had been born that morning (they had already been moved into the pins with the petting zoo animals) and on the tour we saw a couple that had literally just been born. I didn't know that dairy cows had to have a calf every year or they would stop producing milk, even if you kept milking them. Learn somethin' knew every day! :)

the chickens and rooster were just roaming the place

all the petting zoo animals were rescued (except the baby cows)

Babies! just born a few hours earlier

a jersey baby

this chicken was hilarious. she looked totally disheveled and ran and hopped all around

the farm dog

on the tractor tour

I think they said the cows eat 6 tons of hay a day and each cow drinks a bathtub full of water a day!

Just born!!

Getting up for the first time

the whole place was really clean and the cows seemed pretty happy, even though there was no fresh grass. AZ doesn't have much pasteur land! Each cow gets milked twice a day and gets 4 showers a day! They have 2000 cows. It takes about 24 hours to complete the cycle 2 times.

The number that each cow wears is connected to a computer system. Each farmer has a pocket computer and can punch in that cows number and pull up her entire records. Everything on the cow is in there: when it was born, how many calves it's had, how much milk it has produced, if it's been sick, etc, etc.

High tech!

This is Phyllis

First Day of School::2010

The first week of school is going great! The boys were super excited to start. They woke up at 6am that morning! Sheesh, I thought only "regular" school kids did that! Apparently (I wouldn't know) it's pretty exciting to start a new school year, even when you're homeschooled! Both boys got their own binders with their own special supplies in them to hold all their worksheets and copywork throughout the year. Partially I wanted to have an organized place to keep their work and partially I wanted them to have something that was just theirs. They love having their own pencils and crayons and rulers and gluesticks, etc. Our bible verse for the year is on the front and I'm going to let them color or add stickers to the binder or something...
They are both great students. I love teaching them!

Brendan::second grade    Wyatt::kindergarten

learning cursive this year

printing review and practice

getting ready to read!

Compound words

working together, creating a calendar

How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver!

~Proverbs 16:16

Box Day #4

It was box day yesterday! Hard to believe this was our 4th one! Box day is similar to Christmas, so exciting and such a fun way to start the new (school) year! The kids want to start school NOW, but once the boxes arrive I have a little more organizing to do. We're going to shoot for Sunday (yikes! that's tomorrow day-after tomorrow!). Our school week this year (at least for now) will be Sunday-Thursday so that we can just "play" when Rand is off on Fridays and Saturdays.

I love how we don't have to abide by the school cut-off days. Brendan and Wyatt who are exactly 2 years apart would actually be 3 years apart in school...Brendan would be a young second grader this year (just making the cut-off by a few weeks) and Wyatt would be an old preschooler (just missing the cut-off for Kindergarten by a few weeks). Only because I think they are ready, Brendan is starting second grade this year and Wyatt Kindergarten. Can't wait to get started!!!

Bren might be a little excited about this book.

(below)Wyatt's reading on the left. Bren's on the right. Both the boys are repeating their reading from last year. Wyatt just wasn't ready for these (Brendan easily read through them at age 4), but he is seeming much more ready now. Brendan easily read through all these level 2 readers last year, but I'm trying to not let him get too ahead of himself because eventually his readers and our "core curriculum" will go together and he needs to be on track for that. So he'll be concentrating more on the Language Arts that goes with these since that's a little harder for him. Hard when a kid's reading level is way above their understanding of L.A.!

Handwriting

and Math!

Dude. Check out my binder. That is holding our Core curriculum, both the boys reading schedules and both the boys Language Arts.  (Science had to go in a seperate binder!)

All the awesome books we get to read this year!

Happy Schooling!