Self Portraits

Sam has been taking pictures of himself and drawing pictures of himself in school this week.
I was impressed with both!

Cuteness Update

Just in case you wanted to know Megan has a new really cute scrunchy face smile. It usually perks my day up so I hope it helps yours!

Discouragment

Well, have you ever had a bad day or week or month? When Troy put the last coat of epoxy on our floor 2 weeks ago something terrible happened and it ruined our entire floor. We contacted rust-oleum (the maker of the product) and after sending in pictures and many discussions they think it had to do with more than one factor, including high humidity during application (we live in FL People)! We may have been able to live with the fact that it looked bad, but it also had dried into sharp points that cut the kids legs if they sat on it. Anyway many thoughts went through our mind

1. Sell the house and move to an apartment

2. Hire a contractor to finish the work

3. Scrape the floor up and start over

4. Cry We opted for 4 and then 3! Rust-oleum is paying for the tools to remove the floor and reimbursing us for their product but we have to do all the work. We started last Saturday and are almost done with the scrapping. It stinks pretty bad, but we have made a game out of it.

The kids are working with us to earn money for a trip they get to take in a few weeks. Sam is all about bringing the funny so laughing at him is a good remedy for the sheer pain of ripping something up that you just spent a long time doing. The kids keep having contests to see if Troy or I can scrape up the biggest piece. I always win because the kids are biased to the one who feeds them!

In other discouraging news....

1. I had an accident the day the floor messed up running beside Maddie on her bike over the Southport bridge. She cut in front of me sharply while she was looking at a bird or something and I totally face planted. I knocked one of my front teeth loose and had tons of road rash. Luckily everything has healed up nicely and my tooth tightened back up. I can almost bend my right knee which is handy when you are scrapping up a floor!

2. Half of Troy's classes at the college got canceled this semester for 'lack of enrollment'. They were able to sub one class for him, but it will essentially knock his graduation date back at least one semester.

3. The air conditioner went out totally in the Accadia.

4. We have killed 2 black widow spiders outside of our house this week and know I keep having spider dreams!

Of course many good things have happened too, but I can't put them in this post or I will have to change the title!

K-4 and 1st grade

We are one week in to our 2nd year of homeschooling. I'm a little sad to say that I'm glad school is back in since it brings structure and order to our daily life! The kids are also glad and so far are loving it! We are streaming their school this year and so far have liked it alot. I was worried that they might have trouble signing into their accounts, but they can do it as fast as me now. Kids these days are so technologically savvy these days ;-)Maddie is in the 1st grade and LOVES her new video teacher! She seems to be picking things up a lot quicker this year and is most excited over music and art. She is going to continue in dance this year and also is going to try out a new art class that is taught here in town. She wants to take piano and flute lessons, but we are going to wait one more year at the instructors advice.

Sam is in K-4, it's his first official year. We went ahead and bought him the whole curriculum as he is very eager to learn and gets a little bored when Maddie is busy with her studies. The first day he paused his video about 10 minutes in and came in to report that "I already know all this stuff!" Hopefully the year grows more challenging as he learns his alphabet in cursive and how to read!
We have suspected for a while that he is left handed and now that he is doing more structured writing and coloring I'm 100% sure that he is. He is starting a new karate class next week that meets twice a week.

I listened in on a few of their lessons this week and was struck with how grateful I am that they are able to be taught from a Christian standpoint. I heard several times the teachers backing up values that we teach them at home while teaching them reading, writing and math.
I feel very blessed that we have this option for school.

Babies

Megan got some babies for her birthday and she loves them!

I got these pictures of her 'feeding' them a bottle. She like to talk to them and give them hugs. It's super cute!
I love these pictures, but they make me sad because it seems like yesterday Megan was the size of one of the dolls she is now playing with.

100

Well the kids made it and we are SO proud of them!! Maddie read 100 books this summer!

She really improved in her reading and I'm so glad we did this with her. She is definitely coming into 1st grade with more confidence in her reading. And Sam was read 100 books!

He had fun choosing books from the library. Some of his favorites are "The Berenstain Bears" and Construction or John Deere books.

Now we are planning a trip to the children's museum as a reward.

Plan "D" at least....

Oh the adventure of a remodeling project.

It definitely keeps you thinking and working! We knew the floors would be a problem when we started the project. We knew that there were alot of ways to fix them. We also knew we were on a budget.

Our original plan was to lay ceramic tile on the entire floor. That plan didn't fit into the budget.

One option we had was laminate. That plan didn't work with the floor since there is a concrete lip all the way around and laminate has to have room to expand and retract.

I dislike carpet greatly so it was crossed off the list pretty fast.

Our brilliant plan "d" was to finish the concrete slab. There are alot of options out there for this. the one I loved was an acid wash finish. It would make the concrete look like marble. After many days of trying to 'prepare' the surface for this...we went to plan "e" and painted the floor! The old floor had lots of dried paint and oil on it which made it impossible to clean. Anyway I love the way the floor looks! We are going to epoxy coat it tonight and then by Saturday we should be putting up trim!I have picked out a beautiful area rug to put down and we are really starting to get excited about our new living space (especially since my deep freezer has been sitting in my kitchen for the past few days!) Maybe all this hard work will pay off!

One...

Well It's hard to believe that Megan has turned one already! That year has flown by for sure! Her actual birthday was on Tuesday and we celebrated by going to a local cupcake shop and enjoying a little treat. Megan and I ate the "lime in the coconut" cupcake and Sam had chocolate. Maddie doesn't like cake so she just watched!

Miss Mary and Papa Don had a cake waiting at their house so Megan did get to dive into that...she liked it alot! She also got to open up some presents from the mail. Thanks Mimi and Papa!!

On Saturday night we celebrated by hosting a small party. Megan was a little confused by all the attention and we had a hard time getting her to smile.

Maddie was my big helper. She helped decorate for the party and made cupcakes. She loves being Megan's 'little momma'.

Here she is while we all sang happy birthday to her...still no smile.

And trying to get her to blow out the candle. She did finally blow a little bit at it, but Maddie helped her get it out. She had a really cute pink birthday hat my mom had gotten her, but she wouldn't leave it on her head. Not even for a few seconds. It turned into quit and ordeal at the party....about 4 adults trying to get a picture of a party hat on a one year old. Someone should have videoed it. Well the one year old won, and no party hat was worn.

We are very blessed with our sweet girl!

Get Away

Well I haven't posted for a few weeks because we have been super busy!
But not the exciting to post about busyness, just busy, busy I guess. This past weekend, we interrupted the busyness to relax on a weekend getaway to Destin just Troy and I. It was alot of fun! We had some good responsible friends to watch the kids and headed out when Troy got off work Thursday. It was nice to just spend some time by the ocean, eat out and shop. We worked out some things about the school year and took in a movie. We were glad to see the kids when we got back, but they were a little disappointed to see us. Maybe next time we will escape for a whole week......