January went by in the blink of an eye this year. I was home with the kids on parental leave after the addition of Max to our family in December. So, we were getting to know Max and working on school.
School
The girls are getting into the swing of doing school at home, for the most part I do believe they are enjoying it. They definitely have more time for creative projects and our home is often cluttered with construction paper, stickers, glue, string, pipe-cleaners and tape. Kaela has been studying about Mexico in social studies, in Math she’s working on multiplying two and three digit numbers, in English she’s diagramming sentences, using the encyclopedia, possessive pronouns and writing in cursive. She’s also working on a literature study on the book The Crown. Kenzy is learning about the different kinds of communities and what goes on in those communities in Social Studies. In Math she’s working on adding and subtracting large numbers, counting by 7’s, simple multiplication and fractions. In English, Kenzy is working on possessive nouns and learning about verbs. The girls do science together, we’re doing Astronomy and they’ve been studying about the moon and Jupiter in January. They also do Literature together – we’re reading a book called Kingdom’s Hope by Chuck Black. For History the girls are reading a book together about Hellen Keller – they can’t get enough of it. That’s so awesome! J
Mikalister and Mikah are working on letter recognition and beginning reading with a program on the computer called Reading Eggs. They’re both excited to be reading a few words now. They’re also working on their counting and writing their numbers. They love coloring and working on craft projects.
Max is working on his vocabulary. In January we’ve focused on a couple of animal sounds and body parts. He can now tell you what a kitty, doggy and cow say. He also knows where his eyes, nose, feet and tummy are. He’s also got quite comfortable telling us “eat”, “down”, “Wanna. Get. Owwwwwt”, “wanna go”, “hat” “please”, “bath”, “NO” and “shoes”. He nods his head “yes” when we ask him if he can say yes. Instead of just saying “I”, he says “oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy” – super cute. So his most common phrase when he wants to get out of his bed or the car is “mama, oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy wanna. Get. Owwwwwt” – precious.
Mom, I want a PONY!
We had some exciting news from the Merryman family this month! Grandma Lin bought the kids a pair of miniature ponies! Their names are Tyke and Titan and they are trained to drive a cart in addition to ride. When the kids heard the news, of course they wanted to go right down and see them, so . . . . ROADTRIP! Yes, I’m 50% out of my mind 100% of the time! I took all 5 kids on a 8+ hour car ride to Grandma’s house in the dead of winter! (I make up for in adventure what I lack in sense.) It was a great trip and the mini’s are just wonderful pets. The kids absolutely loved them and the weather was nice while we were there. All of the kids rode (and fell off and got back on) and started learning a bit about horses.
The grand plan is for the mini’s to live in NE in the winter and then Grandma will bring them up to live with us when we’re not buried in snow. They stand 35” tall and I’m absolutely positive our snow is deeper than that in our yard. Grandma Lin also got the harnesses the ponies use and the their cart too. While we were there, Grandma and Lucille harnessed them up and took all the kids for a ride. The mini’s did great and the kids were in love. There were a few tears when we had to say goodbye but they’re looking forward to Daddy building a fence at our place when the snow melts so the ponies can come to their summer home.
Visiting Family
While we were in town we got to go over and see Grandma and Grandpa Merryman. Grandpa is 95 and Grandma is 92 I believe. They are still the sweetest, most in-love couple I’ve ever known. I really enjoyed visiting with them. Their minds couldn’t be sharper. I asked them what their secret was to such good health, happiness and longevity, Grandma said “we just sit around and reminisce about all the great things we’ve gotten to witness. We laugh and think about all we’ve been blessed with all day long and we let the other stuff go. We enjoy each day together so much.” You can see why I love visiting them. They enjoyed seeing the kids and catching up on the latest events with our family – meeting Max of course.
There was a mild snowstorm (by our standards anyway) the day before we were leaving NE so we decided to make a bit of progress towards home and visit my aunt and uncle and their family – Tom and Stephanie and their kids Will and Libby. The kids had a great time – they love playing with cousins. They were able to exchange phone numbers while we were there so now the girls can text with them on my phone. Kaela loves having more people to text with.
On our way home we stopped for a field trip through the Laura Ingalls Wilder (writer of Little House on the Prairie books) museum and took the tour. It was fun and educational. Kaela has read all the books so she peppered our tour guide with questions about where and when different things from the books happened. She got significant enjoyment out of that!
That’s about all the excitement we could handle in for January.
