April

Yet another Spring month has come and gone, I can’t hardly believe it!  Maybe it’s because we’ve had much more winter than we’ve had spring!

The girls and I got to go to another homeschool event with our local homeschool group – REACH.  We went to a seminar put on the Martin family.  Job Martin is a scientist who travels around educating and speaking.  It was a great conference and we got several great books and videos of his.  It’s worth checking out his stuff – some of his videos are available to watch on Netflix online as well.

Casey took the girls to a Butterfly Ball in Fargo (daddy-daughter dance).  The music wasn’t really their taste but they enjoyed dressing up and spending time with Dad.

I caught the kids making roll cages for boys.  Each of the boys squeezed themselves into a laundry basket and then their sisters so graciously tied pillows on top of them with some ribbon.  Luckily I arrived on the scene before they sent them for a wild ride down the stairs.  Kalister was disappointed “it’s safe mom, laundry baskets have holes so we can breath.  geeze!”  I always have to ruin their fun with my crazy safety rules – it’s tough to be a mom sometimes!

Easter

We had a nice Easter at home this Spring.  The weather was great and Casey was able to hide eggs for the great Andersen egg hunt outside.  This year to add to the challenge and give Max a bit of an advantage, the big boys were a team (tied together by one arm) and the girls were a team (tied together by one arm and one leg).  It was pretty hilarious to watch.  It definitely added to our Easter laughs.

I made a feast of traditional Turkey dinner this year.  I know it’s not “the official Easter food” but our family just loves Turkey dinner.  This year the girls each contributed a dish of their own as well.  Kenzy made a cranberry fruit salad and Kaela made peach cobbler for desert.  After our big feast, we walked to the local school playground for some fun on the equipment and a friendly soccer match.  It was our first real outside-all-afternoon kind of day – boy did everyone sleep well!  WELCOME SPRING!

Looks like Chicken

A couple pictures of our chickens – the kids just LOVE them.  I never knew the kids would spend so much time loving their chickens!  We got 12 chicks this spring – they lived in our basement until they got “fully feathered” and finally the day before Easter Casey and the kids moved them to the barn.  I like chickens but not enough to have them in my house!  The chicks were really excited to get out and have some room to run.  Our additional 11 big chickens didn’t really give them any trouble either.  Hopefully in a couple months our egg production will pick up enough to keep up with our consumption. 

March – Discovered Some Great Homeschool Materials!

Okay – March came and went WAY too fast. I’m not hardly even sure what happened! It was a double birthday month for us with Max turning 2 and Mikaela turning 10. The girls and I attended our first ever ND Homeschool conference in Jamestown. We traveled to the conference with a friends and stayed over one night. The girls and I had a good time. The girls reconnected with some friends they had when we lived down in Abercrombie and some new friends they’ve made in the homeschool world.

At the conference I was able to check out all the vendors and see some really cool stuff. One of the vendors, Moti-venture had a cool product to enable families to setup these motivational adventures. I got a couple and we’ve enjoyed getting started with them. It’s a really fun and creative idea. We also picked up some additional reading material including reading books from Christian Light – the kids and I both agree these are wonderful books to continue.

One of our favorite vendors was a family-run homeschool store – Heppner’s (from MN). I recommend them to anyone looking for great books. One find at the conference was the Viking Quest series – Kaela plans to read the series with a friend this summer. Another great series we found there is the Kingdom Series followed by the Knights of Arrethtrae Series – totally awesome books for boys and girls (and I thoroughly enjoy reading them to the kids as well). We definitely found some great stuff!

Other than birthdays, that’s all I can remember of March . . . .now I need to catch up with April – I’m SO behind!