Runner

Jayda has decided she no longer wants to walk. No... Instead, she wants to RUN!

She is so hilarious. She tries to run all around the house. Her little chunky legs are so unsteady that she usually only makes it about five steps before she falls over.

Like a little kid with new shoes, she feels she can run even faster when she doesn't have clothes on.

6 of 52

Are they getting taller or is that tree shrinking?

5 of 52

4 of 52

3 of 52

2 of 52

1 of 52

Valentine's Party

Our home-school co-op had a Valentine's exchange after our regular classes. The kids got excited about making boxes for their valentines and worked hard on them all week.

Andrew's was a Sonic themed car. He is really into Sonic lately and spends lots of time coloring Sonic pictures, drawing Sonic and playing an imaginary Sonic game.

Matthew's box was a spaceship, which was manned by his Galactic heroes.

Alayna's box was a pink craft creation, covered with stamp art.

Roller skating

Today we went roller skating! We have tried taking the kids roller skating in the past, but it wasn't real successful. Now that they have been ice skating all winter, I felt more confident they could handle themselves on the rink.

Every Thursday, one of the local rinks has a home-school skate. This week, it was a 50s theme with a Valentine's card exchange.

The kids were a little uncertain at first. But after a few times around, they decided they have a new favorite past time!

Shape sorter

Jayda is really starting to get active now that she is a full-fledged walker. However, her favorite activity is still to be carried by Mom or Dad. Because of this, she has earned the nickname of "hip rider" (or HR for short).

As you might imagine, this gets kind of tiring for a mom who is trying to home-school three other children !

So, I'm always happy when I can find an activity to keep her busy for a few minutes. 

One of her favorite things to do right now is to sort her pegs. We have a big bag of pegs that go with our Giant Pegboard toy.

She pulls them out and then puts them in the circle hole in this shape sorter toy. She isn't quite big enough to match up all of the shapes on the shape sorter. But she can handle the circles!

She works diligently at this task until she fills her little blue box with pegs. And as long as she's busy, I work as fast as I can to complete whatever task I need to accomplish!

Is that fun, Jay-jay?

SciTech Museum

We had a field trip today with our home-school co-op to a science museum about 20 minutes from our house. This was a ton of fun. They had converted an old downtown post office into the SciTech Museum, which was full of hands-on experiments perfect for the ages of our kids.

We felt like we had discovered a hidden treasure when we arrived and "signed in." The only other people who had signed in before us were other families in our co-op.

Alayna loved playing with the "bubble wall." She is blowing on her giant bubble in this photo.

Here are some of the kids getting ready for "lift off" in a hot air balloon.

This was Matthew's favorite part. He had to generate electricity by pedaling a bicycle. As he rode harder, more lightbulbs would light up. He was talking about that for the rest of the day. In this cold weather, we certainly are glad we don't have to generate our own electricity!

Jayda had a great time running from one side of the museum to the other. Here she is standing in the foot of a mastodon. Grrrr....

Eating leaves

One of our assignments for our Biology class this year was to take the little radish sprouts we have been growing and eat them. We were supposed to divide the sprout into three sections and try to determine in which section the radish grows.

OK. It's kind of funny that my kids don't really know what a radish is. They haven't ever eaten one before. So, the fact that one end is red, really wasn't a big clue to them.

I loved their reactions. The firstborn was totally reluctant to eat the sprout. Each section grew progressively more unbearable as he ate the leaves, then the center section and then the red part. "Too spicy!"

The middle child loved it more and more with each bite. "Mmmm! This is good!"

And then there's the third born. She basically loves to do anything that's silly. The whole project was just one more opportunity to have a big laugh.