Rewind Time to December

December was a busy month!  Below are some pictures from the month, minus Christmas.

Jenna's ballet class had a Christmas recital.  Can you spot Jenna...?

Jenna with her two best friends - Allyson and Ella.

Movie night.  This was the first year they watched Elf, and with all the goofy humor, the kids thought it was hilarious.

The kids and I at Hannah's monthly chiropractor appointment.

Love that smile!

Aiden and Bentley spent the night with us, so they all got lots of cousin time!

Morning cartoons

What a messy eater!  ;)

We decorated gingerbread houses as part of our advent activities (counting down to Christmas).

As you can see, Grant lost interest after a few houses.  :)

Craft time - Rudolph hats

I love how much they enjoy dressing up.  Apparently Jenna was a Spider-girl pirate.  She even grabbed my boots out of my closet to add to her ensemble.

More cousin time.

We baked some Christmas cookies and I discovered a new love/hate relationship with the peppermint hershey kisses - oh my!  So good!

She's definitely a Daddy's girl (and I don't think he minds it one bit!)

A picture of all the kids at the Shafer family Christmas celebration.

Hannah sporting her new jammies from Uncle Keith and Aunt Mary.

Precious!

Grant was tuckered out after a fun Christmas celebration at Paw-Paw and Maw-Maw's house.

Grant packed his suitcase so he could go spend the night with his cousins.

Date night at the bowling alley.  We had a blast together and actually didn't do too bad.  I'm loving these monthly pre-planned date nights!

Stud!

We love playing games!  Drew and Grant versus Jenna and myself.

Between Christmas and New Years I got to meet up with a few of my good college girlfriends.  They traveled from Georgia, Colorado, and Illinois - it was soo good to see them!!

More cousin time - enjoying some Buzz LightYear and Woody.

Happy New Years Eve!  (We forgot to snap this picture before Hannah went to bed - next year we'll get all 5 of us.)

I love it when they play well together.  :)

Mrs. Claus pancake (She decorated it herself this year).

And a Santa pancake

Another one of our advent activities was to have a picnic by the Christmas tree.

Rewind Time to November

Once again I'm playing catch-up! 

Christmas Tree Hunting:
We went hunting for a Christmas tree a few days after Thanksgiving on an unseasonably warm day.  It's such a fun tradition for the kids!

Family Pictures:
Every year we get family pictures taken along with my immediate family.  Our pictures were delayed a little this year so we were running into cold, windy days, but they still turned out well.

We were trying to figure out how to position Hannah for the pictures, so we tried a few different ideas.  Here she is standing in her gait trainer.  It's not a very "pretty" piece of equipment, but it's a memory for us of where she was at that point in time.

Love this picture of Paw-Paw and Maw-Maw with the grandkids - so many smiles and giggles.

And I love this picture of my parents!

The whole crew

We also wanted to get a picture of her with her glasses on, even though it's definitely a struggle to keep them on her face nowadays.

Although she's not able to sit on her own yet, we were able to set her on the chair for a few seconds to snap a shot.  Drew was literally inches away from her.

Oh how she loves her Daddy.  You have no idea.  :)  A definite special bond between those two.

My natural beauty!  Cannot get enough of those curls (and they're starting to disappear!!  gasp!)

I love this little guy!

These boys...

We tried getting a shot of all the kids standing together, but that's harder said than done.  I still like how it turned out though - it's again, memories of this stage in life.

Misc:

Seriously love this candid shot of my three!

We had a HUGE pile of leaves out by the curb, and Jenna and Grant were having a blast jumping and running through it.  So I decided Hannah needed to do it too!  We strapped on the Upsee and "walked" through the leaves together.

Checking out the leaves...

Proof of our first "snowfall" - a few flakes at this point.

We went to Chick-Fil-A and all the cousins were playing in the play area.  Just before we were about to leave, I decided Hannah should participate.  So I crawled through the play area with her.  She LOVED it!

We went down the slide together and then Drew picked her up to leave.  She instantly started crying...and crying hard, which she never does unless she's hurt or upset about something.  We finally realized she didn't want to stop playing - she was sad to be leaving!  We set her down by the slide and she immediately had a huge grin on her face and started banging her hands on the slide.  It was very exciting to see that she UNDERSTANDS what was going on and wanted to be a part of it.  She's definitely not content to "just be."  We love it!

Swinging at the park across from Gram-Gram's house with Maw-Maw.

Our first big snowfall.  The kids were so excited to get outside!

Practicing sitting on her own.  She can sometimes sit for a few minutes by herself, but she typically has to prop herself up with her hands, so she's not able to play.  However, if I give her a little support around her hips, it frees up her hands to play. 

I pulled out the Christmas tree I used to use in my classroom when I taught.  It's a pretty sad looking tree, but we thought it might be fun to have downstairs.

They love decorating the tree!

September Schooling

So I just realized I had started a post about home schooling, but never published it.  Here you go!

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For those who didn't know, Drew and I decided to home school the kids this year.  Jenna is in Kindergarten and Grant is in Preschool.  It's something we've tossed around over the past year and decided to give it a try this year.  The first few weeks were tough, but after changing out part of the curriculum, things improved dramatically.  Now I can safely say we ALL love school.  I am truly enjoying teaching the kids and seeing them learn and be excited to learn.  They ask every day when we're having school and still haven't grasped the concept of school being Monday through Friday and will even beg for school on the weekends.  I'm glad they're enjoying it as well!

I'm just doing the same preschool curriculum that I did with Jenna two years ago.  We do one letter a week and it's mainly just "fun" activities with that letter.  Grant could definitely handle more challenging material, which I debated whether to move him up to do some of the same things as Jenna to provide that challenge, but decided against it.  I don't see any harm in letting him have a "fun" year.  He loves the activities I have for him and isn't needing the challenge quite yet.  No need to push them too much too soon.  I'm sure that time will come.

For Jenna I got a math curriculum and a reading/phonics/handwriting curriculum, so she does those everyday.  Then I also give her four sight words (the most commonly used words - some of which don't follow any phonics rules and just need to be memorized...hence the word "sight") for the week.  Each day she has some activities to help her learn those words.  We also work on writing a few times a week, where she can write stories and learn how to add detail and improve her writing.  Then each month I've planned a science and social studies topic to study.  For September we discussed apples in science and did lots of apple experiments and learned about Johnny Appleseed in Social Studies. 

So here are some pictures from August...

First day of school picture

First day of school picture

Letter A

We did some apple stamping - who doesn't enjoy playing with paint?!

Working hard

I've started doing school with the kids while Hannah is napping just because it's easier and allows me to focus on the two of them better.  Hannah requires a lot of my attention, so it's challenging at times to do school while she's awake.  However, if she is awake, I sometimes put her in the baby jumper, which she has definitely outgrown, but she loves it.

Her sight words for the week

We also did an apple taste test.  We tried six different apples and then picked our favorite and least favorite.  I believe Gala apples won and Granny Smith lost.