Life with my Cowboys

So close to meeting the newest cowboy of our family!

 

It's hard to believe we've been home for 12 days already. I've been so busy with getting the house ready for the baby, the constant cleaning, organizing, and chasing after two spirited sprouts that the days have been flying by and just getting away from me. I smartly did all of the unpacking in one day and decided I HAD to get the baby clothes out of storage and move Froggy's clothing in the closet with Monkey's and put baby clothes in the changing table closet. All in the same day. I was laid out for two days because of my over ambition and preggy body not being able to deal with the strain I put on it. Every day since then has been a blur of housework and kids with the occasional hubbie time on those few nights where both kids went to sleep early and nobody woke up during the night. I've been exhausted, nauseous, and experiencing the wonderful pains that come this close to the baby coming. I know life is about to make a big slow down with three

 My hubbie works for a college and has time off in December. We normally stay home but last year we felt the need to make a trip up there to spend time with the boy's great Grandma who hasn't been doing well. The weather forecast kept changing and we were unsure of whether or not we would be able to make the drive up there, in fact there was a white out a few days before we left, but God held back the bad weather until the day we left. The boys did so well traveling this time versus the previous summer trip. It also helped that we stayed at a hotel halfway on the way up and on the way back, apparently seven hours is the max Froggy can handle in a car before he begins to loose his mind. Froggy was working on pushing his two year molars through during our time up there, so he was a whole lot of a mess, but we all enjoyed ourselves regardless. Or maybe I should say we survived somewhat gracefully. Froggy had his first taste of Kansas City BBQ, I think he enjoys

 With sickness abound, we did quite a bit of unschooling before we went to Missouri to visit my hubbie's family for Christmas. I love unschooling, it's so stress free and natural, but Monkey does love having classroom time and did miss it during this period.  We did a lot of baking, making muffins and a couple different kinds of cookies. Monkey loves helping out in the kitchen, I suspect it's because he gets to taste things. Hubbie and Monkey played with the Star Wars angry birds a lot, using our wooden blocks to set up different scenarios and slinging the "good guys" with a makeshift slingshot.  For family movie night, we got Pirates Band of Misfits and the boys were pretending to be pirates all of the time so hubbie constructed a pirate ship for them. Monkey and Froggy had to decorate it with tons of stickers and played in it all of the time. I was surprised how long it lasted before they finally broke it, it took about three weeks of intense play.

School in November was all in full swing, until we all got a two week long cold. We still managed to have classroom time for the most part and had lots of fun with our Thanksgiving workboxes.  I can not believe Monkey can still fit in this swing! We weren't able to go to the park as often as usual since we were feeling crummy, so this swing got a workout with both boys.  The boys had fun painting everything for our continent map. We used Montessori colors for the continents and I began teaching him the Montessori continent song .  There was about a week where we just went with the flow and didn't have any classroom time at all.  The boys got along so well during this time, and I was so grateful because I wouldn't have been able to cope otherwise.  When we did have classroom time, we did our short Weaver lessons and then just played with our themed workboxes and read lots of books. We had a week break between sickness before hubbie got a nasty

My hubbie decided to practice constructing lean-to shelters for an upcoming camping trip last November. In the house. I honestly don't know what he was thinking doing this while the boys were still awake, because they kept getting in the way and tearing it down. But, they had a blast, that's what really matters, right? When the sleeping bags came in, of course we had to try them out right away. Finally hubbie got the more brilliant idea of setting up camp outside. We cooked hot dogs over our brick fire pit and spent several nights outside by the fire watching the boys run around like mad men before bedtime. I didn't get any pictures, but the boys all camped out in our tent in the backyard a couple of times too. And we left our tent up during the daytime too to play in. Our neighbors probably think we're nuts, but who cares, it made our kids happy and we're building great memories with the boys.