Pixiemom

I’ve been busy sewing up some rice heating pads. Notice the Buy Now Paypal button on the side? At the moment, these are the colors/prints that I have available and only in regular size. There is only 1 regular basketball one available at the moment. If you want a plain color that I don’t have, just ask and I can most likely get it. I can’t promise as much with the prints, but I can always try. I’m hoping to have a bigger selection once I’ve sold more of them. For people who can pick it up or at Jeremy’s work, I can set you up to go through Google checkout if you want to pay through your debit card and that way we can waive the shipping fee.

Oh, and the small ones are good as cool packs as well as travel heating pads. The one I made for our family is sitting in our freezer. It makes a great owie pack for kids. It’s cold enough to help, but not so cold, like ice, that the kids don’t want to keep it held against them.

Yesterday, we had Thanksgiving dinner with the other homeschool families. Beforehand, a few of us met to make some bread. The kids had a lot of fun doing it. They did the dough beforehand and set it out to rise while we ate. After we ate, some of the kids did Thanksgiving presentations. Amie watched a baby while her mom was doing dishes and had a lot of fun with her. We got the bread in the oven during clean-up time, so that it came out as soon as we were ready to go, we had some nice warm bread to take with us. Each group of 2 or 3 kids had a bowl in which they made 2 loaves of bread. My kids had 2 bowls, so there were 4 loaves, but we donated 2 loaves to the church’s food pantry (the church where we meet for homeschool group) to put into Thanksgiving baskets. Every group of kids did that. They were all pretty proud of themselves.

Off-subject (from my title), it’s been snow flurrying here and it’s cold. I MISS the nice warm weather of summer. I wouldn’t mind being up here in the summer and going south like Florida or Texas or NC (Hi Mom!) for winter where the weather isn’t quite as cold and snowy. I guess I’d like TN or NC best because I like to have a little snow for winter, but not a lot and then temps don’t stay down as far there as it does here.

I need to really get back into my blogging. Tomorrow, we have the next Grassroots Homeschool group meeting. It’s a Thanksgiving one. We’re going to show up early to make bread for the food pantry at the church we meet at. They are going to put the bread into the Thanksgiving baskets, I think. I’ll update you all on this sometime soon.

This last week’s homeschool group meeting wasn’t quite as good as the others. They didn’t really have any educational aspects to it, but we all had fun. I manned the Welcome table and helped sign in people, take up money for various dues and fundraisers, and took the candy everyone brought for the kids’ bags. The kids put on some music and did some silly dancing and played hot potato and ate dessert food. The adults just stood around and talked and passed the babies around to cuddle and coo at. One of the babies is 7 mo old, but was born 2 mo early (same birth weight as Noelle) and is tiny, so she reminds me so much of Noelle. Her mom and I talked a lot about our preemie babies and their development. Just like me, she is enjoying her baby staying a baby longer and not worrying about any of the large or small motor skills being behind because it’s normal for preemies. I think she enjoyed talking to someone who has already been there, done that.

At the end of the meeting, they did a quick announcements for the adults to know upcoming field trips and whatnot. Then they handed out bags of candy to the kids and we left.

I was somewhat disappointed to lose a whole day of school since I hadn’t expected it to have nothing educational this time AND getting 5 bags of candy which we don’t need since my kids hardly eat candy, but I’m okay with it now.

Our next meeting will be about Thanksgiving and then our first one in December is going to be a talent show. The kids are really excited about the talent show one because we unpacked our puppets and they can’t wait to pick a song and perform it with the puppets.

I’ve now got all five kids doing school. Noelle didn’t want to be left out, so she started doing some Kindergarten stuff, like phonics and counting. She likes me to print out the letter sheets to trace. Anyway, that keeps me fairly busy until 2 or 3 pm. I also have housework which is done before, in between, and afterwards. We have church on Sunday mornings and evening and on Wednesday evenings. On the first and third Wednesdays, we have our Grassroots Homeschool Group meetings in the late morning/early afternoon and on the second Wednesdays, we have our 4-H meetings in the late morning. Now add in Chiropractor appointments to this and you have one very busy family. I got fed up with my sore lower back and it was getting extra sore, so I gave in to some ladies who were asking me to just check it out. They do whole families. Jeremy hasn’t gone, but the rest of us go. The kids love getting their backs adjusted and doing the therapy exercises to help their spines. I do too. My lower back is already feeling much better. Now if she can help that discomfort I keep feeling between my shoulders, I’ll be one happy Momma. The Chiro said that this might help my headaches as well. I so hope it does. We’ll just have to wait and see if I get any of those.

Another thing we’ve been doing more of is family time. We have nightly Bible Study. Jeremy has verses which we read and discuss. We’ve also started up our family movie and game nights. Last night, we played Chutes and Ladders. Noelle loved it… of course, she won too. She actually loved it before she won. She was able to do everything she needed to do herself and that’s what made her happy. I had to show her which way her piece needed to move, but that was all. This last Thursday night, we watched “National Treasure: Book of Secrets”. The kids really liked it. Jeremy and I did too. I think we may have a movie night tonight. I bought corn chips and spinach dip (and salsa for James because he can’t have the spinach dip.) I think the kids are debating between “Enchanted” and “Game Plan”. Let’s just say that we love Netflix’s Watch Instantly option. On Friday night, we went to our church for it’s annual Harvest Festival. Since we helped set up and tear down, we got a lot of candy. There weren’t many kids that showed up, so they gave our kids the freedom to go through the leftovers afterwards and pick out what they wanted. I was somewhat pleased that they wanted the peanuts and crackers more than the candy. Just to let you know, the peanuts and crackers were gone in 2 days. Now the candy will very slowly disappear. My kids aren’t big candy eaters, for which I’m grateful.

Anyway, there you go. Up to date on Pixiemom’s family… for now. Oh, and if anyone is interested, I’m having a blast plurking. It’s kind of like an on the spot, quick post, like twitter except that the timeline is different and responses are listed UNDER the plurk they are intended for. My friends and I sometimes use it as a multiple subject IM since it refreshes often and lets you know how many plurks have new responses.

On Wednesday, we had our third Grassroots homeschool group meeting. We meet on the first and third Wednesdays of the month and in September, the first Wednesday wasn’t really a meeting, just a meet and greet picnic, so that is why this is #3. They did a Citizenship/Red, White, and Blue theme. A guy came and did a presentation on the United States and the privileges of being a citizen and some other history things. Then, the kids voted on favorite color, favorite food, and whether or not we should start a book club as part of our homeschool group. They also did a mock election Presidential vote. McCain won the vote there. I think two of mine were influenced by my views and voted for neither McCain or Obama. I think they were the only ones who didn’t vote for one of those. Noelle didn’t vote at all, she was too interested in building with the big lego blocks that one of our members brings for the little kids to occupy themselves while we have our meeting going. After that, the children did some presentations on America and Citizenship and Historical Citizens that made a difference. Amie did a presentation on Harriet Tubman and James and Christine got together and did a presentation on John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed.) Did you know that not only did Harriet Tubman help rescue a lot of slaves on the underground railroad, but that Abraham Lincoln made her a Captain in his army and she led a troop of freed slaves in spy missions? They would go out and find where the southern army was and disengage cannons and stuff, then go back and tell the main north army about positions of people and ammunition and so on. Also, did you know that John Chapman didn’t just sow seeds just wherever he walked. He went around in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois and ask a farmer who was just starting a farm on new land if he could plant an apple nursery on his land. He would stay and tend the plants and teach the farmer how to tend the plants until the farmer was able to do it before moving along. The farmer could then sell the plants once they were big enough for transplanting. This helped a lot of these new farmers get on their feet and be able to purchase seed and other farming stuff for the rest of their farm. The only thing John asked in return was housing and food when he was in town helping to tend the plants. Most of his seeds, he got for free from cider mills so he wasn’t paying for the seeds. Many apple orchards in Ohio were started from trees that John planted. Guess what? I learn so much more while teaching my kids than I EVER learned in school. This is some cool stuff.

Thursday was Amie’s birthday. I can’t believe she is already 11. She’s growing up so fast. She made her own Chocolate Cheesecake Mousse stuff and modified the recipe I came up with to her tastes. She put more cream cheese in and a little more whip cream and used a chocolate crumb crust instead of a graham cracker crust. It came out really yummy, though I prefer less cream cheese. I think I’ll use that crust for mine from now on though because it really does taste yummy like that. We didn’t really do anything other than a special dinner for her that day since we’d taken the trip up to Wisconsin on the previous Saturday and given her the camera. On Friday, I took her out for a little while, for some one-on-one time. We went to JoAnn’s Fabric to find t-shirts and iron-ons for the Children’s Choir Praise Dance team and then to Border’s Books because she was wanting a journal to write in and I knew they were having a sale on some. She picked out a pink one with a stretchy band to keep it closed and rainbow colored pages.

On Saturday, we headed down to where we used to live and picked up some bunk beds that a friend has been saving for us and then got all of our stuff out of the storage area where we’d been having them stored until now. We now have a U-Haul truck in our parking area waiting to be unloaded. At least this last move, I had time to put things in good boxes and label them. Almost all moves before now have been really quick and so lots of stuff was put in unlabeled boxes or stuffed in trash bags, so we didn’t know what was what. I’ll be able to know what we would use now and what can just go straight down to our basement storage area for now. Amie is happy to get all the books up here since she knows there are some books that I bought for her, but which she just wasn’t ready to read yet before and now she is devouring books left and right, so she’s probably ready to read those. She can’t wait to get her hands on “Ballet Shoes” and “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” now that she has the patience to read through the longer books and understands what she reads better. There are a few others that I have, like “Eight Cousins” that I think she will enjoy as well that are part of my collection of books that I enjoy reading over and over.

Anyway, it’s been a long week, but mostly a good one… other than my breakdown halfway through the week, but I’m okay now. I think I was just overwhelmed by everything going on.

The kids and I had a fall leaf hike on Friday. We went to one of the Forest Preserves that actually has trails and hiked around a bit taking lots of pictures. Christine used her little video camera which also takes pics, Amie had my digital camera for most of the time, and James used my manual focus film camera (auto focus doesn’t work anymore, but manual focus is so fun). I also used my film camera and after running out of film, I used my digi. I need to get my film into Wolf Camera to be processed and put on a CD. It was a lot of fun and the kids seemed to enjoy it.

Yesterday, after James had his cub scout meeting in the morning, we took off for a drive up to Wisconsin. Now the kids have another state to add to all they’ve been to. The leaves are turning even better up there. It’s so pretty. We stopped at Target on the way up to get some box drinks for the kids and went ahead and bought Amie her birthday present early. (Her birthday is Thursday.) She got her own digital camera. She’s doing well with it. Anyway, we enjoyed our drive. We told stories and just had a nice time. We stopped up in Wisconsin for a little while and then headed back. If gas prices weren’t high (yes, $3.00 is still high), we would probably do more drives or go places that are a slight bit further away than we normally do right now.

Next Saturday, we are heading down to central IL to pick up some of our stuff in storage and see Jeremy’s parents and some of our friends.