In an effort to make it *on time* to church tomorrow...

... we're trying this:


{Many thanks to our sweet Ella, who rounded up everyone's clothes. She relished the opportunity to organize and dress everyone! :)}

This is a great week

Today we celebrated Isaac's 7th birthday~ with balloons and gifts and for breakfast: Swedish pancakes with syrup and whipping cream, sausages and fruit smoothies. With pizza for lunch and meatloaf, sweet potatoes and applesauce for dinner. With a trip to the library and time to play in the back yard and lots of time to play on the living room rug with Legos. With birthday kisses from his little sisters and the Happy Birthday song sung all day long. With phone calls and emails from those far away. With hugs and smiles from loved ones gathered round our living room tonight to celebrate our boy. With lemon cake and lime sherbet or chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. We are so thankful.

Tomorrow is a regular school day.

But Thursday? Thursday is not regular at all. I get to drive to the airport to pick up one of my dearest friends and then we're going to stay at a hotel for TWO blessed nights and just talk and pray and laugh and sleep and eat.

I know.

I feel incredibly blessed. God is so good to give me (us!) this time, and Mark? Such an incredible husband to let me do it. [Michelle's husband, too! {Thank you, Chad... for letting her come!!!!}]

What's great about your week?

Coming up in November...

Are you aware that November is National Adoption Month? It's a month set aside each year to raise awareness about the adoption of children and youth from foster care.

That~ and really more the fact that all things adoption and foster-care-related are very near and dear to my heart (and: more importantly, to GOD's heart)~ I am going to be spending the entire month of November talking about those topics here on the blog. Hooray! :)

I don't know yet all that will entail, but here are two things I can tell you: I've interviewed a foster mom who is very dear to me, and I can't wait to introduce her to you and share their family's foster-care experiences with you. And: my own Mark has promised me a guest post on the topic of adoption.

Most of you know that we have adopted internationally, done foster care, and adopted domestically. I know that doesn't make me an expert on any of it (far from it!) but what I do have to offer is this: I am an open book. :) Also, this: one of the great things about being a foster/adoptive parent is that you get to be part of a whole community of other foster and/or adoptive parents. If I can't offer any personal experience on a topic, I can easily find someone who will.

So. Here is where you come in:

If there are any questions you have about adoption or foster care~ whether it be about our experiences, yours, or the whole idea in general, please comment on this post, and I will make sure to get to it sometime within the next month.

~Stacy

Friday mornings

How I love Fridays! Every Friday, my mom comes and takes the two little girls for two (precious!) hours so that I can do uninterrupted school with the older three.

I really look forward to this time with Ella, Isaac and Isaias.

I can't believe how much quieter and calmer things are on those mornings, and how fewer the "just a minutes" are, and how relaxed I can be as a mama without having the two toddlers. I also love knowing that my little girls are having special time with grandma. This morning they worked on puzzles, played babies, danced, and ate snacks! (They always get snacks at grandmas!)

This has been a huge blessing to me this year.

* * *

We played a fun game this morning during math time, and it was a big hit. Here's how to play:

Roll a die, and fill in the number rolled in the left-hand box.
Roll again, and fill in the number in the right.
Then add (or subtract) those numbers (younger children can use counters) and fill in the solution.

Easy and fun!

(Personally, I'm hoping that this means some rousing family games of Yahtzee are right around the corner!)


The other day I was following links to other blogs and stumbled across Confessions of a Homeschooler. That's where I found this idea, and you can download the Dice Addition/Subtraction worksheets here, if it sounds like something your kids would like, too!

Happy Friday to you! Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

My ambitious son

One of the things I asked Isaac to do for school today was to find three objects in the kitchen and do word building with our wooden alphabet letters. The examples I gave him earlier this morning were "pen" and "cup".

When I walked over to the table to check in on him, these are the letters he had on the table:

b u d r n u t s q w

I was trying to decipher if he was working on all three words in the above selection of letters, so I asked him what his words were.

First word? butternut squash. Ah, yes.... that simple word. So very similar to those examples I suggested.

The next word he chose was toothpicks.

He's working on word three now. Can't wait to see what he'll come up with!

* * *

In other news, Audra has recently discovered crayons. She loves to color with them. Everywhere. This morning so far she's colored on the dry erase board, the table, the floor, in Isaac's school book, on Isaac's wooden alphabet letters, and in two books. (In addition to the myriad of places I have not yet stumbled upon, I am sure.) Fortunately for her, she is very, very cute and is always very "sowwy".

How is your school day going?

Our Nature Study Specialist

I arranged for a new teacher to do Nature Study with the kids.

I'm really excited about what he has brought to our curriculum. He is super excited about the opportunity (he even volunteered to do it!) and is so engaging and creative and fun.

Besides all that, he's tall and handsome and happens to be my husband and the father of those schoolchildren of ours.

One night he peered over at my ever-growing homeschooling TO-DO list, and offered this: "Would you like me to do Nature Study this year?" I had to think about it for about a quarter of a second before I agreed.

I can't even tell you how fun this has been for the kids. Each week on Mark's day off he's taken them on a field trip and/or planned an activity for them- concentrating on a certain subject. Then later that week, before their next "lesson" with daddy, they are responsible to do some drawing in their notebooks (generally items they collected on their walk or trip). So- that makes twice a week for Science around here.

I knew Mark would be great, but I had no idea just how in line with his gifts this was. Seriously. People think I'm the creative one of the family but that is just not true.

See example #1, over there, to the left?

That was Week One or Week Two, when they were studying the parts of a tree. It's like a work of art, I tell ya. I had a difficult time erasing it.

I keep telling Mark I want him to do some guest posts here on the blog about what he's teaching. The man has even less free time than I do, so I don't know how often that will happen, but I'm going to try to record what he's doing with them. If we're lucky, he might actually write from time to time!

Radical: Are you reading this book?

If you are a follower of Jesus, I think you should read this book: Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.

It's $5.51 at Amazon. Buy it. Read it.

I'm about halfway through it. Author David Platt is so, so right on and what he writes about is what I need to hear and I truly think: every Christian that lives in America needs to hear.

I even broke my rule of not marking up my books. I've underlined and starred and arrowed all over this excerpt from Chapter 1:

Let's put ourselves in the shoes of these eager followers of Jesus in the first century. What if I were the potential disciple being told to drop my nets? What if you were the man whom Jesus told to not even say good-bye to his family? What if we were told to hate our families and give up everything we had to follow Jesus?

This is where we come face to face with a dangerous reality. We do have to give up everything we have to follow Jesus. We do have to love him in a way that makes our closest relationships in this world look like hate. And it is entirely possible that he will tell us to sell everything we have and give it to the poor.

But we don't want to believe it. We are afraid of what it might mean for our lives. So we rationalize these passages away. "Jesus wouldn't really tell us not to bury our father or say good-bye to our family. Jesus didn't literally mean to sell all we have and give it to the poor. What Jesus really meant was..."

And this is where we need to pause. Because we are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with.

A nice, middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn't mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that he receives all our affection. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe upon our comforts, because, after all, he loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream.

But do you and I realize what we are doing at this point? We are molding Jesus into our image. He is beginning to look a lot like us, because, after all, that is whom we are most comfortable with. And the danger now is that when we gather in our church buildings to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead we may be worshiping ourselves.

Is anyone else sick of the rationalization of Scripture and the comfy Christian life? I sure am.