Art

On Friday mornings we get together with another family and do Art and Phys Ed together.  This week we did some leaf prints and sponge painting.  The kids painted the bumpy side of a leaf with white paint and then placed it on black construction paper.  With a piece of scrap paper over top, they gently rubbed it to make sure they would get a complete leaf print when they lifted it up.  They repeated this a few times so there would be multiple leaf prints on the page.  Then everyone got a few dabs of green, yellow and red paint and a sponge so they could add some fall colours around the leaves.  Samara and Denver kind of kept their red and yellow separate but Victoria and Austin blended their red and yellow to make a nice orange.  I wasn't sure how tricky it would be for the younger kids but they did a really good job and everyone enjoyed it.  Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the kids actually doing the art, but I can post the finished product.  I love how they all turned out.  

Denver's Masterpiece

Samara's Masterpiece

Austin's Masterpiece

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Victoria's Masterpiece

Growing too fast

If you followed my old blog, you may remember these pictures.  Denver decided that Frodo's bed would be a great place to lie down and snuggle inside.  He actually fit perfectly curled up right inside.  

The other day, he had the same idea and decided to lie down inside Frodo's bed.  Oh my . . . look how much he's grown!!!  Doesn't look quite as cozy does it?  

In case you're wondering, there's 20 months difference between the top pictures and the bottom one.  

My eager math student

So far Samara is loving school this year.  She's in grade one now so she gets to do "real" school work finally!  She's pretty proud to be doing more school with the big kids.  Most mornings she's at the school table starting on her math before the rest of us have even had breakfast.  Hopefully her love of math will continue and maybe she can teach her mother a few things!  

First week of school

Since we had so much fun last year, we decided to spend our first week of school camping again.  The weather wasn't as good as it was last year but it didn't stop us from enjoying ourselves.  It was actually warmer this year but we had a day or two of rain - and one doozy thunderstorm in the middle of one night, which was no fun at all!   We enjoyed lots of exploring, canoeing, biking, frog catching, camp fires, etc.  As always the campground was practically empty with it being the first week of September and so we were able to see a lot of deer - thankfully we didn't see any of the bears that were apparently not far off.  

I guess I was too busy having fun because I realize I didn't take that many pictures.  But here are some of the ones I did take.  

 My best boys:

If you look closely, you can see this snake has a frog in it's mouth - courtesy of Austin.  He had just caught a frog when we discovered this snake.  What's a boy to do??  

New blog!

Welcome to my new blog!  I had a different blog since 2005 and decided to stop blogging about six months ago.  But lo and behold I missed it and so here I am again.  Starting fresh.  New account.  New blog.  

Hopefully I'll find time to keep up with it and post on a regular basis.  

Here we go . . .