Tired

All moms are tired. Right? Yes, they are. Nothing new here, so I won't complain. Instead, I'll just embrace the years ahead of being tired.

Today I was motivated to step up my "school" room, which is really just my family/dining room. I needed it to look more school-ish. The problem is, I don't have the space for all my grand ideas, but I'll make due with what I have. For now, this is going to work so we make sure to NOT keep skipping our morning devotionals. I feel those are so important to set the right mood for studying. And for some reason, I keep forgetting to start our day with that most important part. Not. Any. More. This flag is really going to help remind me that we have a little routine to start our day off on the right foot.

The wall time line is our History lessons for the year.  It's actually, "His-Story" that we'll be learning and studying.

Today we went on our nature walk. We looked for rocks. Not hard to find in our part of the world. I thought the kids found some pretty cool ones.  But since we didn't find any blue or orange ones, Nathan colored a couple to make sure we had them. It was fun to discuss the differences and similarities. Why some are soft and smooth, and others are rough. Some have lines and others have spots.

Ever the posers.

 Getting right to work to document what we found. I hope I can keep this up. I've certainly hit the waddling faze of my pregnancy so it's a good thing we can take our time on these walks.



I think next week we will have to do a cloud nature walk. Abigail is so into finding animals in the clouds. It's hilarious to hear what she can "see" in those clouds!

Family Leadership Academy

Yesterday was our first Family School Co-op. Boy oh boy, it was AMAZING!!!! It's everything I've hoped for for my kids in this home school experience. Opportunity for new friends. Opportunity to participate in classes that will help them to stretch, think, grow. Opportunity to express themselves. Plus, it's pretty great for me too. I met so many wonderful mothers. All on the same bandwagon as me. All like minded. All wanting the same kind of future for our children. So, so, so great!

Do not be fooled by their lack of excitement in this picture. They were over the moon excited and nervous! Their mama was running late and was a bit of a grouch getting us out the door. I think that is more the reason why their faces don't express tremendous joy!

The following are just some random shots I took. This is going to be a fantastic part of our homeschooling experience this year.

Abby's first class is outside in the grove. The kids learn hands on and run around. It's a dream place.

 

Hannah & Nates' Core class

 

 Hannah's Math Facts class

Cute girls for Hannah to make friends with.

Knights of Freedom class for boys 8-10.

 Montessori class. Love. Love. Love.

Kindermusic

 One class that I wish I were taking. Taught by one of the outstanding fathers. Lucky teenagers!

 All the moms - minus me because I was late!

Kids schedule
9am Opening Circle (devotional)
9:30am Core Classes for all the kids, divided into age groups
11am lunch
Noon H: Math Facts
          N & A: Fun and Games
12:45 H & N: Exploring Art through Literature
          A: Reading Readiness
1:30 H & N & A: Pinterest Crafts
2: 15 H: Women in Literature with Me
         N: Science experiments
         A: Nibble & Scribble

The day ends at 3:00 and makes for a very long day. Joe is going to be hard, but he and I will have to adjust. I think he napped on me for about 30 minutes for the entire day. It was rough, but we'll manage somehow. It is so worth the sacrifice it's going to be to make sure Hannah, Nate, and Abby get to participate in this. I'm so thrilled for them!

The end of Week 1

Well, yesterday was pretty much a flop. I woke up in a bad mood, got in a tiff with Hannah and watched her giant tears rip into my heart. So, we didn't do much as far as lesson goes yesterday. We read books and went to some pretty cool parks. It didn't fix everything, but it did help take the edge off some of the tension. I have to gear up for reality that some days are going to be plain ole hard! And others are going to be great! Today was GREAT!!!!

Yesterday at the park

Man I love these kids. And because today went so much better I can say that I'm really, really, really, happy to homeschool them.

Fridays are going to be a day off normally. We will go to the library, go on fieldtrips, and do my grocery shopping, but no school lesson. However, since we didn't do one yesterday we did have a lesson today. Hannah even said to me, "mom, I'm really glad you're homeschooling us. This is fun". Thanks to a little prayer and devotional this morning, things were so much more smooth today. I do want to get in the habit of regular library trips, so we headed out first thing after breakfast and devotional. We came home with a bag full of books and the kids sat quietly reading/looking through their books while I got Joe ready for a nap and made lunch for everyone. It was almost too perfect.

Our lesson: Our Family Learning Tree

I'm no artist and the truth is, Hannah can really draw much better than me. We went outside and looked at trees and talked about the different parts of trees and how there are lots of trees in the scriptures, ex: Tree of Life, Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. Then we talked about the roots on a tree and how they are the strength and that's what we want for our school this year. We want our roots to go deep and have fun learning all year long. So....after we talked about the 4 r's, or ways that we will be learning this year, we decided to put it to action. Aaron caught and killed a very large spider last night and pinned it for the kids to look at this morning. They were totally enthralled. I was totally not, but we ran with it. We decided to #1Research it and discover what kind it was. (Um, it's a Hobo and we'll be spraying pronto!) #2Reason, why did Heavenly Father create spiders. Most of us are scared silly of them and some are even dangerous, so why? When I explained that spiders actually do a lot of good like eat bugs, we could see the wisdom in their small creation. #3Relate, maybe there really is a purpose and a plan for all things that are created. What might our purpose and reason be? And #4Record - scary, ugly, and oh so fascinating.
*Aaron says I'm mistaken on this being a Hobo. Phew! We are still going to spray right away!

Nature Walk

Today we went for a nature walk to start out our morning. I bought each of us nature journals to document our findings each week.

We stopped by the park to look for pine cones. We played more than we looked.

Our findings.

 Abby's pinecone.

So excited to see these fill up this year and how they improve.

After our core lesson on History, (which is awesome and I'm so excited to learn along with my kids) we took the rest of the day off and swam in the pool BY OURSELVES!!!

1st day of homeschool

I was up and at 'em this morning. Eager and ready to start our first day of school. The kids woke up in good moods, I had a shower, Joe slept mostly through the night. It was going to be a great day! After all, the day before was one of the worst to date, so today could only be better. And great it was. I'm calling it a big success. As other children were hustling and bustling to 'regular' school, we were relaxed, but just as excited here...well, at least I was. We started it off with our morning devotional, something I took a break from over the summer. Without documenting every detail of our lesson/day, I'll say the kids did pretty well. I think Hannah was a little bored and she did mention a couple of times that she is sad not to be going to 'regular' school. Stab to the heart, I felt the sting and feel sad for her but I know as sure as anything, that this is right for us, at least for now.

 We did enjoy the crowd less parks that will be nice to take advantage of all school year long.

I'm so excited to be apart of the  Family Leadership Academy that we will meet with every Monday and go on Field Trips with every other Friday. The kids will participate in the core subjects in the morning; Geography, Art, Music, Literature, Science, History. And then extracurricular classes in the afternoon. Abigail is taking a Reading Readiness class, Hannah is taking a Math and Art class, as well as Nathan. They will also be taking a Theater/Dance/Singing class and Tae Kwon Do. There's around a 100 children apart of this organization, so they will make lots of new friends.

But now, I must go to bed. I'm completely worn out from today, but in a good way.

Juice Stand

Finishing the summer off with a childhood must! They made nearly $5 and I was so thrilled with their entrepreneurship skills. (We are teaching them young).  Abby was yelling at each car that drove by, "Only 10 cents". Man alive, they were cute!

Eyre Family Reunion

Two years in the making. 2-1/2 days of loaded fun. Two sleepless nights. Power outage. Rain. Rain. Rain. Not enough food. Gobs of pictures. And this years reunion is in the books.

Aaron and I have worked on planning this reunion for the past two years.
Our Theme: Wave Your Flag. A year ago we gave every family a CD to announce where and what we would be doing. We had SO much fun putting this together.

We asked each family to create a family flag to represent their family. They were AWESOME!

Our family schedule for the couple days looked like this.

Eyre Family Reunion 2013: Wave Your Flag
	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
7:00 AM	Bedroom Assignments	Sweatin' with Kaden & Aleea	Morning Hike w/ Aaron
7:30 AM	Master: Kelley Family		Sweatin' with Kaden & Aleea
8:00 AM	Bed #1: Mom & Dad	Morning Devotional - Brett	Morning Devotional - Liesl
8:30 AM	Bed #2: Lombardo Family	Breakfast:	Breakfast:
9:00 AM	Loft: Woods, Susan, Tyson Eyre family,	Trent, Travis, Tyson	Liz & Melissa
9:30 AM	and any children who want to.	Women: Book Group led by Nikki
10:00 AM	Check - in	Uncles & Kids: games	Eyre Tent of Talents
10:30 AM		outside, fishing, hiking	Closing Flag Ceremony
11:00 AM	Opening Flag Ceremony	Free Time
11:30 AM
12:00 PM	Grab sack lunch and go to lake	Lunch - get you and your family
12:30 PM		your own lunch.	Lunch - leftovers
1:00 PM
1:30 PM		Family Games outside	Pack up
2:00 PM			Clean up
2:30 PM			Go home
3:00 PM			Cleaning Assignments:
3:30 PM			Master Bed & Bath: Kelley Fam
4:00 PM		Freshen up for family picture	Bed #1: Mom & Dad
4:30 PM		Family picture	Bed #2: Lombardo Family
5:00 PM		Dinner:	Kitchen: Travis & Trent Family
5:30 PM	Dinner:	Nikki & Dave	Bathroom: Richins & Tyson Family
6:00 PM	Mom, Dad, and Susan	Carlee & Brett	Vaccuming: Susan
6:30 PM		Fireside	Loft: Wood & Lombardo Family
7:00 PM	Fear Factor	Aaron & Melissa	Family Room: Mom & Dad
7:30 PM		Bedtime for little ones	Outside: Preston & Lauren & all the
8:00 PM		Adult Minute to Win It Games	kids.
8:30 PM	Family Movie	movie for kids upstairs
9:00 PM
9:30 PM	Family Devotional - Ron	Capture the Flag
10:00 PM	Cracker Barell
10:30 PM C	ookies/Games

The Lake

The ginormous down pour!

Despite the rain, we had a blast at the lake.

 

Fear Factor

12 and under: moldy cheese, vegetable juice, baby corn, lemon slice, dog food (really it was canned corn beef...sick!)

barf bucket

We had two winners in the kid fear factor. Mason and Beckham. They each got a bag of cold cereal.

 

Adult Fear Factor: 13 and up

Baking Chocolate bar, pickled onions, wasabi peas, sardines, anchovies, and REAL DOG FOOD.

Emily was such a trooper! I think she did all of them, but couldn't hold back the tears on some.

Travis was the winner. He ate the rest of the can of dog food and although Liz tied him since she ate the whole can of sardines, I'm sorry, but in my opinion the dog food wins out TOTALLY! He got movie tickets.

 

Hannah and Nathan dared to try the chocolate, because how bad could that be right? Everyone said the chocolate was the worst.

Preparing for the popcorn and movie night. How to Train Your Dragon.

Everyone got tickets for participating, being good sports, helping out, being kind, or winning at the games we played. It was all to be used for our Tent of Talents that we had the last day. Some of the kids really rocked it on those tickets!

Kaden and Aleea did a morning workout for anyone who wanted to. Apparently, they kicked butt!

 

Family Fun games in the yard

Cheetoe Toss

 Sack race

 Kick ball for about 5 minutes until the rain and lightening came. Oh, and the power went out. Awesome!

 

Me and my lovely

 

Minute to Win it - Adult Time

 

We asked everyone to make something to contribute to our Tent of Talents. We have some pretty darn spectacular talent in this family! The coveted items were, dad's quilt, Carlee's photo shoot, Travis' babysitting, toys, Aaron's kid picnic bench, and so much more! There were scrapbooks, manicure sets, art kits, kids capes, handmade Christmas ornaments, fresh garden vegetables, homemade lotions and lipgloss...oh my word it was fabulous! I thought my kids were going to die to have to wait until the very end of the reunion to try to win what they wanted. I was happy that all the kids got what they wanted. Phew! That never happens.

 Liz was the very lucky winner of dad's quilt! We all wanted it!

 

There were enough babies to pass around this year. They received more attention than just about anyone!

 

 

I'm calling this reunion a success! Everyone that came and participated had a blast. The adults and teenagers stayed up both nights playing volleyball, or board games until the wee hours of the morning. The rain didn't dampen our time. There wasn't enough food and so badly wish we had not underestimated that important part. I'm so thankful that Aaron had the same vision of what we wanted this reunion to be. He is so super fun and truly made planning this a blast.

 

The random

 

 

 

 

Pretty Darn Spectacular Family!