Kindergarten: Completed!

First year of school completed!

We do school year round cause the weather sucks in the summer anyways and it means I can be very flexible with days off.  Also, school adds some nice structure to our days.  So in August we will start 1st grade using a Charlotte Mason curriculum called A Gentle Feast, which I am very excited about.

This past year I just put together my own kindergarten plan.

One of my main goals when we started school last August was to help Alice transition from picture books to chapter books as a read aloud.  Looking at the stack of books we read this last year, I'd say it was a success!

A special thank you to the Heartwood Hotel series for making her fall in love with chapter books.

This is not to say we stopped reading picture books.  Just ask our librarian.  Sooo many picture books.

 Another big goal was to, at her pace, teach her to read.  At the beginning of the year she was still struggling with remembering all her letter sounds.  We went through the 3 Explore the Code books and books 1 and 2 of Explode the Code phonics workbooks.  She is still a very beginning reader, like BOB book level, but that is some huge progress for her.

She also completed the Math-U-See Primer book.

We also spent a lot of time in nature and learning about nature using the Exploring Nature with Children (ENWC) curriculum.  Not as much time doing art as I had initially planned.  Also our study of the States dropped off by January.  But that is the nice thing about homeschooling, if something isn't working, you don't have to keep doing it.

This is what our schedule looked like.  Individual Time was about an hour during Jane and Rutherford's nap time/quiet time.  Tea time at 3 after naps and usually lasted 30 minutes.  After that they usually played in the backyard while I cleaned up and got dinner ready.  Family worship was in the evening (lasting about 15-20 min) before reading bedtime books.

Something that has worked really well for us has been doing daily tea time.  This is our tea time tray:

At 3:00 when everyone gets up from their nap/quiet time, we sit at the table and have juice/hot chocolate and snack.  I tried tea but they didn't like it.  Snack was a wide variety of things, yogurt, apple slices with cinnamon, something Alice and I baked like cookies, popcorn, goldfish, you get the idea :)  The kids love doing the candles, it makes it feel special and they like blowing them out at the end.  You can see what I read to them during tea time on the schedule.  For the poems I went through books like A Child's Garden of Verse, A Child's Book of Poems and Where the Sidewalk Ends.  We also went through the Children's Book of Virtues during tea time.  For read alouds we did books with very short chapters like the Roald Dahl books.

None of the kids think of tea time as "school" and all really look forward to it.  They often complain on the weekend about not doing it.  :)

So now onto 1st grade!

Jane Turns 4!

Jane, my poor middle child, so sorry this is 6 months late.

1 Year Old:

 2 Years Old:

3 Years Old:

4 Years Old:

Jane is 39 inches tall and weighs 32 lbs.

Her favorite show is Octonauts.

Her favorite movie is Wall-E.

Her favorite food is Mac and Cheese.

Her favorite books are Fancy Nancy, classics like The 3 Bears or Red Ridding Hood, and the Dr Suess books.

She loves unicorns.

She has become a lot more talkative this past year.  She is more introverted, strong willed and independent than Alice.  She can be pretty content playing by herself in her own little world.  

She plays really well with Rutherford.  She loves Alice and they play together constantly but they can also bicker quite a bit.  She has no interest in Arthur.  She not negative about him, just not interested in him.

Jane's my little monkey and can often be found fearlessly climbing something.  She also seems to be more accident prone but also very tough so I often find cuts, scrapes and bruises on her that I have no idea how she got.

Meeting Arthur

Here are some picture of everyone meeting Arthur.

Jane said "Oh Arthur's so cute!" but didn't want to hold him and has had very little interest in him since.  She's gotta a busy play schedule to keep up with :)

Alice, on the other hand, can't get enough of him!  She was so excited.

Rutherford clearly doesn't know what to make of this new thing that mommy is holding all the time.  Thankfully he has only shown a little bit of jealousy when he wants to be held instead.

A close up on Rutherford's face :)

Stephen's mom, Nancy, has been staying with us and has been a HUGE help.

Jane and Rutherford were soon back to playing.

It's still blowing my mind that we have 4 kids now.  It seems oh so crazy but oh so right!  It should be interesting to see what life is like after Nancy leaves and we find our new normal.

Arthur's Accidental Home Birth

Arthur was due on Monday, and on Wednesday night I started having contractions about 10-15min apart, you know, just enough to keep me from sleeping.  They continued sporadically all day Thursday and I had hoped that I would go into active labor that night.

Well as soon as I went to bed the contractions stopped.  And then nothing all day Friday and I was feeling very annoyed because I really wanted this baby out!

Then in the middle of the night on Friday the 10-15min-apart contractions came back so...another night of no sleep.  And the contractions continued all day Saturday.

Finally Saturday evening the contractions started to get closer together and I was thinking “Thank goodness!  Finally!”  They got to 6 minutes apart for a little bit and then to my dismay, went back to 10-15 min apart!  I was so frustrated!

The weird thing about these contractions though was that in terms of pain and intensity, they were like a 9 (on a scale of 1-10) and felt like the end of labor, but they were too far apart, right? Right!?

So around 9pm I called my midwife exhausted and frustrated telling her what was going on and she told be to try and relax and take a bath and get some sleep.

So I took a bath but the contractions continued the same.

It was a little after 10pm and Stephen was sitting in bed reading and I was sitting on an exercise ball next to the bed when with one of these contractions, still 15 minutes apart, my water broke.

Now at this point, I was pretty darn sure this baby was going to be born at home.  With all my previous births I started pushing right after my water broke and with Jane and Rutherford it was only about 10 minutes of pushing.

Stephen jumped up and started grabbing our stuff while calling the midwife and she told him to head to the birth center and she would meet us there.

Then I felt it, the need to push and I dropped to all fours on the bedroom floor and yelled “Stephen, I’m pushing!”

He ran in the room and said “You need to get in the car!” and I said “No! He’s coming now!”

So he grabbed some towels while calling the midwife again and she said she was coming over and hung up.

1^st push Arthur was crowning, 2^nd push his head was out and 3^rd push Stephen caught him.

He handed Arthur to me and ran outside just in time to flag down the midwife who was about to drive past our house.

So there I was, sitting on a bunch of towels on our bedroom floor, holding my baby.

Honestly it was surprising but neither Stephen nor I were scared.  If we had to wait a long time for the midwife to get there, we would have been a little more nervous.  Practically this wasn’t much different than my previous births.  The midwife has always been there just in case anything goes wrong but other than that my births have been “unassisted”.  Also with us having the view that birth is something natural and normal and, in most cases, not a medical emergency, made it not that big a deal.

So back to me sitting on the floor holding a baby... Stephen and the midwife came down the hall and reached the doorway of the room at the same time as my mother-in-law, Nancy, opened the door from the guest room, right next to our room and says confused “I thought I heard a baby cry?”  And the moment I will remember forever is sitting there, calmly smiling up at Stephen, the midwife and Nancy in the doorway looking down at me and the hilarious look of shock/terror on Nancy’s face.

The midwife, Sherri, was the same midwife I had for Jane and Rutherford, and we love her.  She came into the room with her usual calm friendly manner and said “Hey, there!  How ya doin?” and looked at me and Arthur and said we looked fine.

The moments after that were a bit crazy as Stephen tried to get all things together and in the car so we could drive to the birth center.

Sherri didn’t have anything with her for cutting the cord so we put the placenta in a bowl, I threw on some clothes and got in the back of our car holding Arthur and a bowl with the placenta in it.  Then we drove the 15 minutes to the birth center talking and laughing about this crazy birth.

As we walked from the car to the birth center with Stephen holding the bowl, he said “This has got to be the weirdest thing I have ever done.”

We settled ourselves in the bed of the beautiful birthing room and spent the mandatory 12 hours so they could monitor our vitals and at 11am we went back home.

And that was our accidental home birth!  

Rutherford Turns 2!

First Birthday:

 2nd Birthday:

Weight: 27 lbs

Hight: 35 inches (75th percentile)

The pediatrician said he will probably be around 6ft when he grows up.

He is such a boy.  He loves cars, legos, balls and sticks.  Anything, including a green bean, can be a gun with his added sound effects.  Stephen and I often look at each other and shake our heads saying "how did he learn that?!"

He loves to ride his scooter.

He recently moved into a toddler bed and is doing well in it.  He sleeps in the funniest position though.  He sleeps horizontal at the head of the bed with he legs through the railings and his pillow on top of him.

Favorite Books: Pout-Pout Fish, The Little Engine That Could, and My Big Truck Book.

Favorite Food:  Mac & Cheese and any kind of fruit but especially clementines.  I call him "my fruit bat".

More pictures of 2 year old Rutherford.

 

Finally, a name for the baby!

Naming your baby is hard.  I mean seriously, it is one of the most important decisions you will ever make.  It’s a huge responsibility.

The girls were easy to name.  I had their names picked out many years before they were born. 

Boy names were the real challenge.  But we fell in love with Rutherford’s name before I was even pregnant with him.

And since coming up with Rutherford’s name, we’ve been trying to think of another boy name we liked with no avail.

This whole pregnancy I have been stressing so much about a boy name and when we found out that the baby was in fact a boy, I started freaking out a little.

The pressure was really on with having given Rutherford a name we love and that had real meaning behind it.

I loved that we picked a name for him that set an example of the kind of man we wanted him to become, a man who loved and served God with his life.  A man who is described as “being altogether taken up with everything good, excellent and useful.”

After that, we could just give our second son a name that we kinda liked that had no meaning.

Well we had no luck finding another theologian name we liked so I started to think in terms of a positive male role model, someone that embodied the masculine virtues.

That got me thinking about knights.  The legends of knights were ones that portrayed men of strength, bravery, loyalty and valor who used their strength to help the weak and poor.  In the current culture of “man bashing” and talk of “toxic masculinity”, I want our son to have a positive idea of what it means to be a man.

This is the knights code of chivalry:

To fear God and maintain His Church

To serve the liege lord in valor and faith

To protect the weak and defenseless

To give succor to widows and orphans

To refrain from the wanton giving of offence

To live by honor and for glory

To despise pecuniary reward

To fight for the welfare of all

To obey those placed in authority

To guard the honor of fellow knights

To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit

To keep faith

At all times to speak the truth

To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun

To respect the honor of women

Never to refuse a challenge from an equal

Never to turn the back upon a foe

Seems to me a pretty good example to set before our son. 

So all of this to say that the name we have chosen is...

Arthur

It is also no surprise that we, as serious book lovers, picked another literary related name.

The middle name we have chosen is Timothy.  It is my dad’s name and a Cooney family name (being good Irish people :)

So it's Arthur Timothy Wolfe.

I am really excited to have decided on a name and to stop calling him “baby”.

Also, Jane says “Arfur” which is just so cute and no one had better dare correct her!

Oh and please no "Art" or "Artie" nicknames.  Much appreciated.

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Alice Turns 6!

First Birthday - Sixth Birthday:

6 Year old Alice:

She is 44 inches tall and 42 pounds. 

During our recent trip to California we were able to compare her height to mine at her age.  She is 2 inches taller!  Won't be long till I'll be looking up to her.

She still loves pink, unicorns, ponies, art, ballet, sparkles, tutus and all that stuff.

She is still a BIG talker.  She has lots to say and lots and lots of questions to ask.

She is very extraverted and loves nothing more than going places, doing things and playing with friends.  Every morning she asks "where are we going today?" and if I answer "nowhere", she is very disappointed.

Her favorite show is Wild Kratts.

Her favorite movie is Sound of Music.

She loves listening to "violin music" which is either bluegrass or Lindsey Stirling.

She is really enjoying the Roald Dahl books that we have been reading lately.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is probably her favorite.

She is the proud owner of 4 silver teeth.  Seriously, she loves showing them off.  Unfortunately it is the result of her inheriting my bad teeth.

For her birthday this year we invited over 3 of her friends for a unicorn birthday party/playdate.

She said she wanted a unicorn birthday cake, thank you pinterest.

Dress up time!

Making butterfly masks, so much glitter glue!

Tried to run off some of the sugar playing outside and in the kiddie pool.

These girls did not have fun at all, obviously.

She really wanted a piñata.  This thing was so hard for them to break open.  Finally they managed to knock it to the ground.  As soon as it hit the floor they were on it like a bunch of pirañas.  They ripped it to shreds in 3 seconds flat.  It was hilarious.

Her one disappointment was that she has been saying for months that when she turns 6 she will have a lose tooth.  By the end of her birthday she sadly said to me, "But mommy, I don't have a lose tooth!".