As Summer Draws to an End...

Here are a few pictures of the kids playing at the park behind our house.

Building castles in the sand

Going Up!

Coming Down!

This is a picture of Evelyn's first ponytail! She finally has enough hair to create a fountain on top of her head!

Smile!

Aidan handed me the camera (which he calls "smile") the other day. When I went to take his picture, this is the pose that I got! I guess he just wanted me to get his good side. As you can see, from the picture, he is in underwear. We have been toilet training for about a month and a half now. The progess is slow, but at least we are progressing!

Royalty

A rare phenomenon has occured in our house. Neal and I are not of noble blood; however, we have given birth to two princesses. We have known this about Madeline for a couple of years now, but we were suprised to find the phenomenon happening twice! Evelyn has let us know that she too has a royal heritage. She hands us her gowns and nods enthusiastically waiting in anticipation to be dressed in her royal attire.

It's Official!

Today is the end of the first week of school for our family. Neal is teaching 2 classes of world religions in philosophy and one graduate seminar called physicalism (I don't know what that means). Those went pretty well for him. His early world religions class has 100 students and they seem very interested in the course. The second class has 35 students and they seem to be "too cool" to act interested, so time will tell with them. The graduate students are enjoying the course and Neal has received great feedback from them! I think he is feeling good about this semester at Tech, and now he has to focus his attention on papers that need to be written and the job search for next year. For those of you who may not know, this is a 1 year visiting position at Tech which may or may not become anything permanent. So, Neal has to go job hunting again and the new adds are already coming out. We know that God will provide, but it is a lot of work for Neal right now.

The kids and I had our first week of school too! They did great on the schedule that I put together for us. We had family devotions every morning, school lessons, and individual play and reading time for each child. Madeline worked on vowels this week. She practiced writing them and learning the short-vowel sounds. In math, she worked on writing numbers 0-9 and we did lots of numeric matching games! It was really fun for all of us. Madeline is thrilled about doing school. She has put all of her school supplies into her backpack so she can carry them to the table every morning. It is so cute! It is a huge relief for me to be starting our home school. We have had this conviction for years, yet we did not have school aged children. I have been attending homeschool group meetings and conferences for four years now always feeling a little out of place. Now I feel like we officially belong to the homeschooling community. It is a good feeling! This week was suprisingly smooth. I know that it won't always be that way; however, it was a good introduction to the new school year!

Here are a few pictures of the kids doing their art project!