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| My new fun thing is gardening... It doubles as a fantastic science lab for my homeschooled children! I sent this to a friend today: Oh, yes!! That's my new fun thing. =O) It's my first time gardening, so it's been quite exciting. I'll tell you about it... It's in a raised planter Matt built, long and narrow, along our back wall. (I'll try to enclose a picture here.) We have: Grapes (green and purple) Yellow crookneck squash Zucchini Bell peppers (red and purple) Tomatoes  Roma tomatoes Sunflowers Carrots Green snap beans Beets Broccoli Cucumbers Pumpkins Potatoes Strawberries Eggplant Watermelon Orange tree Lemon tree Grapefruit tree Peach tree Apricot tree Apple tree And some flowers. What we've eaten from our garden so far: (I started it late last summer) Broccoli Beets Baby carrots Tomatoes Bell peppers Yellow squash Zucchini Snap beans Sunflower seeds Strawberries We also eat the beet greens as a little green salad dipped in ranch dressing. We also tried them cooked like spinach, but it wasn't much of a hit. =O) I even started a little compost pile with my fruit and veggie scraps. My next adventure is to figure out how to garden organically. Right now I use MiracleGro occasionally and a commercial plant food to enhance the awful dirt we have here. --------------------------------- Here are some pictures:  
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| Merry Christmas! OK, it's just SAD that I haven't written on here since September. =O) Life is good and busy and quite full! Here are three of my very favorite people:  | | |
| Yay! Matt finished the grass today! We have grass seed and sprinklers all set up. In a matter of days, our back yard will begin to be green. Matt rocks. And he brought home more citrus trees. We now have an orange tree, lemon, apricot, and grapefruit. Plus a ficus. My flowers, zucchini and peppers are doing great, but the watermelon and tomatoes are iffy. The sunflowers I had indoors bit the dust once they went outside, but the ones I planted outdoors are doing fine. Today Nicolas and I worked on our rock river. Here's a cute picture: 
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| Wow, I haven't fed Zippo, my cyber dog in a looooooong time! I hope some of you readers have. LOL. I keep avoiding posting here, thinking I should wait until I have all my photos ready to upload, and all my ducks in a row... But I need to just pop in often with whatever I have. So here I am! Hi there! For a quick update, our house is awesome. I love, love, love it.  And it's been fun gardening with Nicolas and the twins, watching our new plants bloom into beautiful flowers. We even have two citrus trees out back, one orange and one lemon. Tonight Matt and Nicolas brought home some store-bought oranges and a new orange juicer, so we can practice. Yum. We'll probably also get a grapefruit tree, peach tree, and maybe also an apricot tree. I'm really excited about having my yard full of fresh food. We've already planted some sunflowers, beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, and watermelon. Those who know me well will likely laugh at my explosive, giant beginning in this new garden realm... The kids all just had birthdays. Wowza. Nicolas is a big, handsome, tall 8 now.  And the twins are already 2; no longer "babies".   They even act and talk like little "big kids" now. William's still making mostly 2-word sentences, but McKenna is up to four words and more. She also peed on the potty for the first time last week. I am also noticing they are much stronger and adept at climbing and problem solving these days. OH! And last Friday I took the kids swimming with a friend, and the babies were amazing... with water wings on, they were not only jumping off the edge toward me, but by the end of the day were also swimming alone near me and the steps! So big. They also love helping us empty the dishwasher or sweep or wash windows, and especially love doing little errands like putting something on the counter or throwing something in the trash can. Matt was on vacation this past week, and spent it at home, working in the back yard day and night. It's coming along nicely! And boy, is he sore... There are so many rocks, and he's been tilling the ground, digging trenches, laying pipe, planting trees ... We would have already had grass seed sown by today if it had not deluged twice in the past 3 days. Now the trenches are all canals. We have two new members of our family as of this weekend. Kermit the toad joined our happy home Saturday night after the first big rain. He's quite cute for a toad. A burrowing, fat, Couch's Spadefoot Toad, according to our research. =O) His big eyes are very observant; he follows your every move... The second new pet arrived when we went to PetSmart to buy a toad habitat. We fell in love with Rocky, the 5-month-old German Shepherd mix puppy. He impressed us, the store workers and even nearby customers with his calm, patient, friendly demeanor for the hour we played with him in the store's aisle, even with William and McKenna hugging, tackling, poking, prodding and pulling on him. Mario our dog and Luigi the cat are not impressed. Well, I should go for now. We spent the day choosing Italy photos to print out and hang in our entry way, and I'm excited to go downstairs and arrange them and put them up. Mom's coming to town Friday in time for Nicolas' opening night of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat! The new pet pictures are still on the camera, so you'll have to see those next time. Ciao for now! Savannah | | |
| I have a Word document journal on my computer where I keep some of my favorite posts to my internet support groups and email lists... and I realized tonight that I should be sharing much of these fun entries with my Xanga readers! Sorry about that. Here is one from April 30:
We went out to Kids Eat Free night at Denny's this week for the first time, and we ordered the nachos appetizer. McKenna saw me dipping my chips in the salsa and proceeded to imitate. Except she just licked the salsa and double (triple, quadruple...) dipped the same chip. Anyway, she just loved it. And wouldn't stop, even when her eyes got teary and her face was red, and she stuck out her tongue and cried... I kept offering her water, or a salsa-free chip, but NOOOO. She would just reach in for more salsa. We eventually put our foot down and took the salsa bowl out of her reach, to much disapproval and shrieking. LOL. 
I just found this hysterical image in an email someone sent me. It was appropriate for the entry I just made. ha!
I'm in a food funk. It's hard to get creative on so little spare brain power. But the kids have been chowing on beans, steamed veggies (frozen mixes), corn on the cob, broccoli, quesadillas, rice, dry cereal, yogurt, eggs, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread, black olives (first poked onto little fingertips, of course), this weekend they discovered whole dill pickles, they love cottage cheese, actually any kind of cheese, muffins, tomatoes, all fruit, especially melon and grapes, potatoes (all kinds including tater tots), ice cream and any kind of junk food treat I'm eating. Yesterday they tried and liked shrimp. I think they're sensitive to texture these days (and my BabyCenter update confirms this), because they're not quite as excited about bananas anymore, especially if they're a little mushy.
We're also having a language explosion. McKenna started mimicking this week, and William is suddenly talking and signing a lot more. McKenna also loves to sing and try to do the hand movements to some playtime songs. But still, my favorite thing she says (well, for cuteness factor, not content LOL) is "Weeyum, get down!" And truly, William is often up on places he's not supposed to be.
She's a little tattler already. The other day I was sitting in the living room and she came trotting in from the kitchen telling me, "Daddy ice keem" and pointing back to the kitchen. I said, really? Daddy has ice cream? And followed her in there. DH was standing by the freezer looking caught. LOL. He teasingly chided her about telling on him, and we both had a good laugh. And of course, McKenna and I enjoyed some ice cream too.
... and from today:
Using the example someone used of never studying any wars if given the choice... I think homeschoolers would actually be more apt to study AND RETAIN information about wars and history. I only crammed for tests and remembered facts as long as it took to ace the test, then promptly dumped the info from my head. That must be what happened, since I cannot recall any of it! Whereas I enjoy learning about wars and history now, when I can find out the reasons they happened, social implications, and apply lessons to modern life instead of being aggravated about having to remember stupid names and dates that never seemed to interconnect in any logical fashion in school. Homeschoolers will learn about wars through reading interesting books, watching interesting programs on the History channel, talking to war veterans, visiting war museums and sites, etc.
Tonight I took a walk with my kids and my friend... And there must have been 10 really fascinating things to stop and notice and talk about along the way. I felt badly interrupting our adult conversation every 5 minutes to show Nicolas the stuff, but then I remembered that it's good for others to see. This friend doesn't have kids yet; maybe one day she'll remember our experiences and decide she wants to homeschool her own.
And by the way, we did enjoy the candy factory tour!! You weren't close to the equipment or anything, and you didn't actually walk around, but it was interesting and yummy nonetheless. I'd recommend the neat online tour, as well: www.cerreta.com The kids had a blast at the little city park afterward, which was refreshing. Refreshing because it was breezy and shady, with library bathrooms and water fountain right there... But mostly refreshing because my son discovered yet again that he actually CAN have fun outside without man-made playground equipment, LOL.
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