9 photos on 9-9-09

I was going to post nine pictures I took today, but the battery to my camera went dead, so it's charging, and I'm not going to wait around all night to upload. So for your enjoying pleasure- nine never-before-seen pictures(at least here on my blog):



Last Fall we went to a cool corn maze/pumpkin patch in Spokane. I hope we find one around here this year!


The two oldest last year in the corn maze


Something Jayden should be doing right now, but is failing at. Last night he
was up until 1 a.m. I wonder if I'll see a repeat performance?


Jayden with his balloon hat at a outdoor concert we went to this summer.


The kids feeding the kids at the zoo. Get it? ;)


We took the family on the Light Rail about a month ago.

Budgie Buddies at the Point Defiance Zoo


A cute pic I got of Isaiah our last day of church in Pullman.

Mark's funny idea when we had the stack of cash at our garage sale. If
you've seen the Geico ad, you'll know what I'm talking about. "It always feels like somebody's watching me!"


School officially started for the kids yesterday. I found out we have the same teacher we had last year. In WAVA, I'm called a Learning Coach, and we have a teacher who helps keep track of our progress and stuff. I haven't been able to talk to our teacher yet, but I hope he will send me an e-mail soon and that we can begin testing for Isaiah. I've kind of been making do with what we have in the meantime.

Tomorrow we get to go bowling with the other area WAVA students. That should be a lot of fun for the kids!

Thanks to whistlererin for her tutorial on how to resize my pics in Blogger. ;)

Life's ramblings

We've been housesitting/dogsitting for Mark's aunt since Thursday. It's been sort of like a mini vacation- even though we are about a 10 minute drive from his mom's place. The kids have been enjoying playing in the nice big backyard and getting to sleep in the loft room with a tv to watch videos before bedtime.

Mark went to the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. If you are interested in that, you could check out his new website at TheGeekChurch.com I guess I wouldn't be a very good wife if I didn't help him promote his site. It's a site dedicated to technology, gadgets, and Christianity(although, even if you aren't a Christian, you'd probably enjoy it). He's hoping that it will take off and help supplement his writing career, so if you care at all about our financial well-being, go visit and tell your friends! ;) Views expressed on his blog are not necessarily the views of his wife, so if he offends you in any way, be sure to tell him(and don't blame me ;))

Anyway, I'm glad to have him back with our family again. Even though he came home at night(late), I miss having him around and having someone to tag team the kids with me!

I enjoyed Labor Day today with the kids while Mark labored. I took the older two to see the movie "Up." It was playing in the cheap theater(although the popcorn made up for that!) Later today we had fun with Auntie Kim. The kids really love having her around!

Tonight I got a bit of a laugh. Jayden was playing around in his playpen for quite a while. Every once in a while, he would protest his captivity, and I wasn't sure if I was going to have to bring him out or let him calm himself to sleep. At about 10:45 he was singing(na,na,na na na na na naaaaaa!) to himself, and when I went back a few minutes later, he was out cold. Isaiah had fallen asleep before Kyrie came down to ask one of us to snuggle with her, but when she went back upstairs, he woke up crying, so Mark brought him down to our bed. Kyrie was still begging someone to snuggle with her, so I finished up what I was doing and headed up stairs to oblige. She was out of it, too! Kids are so funny sometimes!

Well, that's a bit of a rambling of what has been happening the past week. Tomorrow the kids start school officially. I'm supposed to be getting a phone call from their new teacher to introduce themselves. Hopefully I'll be able to find out how to get Isaiah into the right level of curriculum. Until then, I'll work with him from Kyrie's old stuff that we didn't use at the beginning since it was sent late last year.

I am hoping that by tomorrow I'll get photos and some video posted. I always think blogs are more interesting with pictures. The software we have for our video camera isn't compatible with my new computer, so I'm at the mercy of my loving husband to upload the stuff on his.

Back to School Prep

Washington Virtual Academy doesn't officially start until the 9th, but I've been trying to ease the kids back into school mode since they are used to being able to do whatever they want all day long. I've been having them do Math and Reading each day. So far it's going okay. I'm starting to realize how much harder it will be to have Isaiah officially doing school this year. When I'm helping one, the other one needs help.

I got all the curriculum for both kids now. Isaiah's came the other day. I have a feeling that we're just going to have to send it back because they didn't do the testing during the enrollment process like they did with Kyrie where she was able to test into 1st grade Math and Language Arts. Isaiah is at the same place Kyrie was when she started last year, but they sent me the Kindergarten curriculum, and supposedly the teacher will give us the test to determine where he is when school starts. Which means it will be a week or so before the new curriculum comes. I still have Kyrie's workbooks from 1st grade Math(we got her curriculum late last year and mostly did on-line stuff at first), so Isaiah has been working in that for the last week.

The other day I took them to the library while Jayden was napping(one of the perks of Mark working from home) and we did school work there. Kyrie and Isaiah also received their final prize for completing 1000 hours of reading this summer. At the half-way point they got a free coupon for Pizza Hut, and this time they got an art kit with paint, markers, colored pencils, pastels, etc. They were thrilled!


Mommy got her own reading time in while Isaiah played on the computers and Kyrie cracked open her new art kit.

Isaiah worked on subtraction.

Kyrie did multi-step word problems.

Official Swimmer

Kyrie got really brave this week and told me that she wanted to jump off the diving board without me there to catch her. I told her that she would need to demonstrate to the lifeguards that she could be by herself in the deep end by swimming across the pool and back. And she did! She was very proud of the wristband she got as proof.





And it's not very easy to see in these pictures, but she has a really great tan this summer!

playing with pictures

I used to want to learn Photoshop Elements for the simple fact that I could selectively color images.
A person on the scrapbooking message board did this picture for me:


Well, today I found a program on Photobucket.com which doesn't require as much of a learning curve as PSE, and it's free!
So here are some photos that I've played around with today(that came from our recent trip to the zoo that I should blog about soon).

Cute Giveaway

If you're in the market for a birthday banner for your young daughter, you might take a look at this giveaway- Little Bit Funky's site .

Look-alikes

Look at the similarities between Mark and Jayden at the same age! No wonder everyone calls Jayden "mini-Mark!"