Thanksgiving Day Pictures

Oops, okay this is me from my birthday which I forgot to post. The kids had just sang to me and were anxiously awaiting their slice of cake!And this is from the other day when Aubriel was playing photographer. She was even telling me how to tilt my head and everything... you can't tell she gets her picture taken a ton can you?

Okay the rest are now from Thanksgiving Day...

Dave hunted in the morning, we had my parents over in the afternoon and we went to Dave's Dad's in the evening. So we had a busy, lazy day and half of the pictures were taken by the kids so I wasn't even really sure what I had until this morning. At least starting with Brody there will be some photographic evidence that I was a part of their childhood!So I was trying to get a picture of the two children that either run from the camera or do something completely goofy whenever you pull it out but of course the other two children are camera hogs so she had to get in the shot of course!And then have her picture taken with Ozzye...And then try to take a picture of Brody and Ozzye...She was getting quite upset that they were not cooperating...Then we needed one of all of them....And this was BEFORE our turkey dinner!I think Gage took this... I love it but these two love that camera so they are easy to get good pictures of!The one good picture of Gage before he noticed what I was doing...Thus these two...And there would be my other picture hog getting in his cousin's way...Brody and Audra...Ozzye with Uncle Ryan...Ozzye with Audra and Aunt Leah....They are not blood related but you would never know it!Audra and Ozzye playing with Brody's feet...Believe it or not this is NOT Brody palming Ozzye's head... it is Kain...Aubriel with Uncle Eric...Aunt Laura and Uncle Ryan taking a picture of Ozzye.... Kain and I thought it was funny...Our little "Mistletoe Stop" (that's what his shirt says)...Aubriel and Audra watching the Grinch...Kain being silly again...And once more with his Dad...Gage I think was too tired to run and hide...

Buck Update

Well, they believe they found Dave's buck... the bad news is they believe it is the 12 point hanging at their neighbors. Poor Dave he is sick to his stomach to think he wounded it just enough to run into their neighbors woods and make it that much easier for one of them to take it down. I feel horrible for him despite the fact that I was less than pleased with him over the weekend of my birth. I certainly in no way wished this upon him but he is taking comfort in the thought that there must be a good reason for it even if we don't see it.

NOW we have snow!

Which we only got last night. Now the funny part about this story... or at least I find it funny... Dave not so much. Since of course he was hunting most of the weekend he explained earlier last week how only bad hunters want snow while hunting to track their deer but good hunters don't want any snow so that the deer are harder for the bad hunters to spot. This of course is key to the tale I am about to tell about a boy and his deer.


So he hunts all day on Sat. and sees nothing big and/or a doe so he doesn't shoot them. Since he came home Sat. night for my birthday he leaves again Sunday morning to go back out. He returns home later than he had said he would. Why? I wondered that myself. Turns out he was in the woods with his Dad, Uncle and Cousin "tracking" (with flash lights and no snow, I might add) the biggest buck he had ever seen, much less shot but clearly not enough to drop it. So they finally call it quits after losing the trail of blood they had found and he came home and prayed for no snow for just one more day so they could have a better chance of finding it in the day light. So what did we wake up to this morning? This out our front window....
So if it looks like this here I bet it looks like this or worse farther north. I told him it was karma for his poor communication with his wife over her BIRTHDAY weekend... believe it or not he didn't find it as funny as I did.


But what is funny is the fact that Brody is like a senile old man. He reminds me of Grandpa Simpson. This morning he is running around in only a shirt, one that happens to be a tad longer than most to cover up his twig and berries and he spills water on it.

So he takes it off and says,

"what the heck?"

Now heck is like a punctuation for Brody, it is added to every single question he asks.

Then he says,

"where the heck is my wonderwear?"(which is what underwear sounds like when he says it) while he picks up his shirt to look inside for it. So I tell him that he was not wearing any and he replies

"what! where the heck did it go?"

He didn't have any on when he woke up this morning in my bed but yet I am suppose to know what happened to it?!

Other Year Older...

So I just had birthday... my husband calls me 28 so let's go with that. I didn't really have any expectations of the day... it fell on a Sat. so naturally I expected my husband would work. But much to my surprise he took the day off! Although not to my surprise he took it off to go hunting... his excuse - he was home at the same time to take me out to dinner as if he had worked.


What he did have planned for the day while he was gone was something I have been wanting for over 10 years now... an acupuncture session! However since he was in the woods all day I feel I should be far more grateful to my mother who spent the whole day with my kids since my appointment was in the morning and we didn't go out to dinner until 7 PM. But the session was awesome! The Dr. came highly recommended to me by two different people I know and it certainly exceeded my expectations.


Now I knew from massage school what to expect but I think it must take getting through one's first session before you can get past the thought of actually having needles in your body. Not to mention the whole time I was there I had my friend's account of her acupuncture experience to turn her breech baby ringing in my ears which I think she described as some type of mid-evil torture. But I think my Dr. must be better at what he does or turning a breech baby is much harder than general relaxation. Although after he placed about 8 needles in my legs and feet and then went to drape a towel on my legs to "keep warm" I nearly jumped off the table from the sheer fear alone that it would painfully bend each and everyone out of my body. But to my pleasant surprise this did not happen.


After I was able to relax and really let go the experience was wonderful. About half way through the session I could feel warm energy building in my solar plexus and then it moved throughout my body. The session seemed much longer than it really was and I felt SO relaxed and warm after. It was not quite the same feel as after a massage but just as relaxing for sure. I just loved it and hope to do it again.

Then I went home to check up on Mom and luckily the baby did great without me. Then I got to run out, all by myself (that doesn't happen often) to one of my new favorite stores called True Nature. They have a ton of stones, crystals, herbs, oils, new age books, tarot cards, ect. So I picked up a little of everything, okay just kidding although I would have liked. But I did randomly pick up a sample deck of tarot cards and when I picked the top few angel cards off the deck the card facing up was the Bethany card. So of course I took that as a sign and got that deck which I am quite enjoying, but it is Doreen Virtue and I love her stuff anyway.

Then after a wonderful day and horrible communication by my husband he returned from his romp in the woods to take me out to dinner. I was suppose to pick a place but I always have such a hard time doing that. We go out to nice places so rarely I can never think of what I want. So we went to our old favorite stand by, Hu Hot which is always good. We had a nice evening but after a few hours I felt awful that my mom had been watching our kids for almost 12 hours straight and Dave of course was exhausted so we just decided to go home to bed. And once we did we had an overly awake toddler in bed with us due to a very late and long nap. Nothing screams romance quite like a bed full of awake babies and tired husbands! Okay I only had one husband in bed but with my birthday I think I might need to look into adding one for my next birthday. Maybe that can be what Dave gets me next year? But I did really enjoy my acupuncture!

What do they say about children that covet food?

I think they have said this of children that have starved at some point. Well, that would not constitute my children at any point unless one would consider sharing treats with 4 siblings starving. But none of my children have ever gone without a meal by lack of having it supplied to them... sometimes by their own choice of not liking dinner but never by lack of supply. However Brody has managed to have kept us all hostage in the cracker department.

When Dave and I were first married he actually use to hide food from me from time to time. I thought it odd but growing up in a house with only a mother and sister he said they were constantly taking his clothes and other items without asking and it made him crazy. Ironically enough when we first got married I was pregnant and we were broke so I did start to wear many of his clothes from lack of anything else fitting. Luckily for both of us after Kain was born I stopped wearing his clothes and he relaxed more the longer we have been married. But the food thing always baffled me. I now wonder if it is simply in their genes?

Brody took a new box of crackers out of the cupboard the other day and asked me for some to which I replied no and told him to put them back. Being the relentless child that he is he opened the box and brought me a sleeve of crackers and I again replied no. That was the last I heard of the crackers and anyone saw of them. Then yesterday the older boys asked for cheese and crackers in their lunch and I told them they had to find the crackers first. So they searched the WHOLE house and turned up nothing! So they had no cheese and crackers in their lunch.

Just this morning Brody pulled the cheese out of the fridge and asked for some with crackers on it. So now I figured I had him! He either had to turn up the crackers he had just told us yesterday he had no idea where they were OR he would not get a snack. So I told him to go find the crackers and bring them to me and he could have some. He went running upstairs and soon returned with... not the box of crackers but one unopened sleeve of crackers.

So we now know the rest of the crackers reside on the second floor but beyond that we have no idea where the rest of the box lies! Like father, like son is ALL I have to say!

Now I'm Scared...

...and feeling a bit stuck as well. I have moved onto the chapter titled: Real Learning in the book, How Children Fail. Now the first chapter I was feeling so relieved at the thought of this parenting thing not being nearly as challenging as I feel I have maybe made it out to be. BUT not only two pages into the second chapter I once again am wondering how on earth I could possibly be capable of teaching my children... however I am in quite the conundrum since I after the first chapter I also don't know how I can continue to send them to school.

When Dave and I first talked about home schooling it was right before Kain entered Kindergarten. We remember thinking what right do either of us have to teach our children with as poor of students both of us were (I of course am referring to my days in public school, not my days being home schooled)? So we sent him to school. I have now realized after reading the first few pages into the second chapter: Real Learning that we were in fact just that poor students, but no where does that imply that we were in fact stupid.

However my fear now is that we have both been instilled with these "poor student habits." It is kind of like the cycle of abuse... it needs to stop somewhere but how does one actually go about doing it? I took an extra day before blogging about this most likely out of fear, ironically the very same fear the author of this book writes about. Since I have started this book there has been SO many times in the book where Dave and I both have been able to say "that was me in school!" It is almost a liberating feeling to know that we were not in fact crazy for feeling the way we did or more importantly we were not stupid but the high feeling quickly comes crashing down with the sobering feeling that things for us could have been different... and I suppose for me they were. Dave and I feel like we were exactly the same kind of student but I was lucky enough to have had a mother that was not willing to label me. Not to say that David's parents ever felt that he was not intelligent, I think he has gone on in his life to prove otherwise but he was labeled as lazy and perhaps it was not even done by his parents as much as his teacher's. Surprisingly though to both of us we discovered in our life coaching that he had in fact internalized this belief and made sure it came true.

But what I have not found in this book, until yesterday that is, was myself now and it scared me when I did. I was reading about a couple of girls lost on a problem. The rest of the class got it but they did not, however I was right there with them. At the age of 30 I did not for the life of me understand where these girls had gone wrong on a very simple math problem. I may have said that when my mom finally pulled me out of public school in the middle of my 6th grade year I did not know many basic math facts. It was never a strong subject that came easily to me and I struggled anyway I could to simply "get through the day" but never to understand math itself. Once my mother did start home schooling me it improved but never to where I believe it could have been. So here is the part of the book I found myself in...

Other children began to try to show the girls where they had gone wrong, but without success. To rescue a man lost in the woods, you must get to where he is. The other children could not get to where these girls were, could not see how they had arrived at their answer, and hence could not help them. All they could do, like most teachers, was repeat over and over again how they got their own answer-which was no help at all. One boy asked one of the girls to work out 6x1/2 on the board. She wrote, '6x1/2=3.' He then pointed out that they had just said that 6 divided by 1/2 equaled 3. The girl looked at her partner and said, 'we've been tricked!' I wonder how often we, their teachers. make them feel this way.
Here one girl began to feel that the answer 3 was somehow wrong, and whispered to her partner, 'we goofed.' Later she said, "one half of 6 is the same as multiplication." She still could not see clearly that what she was doing was multiplying, not dividing. Finally, after much farther argument, she said to her partner, 'we may as well give in. Half of 6 is 12. I don't get it, but it is.'

I didn't get it either. I finished reading that and I was just as lost as they were... STILL! I suppose my schooling IS exactly why. I stopped reading last night at that point and when I picked up the book again today I reread it. Mostly because I had an invested interest in it this time. I want to home school my children and yet after reading something so simply and not getting it I once again was feeling what right did I have if I don't even understand something so simply. So I reread it and I got it! I was stuck in exactly the same place these girls was... I could not wrap my head around that fact that they were wrong because I knew them to be right just as they did. It was not that we didn't know the answer to the question per se... to the question we were asking ourselves we were in fact right. It was simply a misunderstanding of the concept of the question being asked. Nothing had changed since last night except I was able to give myself time, unfortunately for the girls and probably for many times for me in school as well we didn't have time. After all we had "gotten it," right? Which ironically enough was where he headed with the very next thing I read.

Now I wish I had the time to type out the whole thing because it is a very enlightening read but he is trying to explain how crazy it is for us to expect children to understand the number 1 and the number 0 and for them to grasp an understanding, simply because we explain it to them, that the two numbers next to one another make a number as great as 10...

Nobody 'explained' 10, or the function of base and place in our numeral systems, when I was little. I went to a very old-fashioned school where they just showed you how to do problems without ever trying to explain why did them that way, or to convince you that this made any sense. This was probably hard on the children who weren't very good at parroting, and the advantage for me of this system was that I was left alone to make sense of 10, and a lot of other things, in my own time and my own way.
Bad explanations are a great deal worse than no explanations at all.

And there it was in that last sentence. My faith was found once again. I watch my children now and it amazes me how they learn things without an explanation at all. Just today I watched the look on Ozzye's face, you could see the wheels in his head turning as they say, as he watched my friend's daughter not much older than him crawling around him. No one is going to show him how to crawl. I have never gotten down on the floor with my children and demonstrated this task and yet there is no doubt in my mind he will learn how to do it. All of my children have, even those that are "slow" with developing skill almost always learn them at some point.

Unlike my daughter that is being introduced more to the world of letters and what they do. She is delighted that she can now spell mine and David's names, as she puts it, M O M spells Mom and D A D spells Dad. But yet with her new found spelling she is also learning the sounds letters make so she announces to me that she knows how to spell Mommy and says M O M E, mommy. So I tell her that Mommy is actually spelled M O M M Y, and she frowns with a look of confusion. Why wouldn't she think you would spell Mommy that way when after all E makes the same some found at the end of the word? Is she really "wrong?" Does true learning require so much explanation?

She didn't ask me why it is spelled that way so I didn't offer up any reasons. She simply tried spelling Mommy again correctly this time. I figure if and when she asks for an explanation she will feel ready for one at that point in her learning.

I have always said about the care of my children when I make choices that go against the mainstream "no, I do not have a medical degree but I do posses the very same thing that the ones that do have. An ability to get an education." Which is exactly what I have done through all of my parenting up until this point, right? So why wouldn't I continue? I don't have to have all the answers, right? The children and I can learn together. After all teachers who teach our children in the schools don't know everything about everything, no one really does. I know a lot of teachers and they are very intelligent people, I know a lot of people that aren't teachers, they are very intelligent people as well. I believe I learned far more from interacting with all of these people rather than having them instruct me in some form and I really think that is what it boils down to. That is in fact what I want for my children! I want my children to keep their passion for learning, whatever it might be, because they have an invested interest in it not because someone is telling them they need to know something.

Our Little 6 Month Old!

This is exactly how we feel too! It seems like I just gave birth to our little Ossyres and now he is 6 months old already today...And learning how to take off his diaper. He is just over 15# now and has seem to have grown a lot in just the last month or so.

Ozzye is such a wonderful, happy baby.

All of ours have been wonderful of course but I think he has to be our most content baby yet!While Brody was dubbed our "bonus baby," Ozzye is most certainly our "reward baby"...

our reward for surviving our bonus baby! Here are his six month photos!

Happy Birthday Grandma!

So this morning I told the kids I had to run to the store quick before their Dad had to leave for work. Then I said we were going to be busy making Grandma a Pumpkin pie (her favorite) for her birthday today. Aubriel asked if I could just buy a pumpkin pie instead of making one and Kain told her "no, because then it wouldn't have any love in it." Their Dad tells them all the time that his secret ingredient in his cooking is love. So we made a pumpkin pie with extra love in it... and possibly some egg shells but none have been found thus far.All the kids drew pictures...and Ozzye learned to sit up for Grandma's birthday!

Snow-vember!

That is what I woke up to this morning. You can hardly see it in the picture (I was not willing to go out into it for a picture) but it was snowing for the first time this season this morning. I was laying in bed and I could hear all the children yelling with excitement, "It's snowing, it's snowing!" I always love to hear their excitement about the seasons changing. Then Gage said "but it isn't even Grandma's birthday yet" (it happens to be tomorrow) but she told him it never snows before her birthday... I am thinking that may just be wishful thinking. Then Gage said "wow it isn't even December yet" and Aubriel responded with "nope it's snovember!"

So only in Wisconsin could I be at the park playing with my children in 70 degree weather 3 days into the month of November and then have it snowing 5 days later! Dave even went golfing on Wed. Alas here it is mid afternoon and any tiny bit of snow is gone now but it is still only 35 degrees out compared to the 70 we had just a few days ago. As long as we have snow for the month of December I am happy. That is the only month of the whole year I actually enjoy having snow!