2011 Year End

Ah, the phrase "Year-End" makes me sort-of-sentimental and sort-of relieved that it doesn't mean spending the holidays in a cube closing the books and preparing for auditors :-)

As promised here is our 2011 Year-End Highlights!

Here are my beautiful children on Christmas Eve.  I left Chris and I out of the photo because we are not so beautiful from lack of sleep and I don't have time to touch us up in Photoshop :-) 

This year lance officially started his love of baseball. In the spring dad helped coach. In fall Chris was the head coach of his team. Chris really enjoyed coaching. Currently Lance's favorite position is catcher, but I adore this shot he took of him pitching. For his birthday, Chris, Grandpa Harv, Jared and Matthew went to a real RedSox game at Disney's Wide World of Sports, if that gives you an idea of the severity of baseball fever in our house. When he wasn't playing baseball, he was running in the "Smile Mile" or swimming with a team of friends all summer long. All this work culminated in August when he successfully competed in his first Triathlon. In short, Lance likes sports and he's very athletic.

Jared is my beautiful thespian.

He loves to talk to people.  He frequently sings for people at the park and enjoys playing his piano.  Jared celebrated his birthday at the Fountains Resort again this year with friends and family.  After his birthday, he started up karate again and it has gone very well and he is now a purple belt with black stripe. 

Jared's cardiac conditions are part of the reason we studied anatomy in detail this summer.  We wanted to finally explain to him what his conditions were.  We had no idea how important that would be in the fall when one of his conditions started acting up again, after being inactive for two years.  He had three SVTs this fall/winter and has progressively become braver with each occurrence.  I think it helps that he intellectually understands what's going on.  Unfortunately, because of his conditions Jared found out he is not allowed to play baseball or any contact sport.  It helped that he was the bat boy on Lance's team in the fall but he was disappointed at the news.  But rather than focus on the negative we thought of alternatives and one I came up with was riflrey.  Grandpa Bob is an expert marksman and was happy to help start this focus.  He not only gave him a BB gun for Christmas but took the time to explain to him this really is a sport he can compete in at in the Olympics. If this doesn't work out I think he'll make a great sports announcer some day.

Then there is Titus.  His name and personality lend itself to so many nicknames and theme songs; "We are the Titus, the mighty, mighty Titus" is still the favorite.  He wants to be in on EVERYTHING his big brothers are doing, physical or age barriers be darned.  He's been talking like a five year old since the beginning of the year and I wish I'd kept a list of some of his incredible statements. He jumped into the pool fearlessly all summer long and became a pretty good swimmer.  He ran the nursery at CC and wooed all the teachers at church, one even called him a "genius" (Hee Hee).  Chris suggested a blurry picture, since he's always moving but I chose these instead.

Super Hero Titus or Disappearing Titus

I did not pose him he did this himself :-)

Titus in charge on his "Wee HOO"!

The biggest event of the year was the arrival of little Amber Elizabeth.  I'm not sure little is the best way to describe her. Our chunky monkey weighed in at 11 lbs. 12 oz. at her two month checkup and 23 inches.  Each child seems to grow up quicker than the previous. She is so alert and interested in the world around her, and what a world it is.

That wraps up the year.  Safe tiddings to you and yours!  May the New Year be filled with God's blessing upon your families.

Love the Otto Clan! 

Next Right Thing

I have kept a journal since I was a young girl. As a child, it was my way of venting.  After I married Chris, I got rid of all those old journals. I decided my journal should be a way to record everything good in our lives. I've done a decent job of keeping a journal over
the last 15 years - until January of 2010. The last two years have been rough on many levels.  I've had a hard time seeing the sun through the clouds and my journal reflects that by having very few entries.  It fills me with guilt all the wonderful moments with my boys I never recorded and have already forgotten. We can't change the past and as our pastor says: "all we can do the next right thing". 

This last week hasn't been any easier, new challenges pop up and life is still tough. But if I keep waiting for life to improve, I'm going to keep missing the rays of sunshine that make rainbows in the clouds.  From now on, I'm going to do things differently.

I'm going to use my nice new hot pink iPhone to capture those special moments so I'll have them to write down later. My blog is going to change from a homeschooling resource, to a journal of my family's adventures through life. And I can post lots of pictures. Yay! "They" say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes no words can do justice to what happens in the lives of my boys. 

I want to change how we live life in order to increase the chances of having more happy moments to record. I will change homeschooling to being just one part of our life, not it's main focus.  To do this, I plan to continue our gravitation towards a more Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling.  I am going to plan more field trips and have the boys experience what they have learned. 

I want to bring FUN back into our daily lives and enjoy the simple moments to play when the moment strikes us.  I've done more of this lately and I already see a difference in the boys. Finally, I plan to remove the burdens we have inflicted on our lives.

My next entry starts this journey and I will include a little catch-up on the highlights of 2011. Stay tuned!

Back in the Saddle Again....

I've been spending as little time as possible on my computer lately, partly because its been bugging my eyes and partly because I simply don't have the time.  We are starting our third week of nearly full-time school again.  I say nearly because there are a few things we still need to add back but all in good time.

THE BUCKING BRONCO

The biggest challenge we have to getting things done is not Amber but my very active two year old Titus.  He's the cutest thing in the world (which is how he became a terrorist), extremely smart (he knows all his letters and their sounds) but he doesn't do tricks (only counts when playing hide-n-seek) and he has the attention span of a gnat.  Here's how me trying to integrate him into our day and honor his requests of "I do work too!" goes:

The scene is him on my lap with the alphabet in front of him (consonants in red, vowels in blue) a picture of a cat and three blank spaces after.

"Titus point to the letter that makes the /k/ sound"

    Titus points to "c" and we start to spell the word.

"Nicely done, now which letter makes the /a/ sound"

    Titus points to "m" and starts spinning it around.

"Not /m/, /a/, its a blue letter."

    "Not blue, I like red"

"Okay, point to /t/ then"

   Titus then starts twisting multiple letters.

"Titus point to the letter that makes the /t/ sound"
I repeated this a few times till he gave me a sly smile and said...

   "How 'bout "p"?"
Game over he wins.

He knows very well which letter is "t" but lost interest in the game that quickly and that's how all our teaching lessons go.  Then because he's "done" in his mind, his brothers should be too and free to play with him, thus the challenge of my days.  The worst part is I really feel for him.  He's only two.   He should just be playing his days away.  I envy the homeschool mom's that have the option to put their littlest in preschool, it seems like such a win-win plan.  However, for us preschool is a petri dish and we can't mess with that.  I'm hoping to find some way to create a mini-preschool at my house with my friends daughter.  We are trying to find someone to play with them a few hours a week while we teach the older ones.

LOW TECH SOLUTION

I wasn't going to let my eyes stop us from starting school the other week, so I went low-tech.  I took a 5x8 index card drew some lines and called it a schedule.  Strangely the new system is working better than any other system we've used the past.  Here's how the last week and the current week looks:

To the untrained eye (which is anyone other than me and the boys :-) ) it looks like a bunch of gibberish but here's what it means to our days.  I have this on the front of a three ring binder for the boys to view anytime during the day, certain things they can do on their own and other things require my help.  That said it means we do NOT do these things in order we do then as the opportunity arrives during the day.  Inside the binder are all the worksheets/supplies they need to complete the work for the week.  They can work ahead if they want (hasn't happened yet) but if they do not complete their work during the week they will have to do it over the weekend (that motivates them to do it during the week).

BIBLE:  For right now its just me reading bible stories from the "Jesse Tree" book and them making their new links for the "Thankful Garland".  Next week we will go back to reading "Matthew" with narration and discussion.  On the weekends Chris does the CLE Bible curricula with them.

CHORES:  This isn't a subject but my children claim they just cannot remember on their own, to vacuum their rugs and brush their teeth each morning.  The "LF" you see I added this to stop the discussions over who is vacuuming which rugs, which days since they switch each day (Oyeevey!)

PIANO:  Is practice four days a week and lessons on Thursday, details of which is all determined by their wonderful piano teacher.

CC REVIEW:  Involves reviewing the first 12 weeks of Classical Conversation Memory work, three weeks each day.  Most days it means watching three weeks of the videos I created, but some days it involves me quizzing them.  I'm happy to say that based on the quiz days my videos have really done their job.

DRILLS:  These are our "Calculadder"(CL) and "Alphabetter"(AB) drills.  Between the two it only takes 6 minutes a day.  I am extremely pleased with the "Calculadder", I can see the boys truly gaining mastery in math and staying fresh with their math skills till we start-up their full curricula again.

HISTORY:  This is where we spend most of our day.  Its not just history but also reading, science, penmanship and art.  I have decided to go really deep with our history this year instead of going wide.  I want the boys to truly understand history from a providential standpoint, how it all relates and the details of the people and the events.  In addition to various living books, I'm using all the tools mentioned in my previous posts (Post 1 and Post 2) to teach the boys history and recently one more I found from Brandy called "Adventure Tales of America" (ATA).

I use the "Mighty Works of God" (MW) as our backbone curricula and then work off it with the others. For instance with the Pilgrims we started with MW reading and worksheets.  At the same time we were also reading "Squanto: Friend of the Indians".  Then we went over the same period in the ATA and "The Light and the Glory" (LG), doing worksheets out their Activity Books, while reading "The First Book of Indians".  In addition I have them draw two related pictures and corresponding penmanship from the "Draw Write Now" Series each week.

In the evenings they watch the "Drive Thru History" DVDs (I can't say enough good about these) and other supplemental DVDs I have found at the library.  My latest cool find was a DVD called "Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude".  After watching it this weekend I have decided that Harrison is the inventor the boys will be using for their Inventor Speech at CC in week 15.

SCIENCE:  I asked Chris to take the lead in this subject.  They have started the Mr. Q Chemistry curricula and I can't say enough good.  It is easy, thorough and fun.  In addition, we will start reading from the "World of Chemistry" book this week and plan on using a number of the awesome resources Brandy recently posted on her "Half-a-Hundred Acre Woods" blog.  Dad and boys are having fun.  Here's the boys and their first experiment the "Rubber Egg".

READING:  This we are still keeping light and have not started up their full Language Arts curricula yet.  I figure they are doing so much reading on their own and with history, we can wait a little bit to get back into curricula.  For now I am simply having them read from the "Christian Liberty Press Science Readers" and narrate back to me what they have read.  For Lance, I did have him start-up his Easy Grammar Daily Grams and Student Book but just one page a day for now.  I'm also trying to get him to practice typing and cursive but its been off and on.

Finally, we are also working on an adaptation of file folder game called "Passport to America" with some living history books.  I've been searching the library for books about each of the landmarks.  We are slowly reading our way through.  When we are done I'm going to use the game as a final quiz, having them match everything up and tell me what they know.

Here's a quick list of what we've read so far:

• "Sky Boys:  How they built the Empire State Building" by Deborah Hopkinson
• "The Hover Dam" by Jeffrey Zuehlke
• "Lakes" by Geoffrey H. Nash
• "What is Mt. Rushmore" by Laine Falk
• "Story of the Lincoln Memorial" by Tom Dunningham
• "You Wouldn't Want to be a Worker on the Statue of Liberty" by John Malam
• "You Wouldn't Want to Work on the Brooklyn Bridge" by Thomas Ratliff
• "A Capital for the Nation" by Stan Hoig
• "The Story of the Liberty Bell" by Natalie Miller

We try to do some craft and art projects during the week but most days we choose to go play at the park instead, the weather is just too wonderful this time of year to resist!  In fact some days we even take our reading to the park.

Christmas Traditions

One of the things that our family lacks is a strong sense of tradition.  Early this year I bought this book to help:

Mrs. Sharp's Traditions by Sarah Ban Breathnach is a really neat book with all kinds of Victorian ideas that are neat to revive.  We had fun earlier in the year, starting some birthday traditions; like making a special hat for them to wear that day but then my energy puttered out and so did starting new traditions... till now.

Here's what we are doing for Christmas this year:

  

First, I'm proud to say we actually got our tree up and "the deer" on Thanksgiving weekend.  The deer serve as a beacon light for the airport runway two miles away :-)  Clark Griswold would be impressed.  

At first we were going to use a few of our regular ornaments but after four were quickly broken we re-grouped and decided to go a less delicate route.  Works better with our FP Little People Nativity Scene too (Ours doesn't look quite like this. The sheep keep flying into the tree, along with "the cowboy with the funny hat", as Titus calls Joseph :-).

I decided it would be neat to make "Jesse Tree" ornaments, one each day till Christmas Eve.  I looked at some sites for templates and then just decided to let the boys create their own ornaments based on the story we read each day.  The book I chose to read to them this year is "The Jesse Tree" by Geraldine McCaughrean.  I chose this book mainly because it was available at the library.

The was a wonderful idea and I think we'll really do it next year, but it was a bit too ambitious this year; we made it to day two before the boys lost interest in making ornaments.   However, we are still reading the story every night and they are enjoying it.  The story has an interesting twist in that its told by a old church carpenter to a boy that at first really annoys the carpenter but then starts to grow on him.

Which brings me to our final new tradition that we have been keeping up with.  Along with the daily readings we have been making a "Thankfulness Garland".  Its the traditional construction paper garland we all made in school with a little more added.  We have the boys each write something they are thankful for each day and we add that loop to the chain.  By Christmas it should be an impressive 75 loops long.  The boys are enjoying this and sometimes they decorate their loops, depending on mood.  Lance is even talking about plans to keep it so we can add to each year.

Lastly, here is something to add cheer to your Holiday Season!

Beauty: One Month Old

It is tradition that we take a photograph each month of the boys with their "Ragedy Andy" doll, for the first year of their lives.  So thankfully my MIL was able to find a "Ragedy Ann" doll and bring it with her before Amber's one month photograph above.  How precious is that outfit?!  We are thinking of framing it, my friend brought it back from Puerto Rico with her, it's just too adorable.

I thought of calling this photo "Beauty and the Beasts" for fun, but my boys are certainly not beasts, active "yes" but not beasts.  "Beauty and her Beauties" is a better caption :-)

Amber is a healthy growing girl.  At her official two week check-up, they expect them to gain between 8 and 14 oz, my healthy girl gained 21oz, which means her feedings are not in vain. I always worry my milk supply isn't enough and Chris always points out the proof is in the proverbial pudding.  We also found out that day that me eating eggs does not agree with her.  She was up screaming for about twelve hours 9pm to 9am the next day.  Unfortunately, that has really limited my protein sources, so I'm back to eating meat, which is both inconvenient and expensive.  Also for fun that night I messed up my wrist carrying and patting her and had it in a brace for a little over a week.  Boy, am I old and falling apart.

Back to Amber, after she was born everyone agreed that she looked just like Jared but already after only a month she has changed to look more like Titus.  So I'm sure it won't be long till she'll only look like Amber.  She is already trying to keep up with her brothers, holding her head up very well, smiling and enamored with each of them.

The boys are just as interested in her.  Lance is her protector, Jared tells everyone he "can't keep his eyes off her" and Titus said before anyone else when we dressed her above "She looks like a princess".  Titus is really interested in her, wanting to constantly interact with her, which is both adorable and dangerous.  For instance, we brought out the swing last weekend and he instantly tried to send her into orbit, so we quickly put the swing away :-)

We welcomed Grandma Elaine and Auntie Susie for a 10 day visit ending the Monday before Thanksgivng.  It was helpful having extra hands around to hold Amber and play with the boys, and let me do my own thing for a minute or two.  Thus why its taken two weeks to get this post up since they left.

While they visited we celebrated our 15th Wedding Anniversary on November 16th.  Needless to say we didn't do anything special.  Amber has me on a very short leash both time wise and what I can eat, so even going out to dinner was out. But our family is gift enough and we'll have plenty of time alone together when we are old, right? 

Since they left I've trying to figure out what our new routine will look like and how to make it happen. 

For Titus it means convincing him to sleep in his brothers' room.  At first he was sleeping through her nightly feedings but now he seems to have become very sensitive to her waking up.  Cute as he is, a two year old with little sleep is not the most pleasant thing, especially since he won't take a nap.  I'm setting up a bed in the boys room for him today, he seems excited, we'll see what he does tonight.

As I first started typing this I was going to say:

"For Lance and Jared, it means moving most of our school day to the afternoon.  Amber seems to like to sleep from 1pm to 4pm.  The boys of course have traditionally been unable to focus after 2pm in the past.  Hopefully if they can play hard in the morning, do some "Move to the Groove" and/or "Tae Bo" so we can make it work."  

Of course Amber's "schedule" has already changed.  I guess the key will be flexibility on everyone's part.  One thing I've learned is I need to be prepared when those teachable moments happen.  I can't waste her precious sleep time preparing their school work and I don't have time to prepare at night either if I'm to get any sleep.  So I will need to get the schedule for the whole week and supplies all lined up over the weekend.  I failed at doing that last weekend, we'll see how things go today and tomorrow.

There just isn't enough time in the day to treasure each of my four wonderful children the way I would like to each day.  To sit and talk with Lance, play out fantasy games with Jared, to play games with Titus and cuddle/nap with my little girl trying to imprint her image in my mind.  I have consciously been making the choice to spend time with my boys and let the house work fall behind, its obvious.  I just keep remember a quote from an older wise woman "No one remembers how their mother kept their house as fondly as those special moments she devoted herself and time to them."  Hopefully our new iphones will at least help me to capture and remember those special moments....like Titus' telling Lance yesterday "Oh, that stink is me!" :-D  

Happy Holidays to everyone, may the reason for the season bring you great peace and joy!