Back to (Home)School Pictures 2015

We started our ninth official year of homeschooling this week. We always take a minute to take photos during our first week of school. Each year we fill out a memory book page* about the kids and glue these photos to the page.

Here are the photos of the boys for this year:

Hope those made you laugh as much as they did me! As you can see we had some technical difficulties. Even though we were in the shade, everyone insisted it was too bright. I had to take multiple photos of everyone to get one good shot. I never did get a good one of Eli. After working with the boys, I didn't even try with Annabeth yet. I will get hers and a good one of Eli soon. Meanwhile, here is one of everyone else:

*If you would like to print a pdf of the first day of school page I created, you can click here.

Double Storm

We got hit with two monsoon storms yesterday. One mid-morning and one in the late evening. Both started with some blowing dust and strong winds and ended with rain. The evening storm included TONS of lightning.

The morning storm dumped a good bit of much needed rain!

During the evening storm I tried to catch a few photos of the lightning. Boy, it is hard to photograph lightning! This is what I ended up with...

In the bottom photo, I accidentally timed it so the lightning made it look like it was daytime instead of pitch black night. If you look really close you can see one of the patio chairs overturned by the guest house front porch.

In the neighborhood just north of us, there were tons of trees taken down by the storm. Thankfully, we didn't have any damage. We have a had a pretty boring monsoon season this year so we were happy to have two storms (with rain!) in one day. The weather here can get pretty boring... sunny and hot, repeat... so different weather of any kind is welcomed by all of us!

Library Freebies!

Wesley got a nice surprise when we went to the library a couple weeks ago. In addition to his free book and a coupon for free food, he won not one but TWO of the random prize drawings. He won a Captain America t-shirt and a $15 iTunes gift card. We didn't see the notifications on the library website so were totally weren't expecting it!

Everyone except Jerry participated in the summer reading program this year. Wesley was the only one who won extra prizes. Too bad because some of the prizes were really nice - iPads, GoPro, etc. We all got a free book and coupons for free lunch at Chipotle.

We used our Chipotle coupons for a free lunch on Saturday. We just had to pay for Jerry's lunch and three drinks. It took the poor cashier forever to ring us up. Thankfully, we beat the rush by a few minutes and I don't think it upset too many people.

None of the kids had ever had Chipotle before. Some liked it better than others. We had a good time and you can't beat the price!

A Lost Classic

I've been purging and organizing in preparation for the new school year. This morning, I came across this "book" I wrote several years ago. I'm guessing it was made in 2008. 

In years past, I made things like this all the time. I can tell by the quality I made it on a whim. We probably all sat down to color together and this is what I made. As kids get older we do less and less things like this. It reminds me of a different phase when we had lots of little kids and only one big. Now we have lots of big kids and only one little. 

All the kids loved seeing it! Wesley suggested I make a new version. I just might do that!

Note: Eli called shorts "up jeans" at one time. He insisted on wearing them every day. 

Room Shuffle

We decided to do a little room shuffling this summer. Eli, Justus, and JD stayed put. Hayden and Wesley moved into what was Annabeth's room. Annabeth moved into the former school room. The biggest task was moving all the school items and books into the living room. As long as we were moving all the school stuff out to the main living area we thought we'd move the computers out there as well. Previously, they had been in our bedroom.

I spent a lot of time looking at bookshelf ideas online. Thankfully, we have an Ikea relatively close so we knew we could get decent bookcases there inexpensively. I finally came up with a plan including an "Ikea hack" to build two small desks into the shelves. The hardest part was deciding what color bookcases to buy. In the end with went with white. I really liked the look of wood grain, but Ikea's version was quite dark and I knew it would show dust and really darken the room. Our living room doesn't have much natural light so in the end the white seemed like a better idea.

Here are a few before photos:

We made the trip to Ikea and bought seven white Billy bookcases. We decided to put doors on two of them to hide some of the less attractive school items. We also got a table that we would end up cutting in half to make the two desks.

I removed all the books from the shelves. I got rid of a few, but most were just set to the side to await the construction of their new home.

Jerry spent several hours over several days assembling. I put one together myself, but made a mistake and was demoted to assistant. They were pretty easy to put together and when you do so many in a row you kind of get it down after a couple.

Once the shelves were done, we got to work on the desks. We didn't put any of the books in place just in case we had second thoughts. The desks were pretty simple, basically just an Ikea table cut in half. We did reinforce the shelf they rest on with some L brackets and screw the table into place. In order to get the computers plugged in we did have to cut/drill a few holes.

It was looking good and the desks worked out great so we started putting the books into place.

We had books all over the house that are now housed together. We still need to figure out something for the top, it's a little plain right now, but overall we are really happy with how it turned out. 

It is nice to have the computers out of our room. Now if someone is on the computer they aren't hidden away from the rest of the family. We'll see how it goes doing school at the kitchen table. We've never really done that before!

Silly Boo Boo

Here are a few silly photos I've taken of Annabeth lately...

One of the boys popped the lenses out of their cheap sunglasses. Annabeth thought she looked very smart!

Annabeth didn't know I was taking this group of photos. She was standing on the cedar chest singing quietly into her microphone. I couldn't tell what she was singing. She had the microphone in one hand  and a little Bible in the other. She likes to stand on the chest because she can see herself in the dressr mirror!