Serving This Summer

As Sissy is going into 7th grade she is approaching her teen years...seriously? SIGH.... One of the good things about that is that she is able to be active with the youth group at our church. We have an amazing youth minister and my husband and I are lucky to say that we see eye to eye with him on several issues like teen dating (not necessary) and entertainment choices (filter, filter, filter). Sissy has been participating in a few youth group activities this summer including Service Tuesdays.

I've been fortunate to attend most of the events because there were so many kids signed up to attend that they needed an extra driver. The kids have served at the local soup kitchen, a food and clothing "closet" that gives food and clothing to people in our area and an elderly care center. Most times I was able to leave the younger girls with someone for a few hours, but the care center was an hour away so I took them with us. What a blessing it was to watch the kids interact with the elderly. Their "service" was to entertain them with a game of kickball. A very energetic game of kickball. Prior to the game they sang some songs to them.

I suggested to my little girls that they take a bag full of books, coloring books and crayons with them to occupy themselves. What a joy it was to look over and see that Sweet Baby had started reading to one of the residents.

Badge Work - A Family Affair

One of the convenient things about being a homeschooling family in American Heritage Girls is that we seem to do badge work all the time, without even knowing it, for school. The little girls wanted to learn about plants for science this year so I grabbed their handbook and wouldn't you know it - there is a plant science badge.

Daddy is an avid gardener and is always trying to get the rest of us interested in gardening. We have a pretty large garden for the size of our yard. The girls have planted their own mini garden once before but as part of their badge requirement, they needed to plant a garden again.

Daddy let them choose what to plant, helped them work up the soil and make markers so they would know what seeds had been planted and where.

After making their markers the girls and dad headed down to the garden to get started. First Peanut planted hers. She is the one who gets very excited about what is growing in her garden, she will weed, once in awhile, and is really excited to do projects like this.

Here is a picture of Peanut and her Prince. Notice the hat?? World's Greatest Dad - Sissy's Father's Day gift.

Then it was Sweet Baby's turn to plant her garden. I love these pictures...all of them in a row. Mind you that "Cinderella" by Steven Curtis Chapman is playing in my house right now....

More Summer Happenings

This summer the girls and I headed out to Michigan Christian Youth camp (the same camp we attended with American Heritage Girls) for summer camp. The week we were there was a week that many kids from our church and surrounding cities attend. Most of the volunteer counselors are adults from our church. There is such a sense of community at MCYC and I think that I enjoy being there as much as the kids do.

This year was Sissy's 3rd year attending, Peanut's 2nd year and Sweet Baby's first year. Here is Sweet Baby getting her bed all set up.

This year I counseled Peanut and Sweet Baby's group of 9 girls ages 7-10. My co-counselor was a teen from our church. She was wonderful with the kids and had such a great sense of humor. Sissy was in a different group (she likes it that way). She is always in a group with one of her best friends - here they are.

Camp has become a tradition around here the last several years and unless we end up with no way to pay for it, I would never consider having my kids miss it. There are a couple families that we are friendly with that have had to move away in recent years and two of the families even sent their kids back to Michigan so they could go to camp. Here is Peanut and one of her best friends. They recently moved to Minnesota and the both of them were so excited for camp so they could see each other. They did not get to spend a lot of time together since the activities are divided according to gender, but they did see each other at flag pole, meals, games and campfire.

Every year Wednesday night is "Carnival" and "Family Night" so that family comes out and enjoys devotional by the lake and carnival games. Thankfully we are only 1/2 hour from the camp so many of our church friends come out to visit. This year we were blessed to see one of the teens be baptized in the lake. In addition, I snapped this photo of my dear friend from Oklahoma and Sissy sharing a moment as they listened to the devotional. It is moments like this that I am thankful to God for the people he has placed in our lives who love Him and our girls.

Sweet Baby especially enjoyed getting to ride the horses. We were fortunate enough to get three different horse rides for her. Although they did have someone walk her horse; rather than her controlling it, she did not care. She was on a horse and that was all that mattered!

As an adult, my favorite activity to watch is the Low Ropes course. The activities encourage team building, self confidence and determination. Here the younger girls are making their way across the tire swing portion of the course.

It was a great week with the kids learning archery, riflery, swimming, leather crafting and so much more. The weather was great and the girls all learned a lot. Take a look at the bottom of these feet on the last day and you'll get an idea of how much fun they had!

P.S. Peanut took a shower EVERYDAY we were there!

So Much Going On - Highlights

Golly, I haven't updated my posts in forever! Based on my previous posts it appears like we did very little school the last several months. We finished up school at the end of May, it has been so nice to have a break.

Although I don't have school photos to share, we have had lots going on and I wanted to share.

We celebrated some birthdays around here. Sweet Baby isn't such a baby anymore. She turned 7 and celebrated with a Tangled birthday party. Yes, that cake is my pitiful attempt at making a castle with cupcakes and a sugar cone on top.

Peanut turned 9 and had her first sleepover party with a couple friends. She had an owl themed party.

In my last post I shared that we had to put our dog of 14 years down the Monday after Easter. It was awfully quiet around here, so we added a new member to our family. Daisy joined us at the end of May. Isn't she cute? She is a beagle/lab mix. I had forgotten what it was like to have a puppy around the house. LOTS of energy...lets just leave it at that.

Our dear friends who moved to Oklahoma 3 years ago came out for an extended stay. They were here for 2 months. What a blessing to be able to make memories with them. They are as close to us as family and we enjoyed every opportunity we were able to see them while they were in Michigan. Their daughter is close to all of the girls and I love having photos like these...

And because they are kids, we had to have a photo like this....

Our niece graduated from high school so we were able to spend some time with family at her open house. Here is a photo of Sissy and grandma (my husband's mom).

We spent at day up at grandma's house. Grandma lives literally across the street from Lake Huron. So, we loaded up the kids, the dog and even my husband's youngest brother and headed for the lake.

We discovered that Daisy really likes the water - once we got her in there. When she came out, she kind of resembled a wet rat.

Here the girls are swimming, they had such a great time.

And this is my favorite picture...a photo of Sweet Baby and grandma enjoying a walk together.

That is all I'll share for today. I will be working on another post sharing some more highlights, like summer camp.

American Heritage Girls Camporee

The girls and I attended our first American Heritage Girls Camporee last month. It was an amazing day! There were close to 160 AHG girls and parents there to share in the fun. We camped at Michigan Christian Youth Camp, one of my favorite places to be. Since all of our girls are Explorers or younger, we were unable to camp in tents, but slept in the dorms, which was just fine by me!

We arrived with dreary but dry weather, set up our stuff and headed down to the campfire.

After some campfire songs and smores, we headed back to the dorms to get some rest. Thankfully the rain held off till around 10 pm, but when it did decide to rain, it poured! It just kept raining all night and into the next day! It was such a wet day! It rained till around 1:00 pm!

We all had breakfast, and then split up into their different groups for activities. All of our girls made no mess tye-dye bandannas. Here is Sweet Baby with hers....

Peanut with hers...

The Tenderhearts and Explorers were able to do Leathercrafts. Here is Sweet Baby as proud as can be to show the project she made for her AHG pen pal. It is a key chain of sorts shaped like a heart and "broken" down the middle. On one side she stamped the word "Pen" and the other side she stamped the word "Pals". As soon as we got home she packaged up one side to send to her pen pal. Too cute!

The Explorers were able to participate in several team building exercises. They really seemed to enjoy themselves. Here is Sissy making her way across the tire swings on the low ropes course. It is amazing to witness than a young girl scared to try something and then seeing her peers cheer her on.

The Tenderhearts were able to participate in a section of the low ropes course as well. Since we spent a year last summer at this camp, Peanut had already done the activities, but Sweet Baby had not. She was TERRIFIED but an even great thing to witness than peers cheering their friends on, is when a child conquers their fear and sees that they CAN do it! I LOVE these photos as you can really see how happy and excited Sweet Baby was as she made it across the ropes.

It was an amazing weekend. Sweet Baby was able to experience her first trip to camp, the girls and parents in our troop were able to bond and make amazing memories and accomplish things they never thought they would!

Busy....

I realize it has been awhile since I have posted. We have had alot going on the last few weeks.

First... Easter weekend we had to put our sweet dog of 14 years down. She had become sick a couple weeks before and we had hoped it was just a virus or something. After 2 1/2 weeks we took her in to discover that she had liver cancer. It was a very hard thing to do. We found out on Saturday what was wrong and had her put down on Monday. It gave us the entire weekend to say good-bye.

With American Heritage Girls we attended a Sweet Pea Beauty celebration. The girls watched the Veggie Tales movie Sweet Pea Beauty and learned all about where your beauty actually lies - in your heart. We had fun activities, lunch and games.

We ended our year with our co-op. Peanut had a presentation to do in her Inventors class. She chose to research who invented braille and the braille writer after watching an episode of Little House on the Prairie. She learned alot about Louis Braille, made a great display board and did an oral presentation for her class.

Sweet Baby loved her Storybook Art class this semester. The teacher read books to the class and then they created an art project based off of the illustrations in the book. Here she is displaying all of her projects for the semester.

Then Sweet Baby learned something REALLY big...she finally learned how to ride a 2 wheeler! Now if we can just get her to learn to tie her shoes!

We took a bit of a break from our heavy schedule at home to share a unit with some friends about American Indians. A friend recently started homechooling and her mother (who is a retired 3rd grade teacher) wanted to do a unit about American Indians. They invited the girls to come along so we spent 4 weeks enjoying that. What a nice break for mom! I would drop them off twice a week for about an hour and a half. They ended the unit with homemade Indian vests, masks and a lunch of various foods the Indians would have eaten.

This weekend we attended our first American Heritage Girls Camporee. It was amazing! WET, but amazing. It rained all night on Friday and all morning on Saturday. I'll share some pictures and stories about that another day.

Encouragement and A Recharge

This past weekend was a wonderful one for this homeschooling momma. A week ago Thursday I headed out on the road with 7 homeschooling friends. We had a 5 hour drive ahead of us as we headed to the Midwest Homeschooling Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. What a blessing that trip was!

I have been to the big homeschooling conference here in Michigan for 2 years and I thought that was large. It has NOTHING on the event in Ohio. It was amazing to be with more than 15,000 homeschoolers and listen to some very uplifting and encouraging talks. The seminars ran ALL day starting at about 8:30 am and running till 9:30 pm.

The vendor hall was amazing. What a joy to be able to see curriculums I have heard about and leaf through them. I left the Queen Homeschooling Supplies booth with 2 new literature guides to follow our historical study next year. Here is a photo of about 1/4 of the vendor hall! Can you believe that!!!???

But most exciting to me was to meet Marie Rippel. Marie wrote our spelling program. If someone would have told me 5 years ago that I would be excited to meet the author of a spelling program, I would have laughed in their face! When Sissy was in public school, spelling was a subject that would make her cry almost nightly. She still struggles and is certainly not up to grade level, however, she is doing much better and never complains since we have been working with All About Spelling. As a matter a fact, she said she was "jealous" that I would get to meet her. It was Sissy that asked for a photo of her. So, here it is....

I sat through many seminars about writing and the what to expect at certain ages, how to adore the child in your home that loves to argue, cause trouble, throw fits, etc. :) And, I really enjoyed listening to Michelle Duggar speak to us. YES, Michelle Duggar. The mom with 19 children! She was soft spoken and under control, yet she talked with us about a time when she was not always so "peaceful" in her parenting. It was a talk that I took much from.

I addition to enjoying some wonderful wisdom and advice, I was able to meet Sweet Baby's pen pal from the American Heritage Girls program. Their family lives in Cincinnati and homeschools as well. Her mother and I were able to meet for a few minutes. Imagine my excitement when I realized she had brought her daughter with her. What a cutie!

I'll share more in another post about our trip to the Creation Museum.