Circling Through This Life

Some time ago some dear friends of ours hosted a Dramatic Skit and Reading activity.  Though I chose not to participate in a skit or do a reading, I very much enjoyed watching my family (and friends!) participate. I didn’t get as many pictures as I wanted.  I really wanted a picture of Honeybear reading There’s a Monster At the End Of this Book.   But here are a few that I did get:

I know, I know it’s been a couple of weeks since I did a Random 5 on Friday.  This will be the first one for September!  September? What happened to August? It’s only September 6 but it feels like September is flying away as well! 1. In mid-August the three “big girls” went camping at Mt Rainer with our church. They went hiking on the mountain.  They came out exhausted but happy and excited to tell us all about it.   2.  We started back to school on August 26th.  We eased into our new school year by only scheduling 5 days of school over two weeks.  It will be very strange to only have 3 girls instead of 4 in our home school, but I’m really excited about the things we’ll be studying! This week we’re really back it ! 3.  I finally learned how to can tomatoes and there is no way I could have canned them without the Tomato Canning Extravaganza that my dear friend Mimi organized. BooBear and I helped process about 100 lbs. of tomatoes (that was 5!...

Do you remember what you were doing 18 years ago? Admittedly, I have trouble remembering what I was doing last week let alone a year ago.  Forget multiple years ago! But I do have some recollection of 18 years ago. It was a Sunday.  Unusually hot for Duluth, MN.  And it was Father’s day.  I was waiting for my husband to get in from Fort Lewis where he was Cadre for the ROTC Camp.  He was flying in on leave in anticipation of the birth of our first born daughter.  She wouldn’t make her appearance though until the next day. My doctor had scheduled an induction for June 19 which allowed us to contact the Red Cross and arrange for my husband to be home.  He had a well meaning Captain try to comfort us by telling us that his wife was in labor for something like 32 hours and that he had plenty of time to fly around the world and make it back in time for the birth.  The thought of a 32 hour labor was most emphatically not comforting especially not the ...

I completed and utterly missed last week.  I had every intention of posting a Random 5 last week but well, it didn’t happen. 1.  This past weekend BooBear had her last piano recital. Well the last one as a minor. She’ll be attending college in the fall studying music and playing the piano so I’m sure it’s not the last time ever that she’ll perform but it is the last time she’ll perform in this type of recital. 2.  We’ve had an awesome week of product deliveries! All for the review crew! The science will be technically for the next school year but the Lily Lapp books are some fun read alouds to end our school year and the pile of books from Moving Beyond the Page is a wonderful way to finish up Tailorbear’s 8th grade! We also received our download copy of the TeenCoder C# series from Home School Programming.  Boobear may be graduating in 3 weeks but she has said she “will probably work on this over the summer anyway.” 3. Graduation season is upon us!  I...

Yesterday when I linked up my Silly Post for Debbie’s Think Back Thursday, I noticed that this week’s theme is Black and White.  This brought to mind the images my daughter created while playing with the black and white setting of the digital camera.  Photos like these: The above photo is a self-portrait of BooBear.  She likes playing with the camera.  I think the camera likes her!  The photo below demonstrates Supergirl’s love of the camera.  She loves having her picture taken anytime, anyplace, black and white or full color! I found the next picture irresistible.  Of course every time I look at it I can’t help but hear Madonna sing the phrase “strike a pose”.  Turtlegirl tells me that she was demonstrating to Tailorbear how to strike a pose. But as I searched for those pictures I found other pictures, that while not photographed in black and white cried out to be included because they were black and white themed. Our digital piano didn’t...

One of the blog memes that I really enjoy participating in is Think Back Thursday hosted by Debbie over at Debbie’s Digest .  I do strive to post on Thursdays but I never seem to quite make it so I am thankful the linky stays open so I can add in sometime during the week. This week’s theme is silly and since I am needing some silly right now it sounds perfect to me.   One of the things that makes my family special is the silly ways we goof off and make each other laugh. This picture makes me smile.  It is just so Turtlegirl.  Big silly glasses and eating a pickle.    I think this was taken when she was about 5 1/2. I don’t know why but my girls were always trying to sit or climb into the strangest places.  So here is one silly girl sitting in a kitchen trash can!  She had just turned 3 a few days earlier.  Tailorbear being silly! Playing dress up gives you a chance to be silly and make up stories.  BooBear and Turtlegirl decid...

It’s been a long time since I’ve participated in Debbie’s Think Back Thursday meme but when I saw that this week’s theme was “wood” I knew just the pictures I wanted to use.  We took a trip 9 years ago.  9 years!  I cannot believe it’s been that long!  It was an awesome little trip to spend some time together as a family.  I had been a single parent for nearly 1 year while Honeybear had gone to “play in the giant sandbox.” (Think Middle East Military Deployment).  On this trip we drove through Oregon to take a field trip to see crater lake and then on to northern California to see some really big trees. Mostly I just wanted to be able to say I had been to California! Photographic evidence that at one time Turtlegirl and BooBear really were taller than their younger sister, Tailorbear. You can see little Tailor’s head resting on her arms. She’s barely able to see over that sign. I love seeing pictures of my husband with our children.  Above: he hold...

Here we are just two days before Christmas,  We’re at letter O for the Blogging Through The Alphabet.  Being so close to Christmas it would make sense to do something like O is for Ornaments and I could very easily do a whole post about ornaments.  But I found a bunch of “ordinary” pictures.  Pictures of us doing boring ordinary things.  Here are just a few.     Sleeping.  Something we do everyday.  Not necessarily daily on the couch though.         Yard work. Another ordinary activity. This was taken in the spring after the major ice storm of January 2012           School work.  Boring.  But it’s something ordinary that we do nearly everyday.           More school work.  Doing school with the cat on the lap is a pretty ordinary event for us.               I wish that goofing off during schoo...

It’s been several weeks (months??!!) since I’ve participated in Debbie’s Think Back Thursday Meme.  I really enjoy the the Think Back “meme” because it’s fun to hunt for pictures to fit the theme! I know today isn’t Thursday but thankfully, Debbie’s Digest keeps the link open for the whole week so I can post when I want. This week’s theme is “rocks.” I rarely (pretty close to NEVER) post pictures of myself on my blog.  I just hate looking at pictures of myself but while searching for pictures of my girls on a particular trip where we climbed on rocks, I found this one: We were on vacation in Kentucky visiting my Grandmother. On this particular day we’d left the girls with family while cousin Clint took us for drive to the State Overlook.  Grandma lived in Kentucky but if you climbed to the top of her mountain you could look into VA.  I don’t remember if we were in VA looking at KY or in KY looking at VA but at one point Clint, who reminds me so much of my dad, poi...