FREE Math Book & Accompanying Lab Book and 2-Minute Mysteries Book

Free with free shipping.  First come, first serve.

First a Miquon Orange Book (math, first grade level), new condition but missing the first sheet (first 2 pages) and the book that accompanies all the Miquon books, Lab Sheet Annotations, which I bought in good used condition.  We just never did use Miquon, although I did buy Cuisenaire rods and use them.

Secondly, a duplicate copy of Still More Two-Minute Mysteries by Donald Sobol.  I got this copy as a child as a library give-away book.  It's the book I picked out.  It was a library book, so it was quite used when I got it, but it's still in fair condition, not falling apart, no marks, etc.  I thought this was one of the books that came up missing from my childhood collection, so when I went to buy the other two books in the series for my son Jaden William, I bought this one as well.  After the fact, I realized we still had my copy on the shelf.  Great book for crime-solving minds!

Comment on this post if you want something, and I will contact the first ones who post for their address(es).


Thanks in advance for taking these off my hands!

Flowers, Floodwater, Snakes, and Worms

Throughout spring the boys picked bouquets for me.  Well, mostly Jaden William picked flowers for me, but Trusten picks flowers, too, so he added to the arrangements.  I've been needing some more flower vases for awhile, and I finally got some at the thrift store.  Now I don't have to have my flowers in a Coca-Cola glass that a relative gave me from McDonald's.  Here are some pics of the beautiful bouquets my sweet boys picked for me:

Some pictures of some unidentified, never-seen-before types of mushrooms on our property (anyone know?), a picture of what my red honeysuckle looks like this year, and a couple pics of the latest snake he caught (Western Ribbon Snake, a type of garter snake):

Now for a picture of the boys hanging out together on the hill off our back deck before it was covered with the summer weeds,  a picture of Liv in the shower after one of her mudfests, and some pics of all three kids playing in their much-beloved spring yard flood:

Earthworms!

In the next post I'll talk about Trusten's 4th birthday and the last of God's spring feasts, Pentecost.  After that, I'll talk about JW's birthday and our butterfly garden.  Next week starts the boys' swimming lessons, and also JW turns eight.  We're planning to take him for a flight in a private plane.  He'll get some new books and other things.  He's read all of his Cul-de-Sac kid books and only has three of his historical graphic novels left, so he'll get some more of the latter.  It's cool how much he reads about and then tells me.

He asked me not too long ago who William Clark was.  I said, "Wasn't that Lewis' travel partner when they explored up and down the Mississippi River?"  He said he thought so.  I told him we could look it up in the encyclopedia.  We've done this with several things recently, but this is the example I remember.  It gives him practice on looking up things in reference books.  I do this with dictionary skills, too, when he asks about words.  Anyway, I guided him through looking up William Clark, and I told him to read the entry.  He read part of it, enough that we confirmed that is who it was.  I asked him how he knew about him, and he said he'd read about him on Poptropica.  That's an online game he play sometimes.  He sometimes interacts (to an extent, as you can choose things to say from options, not just type whatever you want) with other kids, asking them to play certain activity competition games on there, etc.  He also reads and learns things on there. 

Well, this is it for now.  I included mostly pictures, little typing, as I'm so behind. 

Until next time....

Flooding, Planting, Emigration, Oh So Much!

We have been BUSY!  So much has happened since my last update, which is why this update took longer for me to get around to doing than the last one did.  There is no way I could possibly cover close to everything, but I don't want to share nothing.  (Of course, I'm not sure how many actually keep up with this or care one way or the other, but nevertheless I keep this blog for my own records, anyway.)  I actually plan to do this post and then soon do another one or two, rather than fit everything I decide to cover in one post.

I found out on April 15 that I was pregnant...six weeks and a day pregnant at the time.  Wow, this is my sixth pregnancy, and that was the latest in the pregnancy I've ever been before realizing I was pregnant.  A BIG surprise, to say the least.  We thought we were done.  I had given away nearly all my baby stuff, so I'll have to buy most everything again.  I'm just now getting over my shock and denial, because as bad as it may sound, I really didn't cope well with the news.  All will be fine, though.  :-) I'm starting to feel much better about it.

I kept Passover on the evening of April 17.  I usually include the children in the footwashing, but it was all I could do to even participate in anything myself.  I was so tired and a bit down about a lot of things.  I solemnly partook of some unleavened bread (homemade tortillas) and unfermented grape juice this year, since I don't like to drink any alcohol during the first trimester of pregnancy.  The next afternoon--the afternoon part of the Passover when Salvation died for our transgressions--the boys and I watched a movie that I bought about Salvation's (Jesus'/Yeshua's) life.  I was so disappointed to discover that it was the exact movie that I did not want to see (The Greatest Story Ever Told).  It was the movie we'd rented online last year, and I HATED it.  It had so many things mixed up.  Very misleading.  I figured I may as well get The Passion of the Christ.  I did, and so we watched that about a week later, but I didn't let Trusten see the violent parts.  WHY does everyone have to portray Christ with long hair, though?  Anyway, we kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread all that week, through 25th.  I even made unleavened muffins a couple days for breakfast, and though they were small, they were tasty.  The kids thought they were fun.

Tortillas, ugly but very tasty

Delicious tortilla in the skillet

I don't have much recorded from then until a few days into May.  At some point during that time, I got Jaden William a spelling curriculum--Sequential Spelling.  This is one of those things I really need to go give a good review on.  I LOVE it!  I've not seen any spelling curriculum with which I've been happy, so I've not been using such.  The so-called Natural Speller book I have is anything but natural, in my opinion.  I've pulled it off the shelf to give it a look several times, trying to see what people like so much about it, but I just failed to see it.  I was a super speller in school, and still I'm the one my husband asks when they need to know the spelling of a word.  It was my mother who always asked when I was growing up.  Well, William just hasn't been a good speller.  He excels at reading, though, so it's been confusing for me.  SO, I was flipping through a Timber Doodle catalog one night, and I came across Sequential Spelling advertised as being perfect for those who excel at reading but struggle with spelling.  William! I thought.  I found quite a deal on Ebay for the whole set brand new, and I can't be happier that I bought them.  It makes sense!  It teaches spelling the exact same way I would do so.  I actually used such a method before with William years ago, myself, but it was too soon for him to grasp.  Sooo, if anyone reading this has a child with the same issue (or ANY child), I highly recommend this set of books.  We've done fifteen days on it, and I've already been amazed at how it's working for him.  It uses bases then includes words that all have the same base.  JW writes the word in his workbook first, then I write the word, keeping the base in one color and the beginning, the prefixes, and suffixes in another color.  He then corrects any mistake he may have made.

Sequential Spelling

I also got a language arts book called Language Lessons.  I got the book 1.  So far I've been pleased with it.  He's analyzed one picture so far, used logic to answer questions about it, wrote something about it, and the last few lessons he's done copy work, which is a poem.  After that's finished, he'll learn about poetry, and then I'm not sure what.  But eventually, there is another picture, and then the process is restarted to learn something else.  It's pretty neat.

We've been working on JW's math almost daily.  Right now we're doing addition and subtraction flashcards to help his memory and speed and working through his Grade 2 word problems book by Evan Moor, and he's almost finished with it.  I'll then have him working on more worksheets I'll print off the Internet for more practice on 2- and 3-digit addition and subtraction, including borrowing and carrying and play School House Rock multiplication songs for him to learn those.  After he's got that down a lot better, I'll start him on the Grade 3 word problems book we have.  It's designed for a problem a day, but we do three pages a day, which usually equates to at least five word problems a day.  Then there's the everyday life things, like learning measurements in the kitchen.  He loves helping in the kitchen.  :-)

We've started taking our nature walks, though for awhile I felt so tired and nauseous that I didn't want to do anything.  We'll soon make it a regular thing again, and we'll start back up the plant project, adding more plants to our binder, and we'll be louping things, too.  LOVE the loupes!

JW has asked about many things, as usual.  He took apart a broken calculator one day and asked about the colored wires, which led to a discussion on positive, negative, ground (neutral), electrons, etc.  We talked about static electricity and rubbing off electrons, etc.

We're considering now heavily moving to South America, probably Uruguay, possibly within the next couple of years.  Nathan and I have talked on and off about moving out of the U.S. for five years or so, but lately we've talked about it more seriously.  So we've been learning about other countries, and the boys are included in some of the learning.  Nathan and I also took a week's long trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands (where we'd not live, but it was a nice getaway).  We visited St. Thomas and St. John.  Here are just a few pics of the things that I told the boys about so that they could learn:

The ocean view from our hotel on the beach (our room had the only balcony)

A Laughing Gull

Hermit Crab

Neat rock Nathan found in the ocean, with various fossil and life features

Woven hats and baskets; we saw the guy working on one nearby

The hotel garden

An iguana lizard who lived in the tree in front of our hotel balcony

Coconut retrieval (early to harvest for its nutritious water)

Man chopping open coconuts

Some coral, shells, rock that I collected and brought to William

I have many other pictures, and William was delighted to see (as I knew he would be) that I took a picture of brain coral that was growing in the ocean.  He learned about brain coral from one of his Reading Rainbow dvds.  We all also learned that the people drive on the left side of the road in the VI, as they do in Britain.  (They also drive crazy.)  Most of the people are very friendly there, though, unlike what people as a whole have become here in the States. 

The last thing I'll mention in this post is the flooding we had.  We recently learned about earthquakes, as you may remember.  Now we talked more about flooding and witnessed it firsthand.  The creek in front of our house flooded badly twice this spring.  The last time it got so bad that Nathan did not make it back across when he came home from working.  As a result, his truck was totaled. 

The creek that borders our property on one side

The road in front of our house and the view of where the creek crosses it

Nathan's truck in the flooded creek

I also have videos of the floods we've had this year.  They can be found at the following links:

Second Flood, w/ the Truck

First Flood, High Water (Silent Audio) 
(not as high as when the truck didn't make it)

First Flood, Lower Water (Sound Included, Longer Video)


Well, there's SO much more to cover, but I'll try to make another post to cover the rest sometime next week.  :-)

Earthquakes and Louping!

Wow, it's been nearly a month again since I've updated this.  Let's see....

We talked about:

*Poetry

*Hearts and the circulatory system

*Earthquakes and Plate Tectonics:  we read about them, the instruments that measure them, and other disasters caused by them (like fires, mudslides, tsunamis, etc.), as well as plate tectonics, in Wikipedia, watched some video animations on plate tectonics and some other videos on earthquakes and tsunamis, and talked about earthquake safety before, during, and after earthquakes.

I bought a book about a year or so ago called The Private Eye by Kerry Ruef, used from Amazon.com.  I LOVE analogies and use them heavily in teaching my children and others, so I thought it would be right up my alley.  Well, I finally got around to reading it recently.  I then bought some jeweler's loupes--five of them--and we've been having a great time ever since!  We've louped: flowers, buds in various stages, leaves, insects, insect eggs, rocks--especially largely crystalled ones, food, and more.  It's so much fun!  We carry loupes with us on our nature walks.  I was fascinated by a honey bee, especially by its pollen sacs! Will you believe I've never even noticed the pollen sacs before?!  Green leaves of various plants look stunning in bright sunlight!  Who would have thought things were so glittery and dazzling?  You can really see the hairlike structures of plant parts all the better with a loupe, too. Moss!  Insect eggs!  Crystals on rocks!  Oh, IT'S GREAT!!!!!!!!!!

Jaden William climbed a tree one day on our nature walk (he's always climbing trees), and he brought back down a very fascinating find.  They must be some sort of insect eggs.  They are COLORFUL, SHINY, AND THEY HAVE LITTLE SPIKES AROUND THEM!  They remind me of the sun with its rays, or the pagan statues with the spiked crowns depicting the sun (like the "Statue of Liberty"), or sea urchins.  Oh, they are SO NEAT!  So, so pretty.  We brought them in, and when I used a plastic tweezers to remove them for microscope viewing, I discovered that they BOUNCE! That must be what the "spikes" are all about.  I theorize that they're some sort of defense mechanism to protect them from enemies.  They just bounce away.

Some things that William has collected in his collection containers for viewing include a red wasp, some sort of insect eggs or pupae that he unearthed, and an unidentified insect.  Oh, and one day a few days ago he went to pick up a Frisbee that had been left in the yard, and there was a round worm on it!  Oh, wow...I never had seen one of those before!  It had to have been a male, because I read and found out the rear ends of the males are curved (and this one's rear was).  Creepy thing!  It looked like a nasty piece of spaghetti.

The mouth is the black spot on the left end.  It behaved like a snake.

Some of the flowers we louped were Henbit and Dead Nettle, and William pressed a Rue Anemone flower with his plant press, and we then louped it.  Do YOU know the difference between Henbit and Dead Nettle?  We have both in our yard....a beautiful purple carpet!

Above left is henbit, right is dead nettle; bottom is pressed rue anemone

William loves art, so I told him he ought to start pressing a lot of plants and make things with them, like cards or framed art.  I am planning to enroll William in a painting and/or drawing class sometime this summer.  He wants also to take a pottery class, but from what I can tell, ten years of age is the youngest anyone allows at a pottery wheel, so he'll have to patiently wait two  years.  Meanwhile, we're considering enrolling Trusten in theater.

One of the books we've recently read is Hummy and the Wax Castle.  I think we've only read it completely once before--two years ago when I first bought it.  It's an excellent book on honey bees.  A book I recently bought is It's Just a Plant, and we read it, too.  I was mostly pleased with it...except for including Halloween in it.  It didn't have anything to do with the point of the book.  It's about Cannabis sativa, one of the most useful plants on this earth but probably the most wrongfully demonized.  I love when we read books like these.  I get so burned out on the Berenstain Bears, all fifty-something titles we own.  I really also enjoy when we read our Ranger Rick and Your Big Backyard magazines.  We learned some fun things in those this past month, too, like the birds who build a house and yard decor to impress the females.

Just two of the great educational books we have

A while back we got a cool map in the mail.  I trimmed it and kept it until we could get it laminated (who can have too many cool maps around the house to use?).

I finally got around to getting it laminated at Staples.  The woman behind the counter let William go back there to see how something is laminated (besides using the laminating sheets I do at home) and then trimmed with a cutting board.  I snapped a photo with my iPhone while we were there:

It is just about time to get some flowers to put in my front porch pots, and I am determined this year to have a butterfly garden to further increase our butterfly visitors.  My dad bought me a great book a couple years ago about attracting butterflies and hummingbirds.  My plan is to let the boys help me create a butterfly flowerbed SHAPED like a butterfly:

Doesn't this sound great?!  I'm so excited!  I still haven't decided on all the flowers I'm going to use.  I will use the ones they list as a guide, but at least one thing is being changed, I think.

Look at this beautiful Zebra Swallowtail!  I LOVE butterflies! 

So do the children.  The following pictures include two of Liv squatting to get a closer look at some butterflies:

The third picture is Liv bringing me a flower. :-)

We haven't read any from Mystery of History in the past month.  We'll get back to it at some point to see what happens next.  ;-)  William enjoys counting his money and purchasing things, and I ask him questions when we're working together in the kitchen, to get him to practice measurements.  For example, I'll use the 1/2 cup measuring cup sometimes and tell him, for example, that the recipe calls for three cups of whatever, so how many 1/2 cups would that be.  He'll learn most of what he needs to know math-wise in this real-life manner.  I did buy a couple neat math word problems workbooks by Evan Moor.  I got the "2nd grade" and "3rd grade" (I don't even call my kids by some "grade" but rather just their age), and William is already halfway through the first one.  He mostly thinks it's fun.

He hates writing and was so upset about his journal writings, so I stopped enforcing it.  I now nicely encourage it, and today he even said, "Writing in my journal is kind of fun..."  He just hated my correcting everything and making him writing it again.  It took the fun out of it, so I stopped doing that weeks ago.  I do not want him to hate writing.  His spelling is what I'd call poor at times, but he reads a lot, so he'll naturally come around and spell better, and when he's ready to write for whatever reason, he'll write.  He just doesn't have much of a need for it right now, as far as he's concerned.

We were looking at the back of the math workbooks, and the company has some workbooks for editing/proofreading.  Well, he LOVES that (just doesn't like having it done to him, I guess), and he actually asked me to get him some.  I haven't yet, but I'm waiting until we have more money, as it's just that time of year when we don't have a lot of extra.

He is reading Charlotte's Web right now, each night.  He is still reading his Cul-de-Sac Kids books when we drive somewhere.  Oh, and he LOVES the PS3 Jeopardy now (guess it's actually PS2, but our console is a PS3).  Nathan and I play nearly every night (except Sabbath--Friday--night, and then we watch lectures).  William thought it was stupid at first, but I guess the curiosity got the best of him.  He'd lie awake in bed every night listening, and he realized he knew some answers.  So then he started asking whether he could stay up and watch us.  Sometimes Nathan lets him.  He has played with us twice, but mostly he only gets to watch.  He's a smart boy.  He answers a few questions during each game.

William has been very busy lately with this and that.  He's either painting something; building something with wood, hammer, and nails; fixing something (oh, he's a GREAT helper, as he's getting good at fixing things); hoeing grass; picking up limbs and rocks; washing something; reading something; and all sorts of things.  He really doesn't stop.  He's also recently been able to watch and help his daddy redo our main bathroom:

It will be done soon!

Trusten busily counts things now, and he's still always wanting to watch some movie.  They've watched a lot of our Blue Planet and Planet Earth series lately (that we originally watched over two years ago), and they've both really enjoyed that.  Trusten has also practiced folding and cutting.

Well, to conclude the blog, here are a couple pictures of my two sweet boys playing the PS3 on their game day and William picking up Liv in her play box (whatever it's called...she climbed in it):

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND ANYONE READING THIS TO BUY SOME JEWELER'S LOUPES AND GET TO LOUPING!

Until next time...

Lessons About Fire, Metals, and Snow; and Will's Lego Spaceships

It SNOWED, and we got about nine inches or so of accumulation, so we all had a lot of fun.  I posted about that on my last post, but after the snow was melting off, William asked me about snow.  He asked how it was made.  I decided to read straight from the encyclopedia to him.  He learned then that it is water that is in a vapor form that freezes into minute crystals and falls to the ground.  I then asked him whether he'd like to make paper snowflakes.  We watched a Youtube video instructing us how to make them, and he went excitedly making his own after I demonstrated with the first one.  They didn't turn out exactly the right way, but I think he did a great job.

 He then wanted me to remind him how to cut hearts, so I did, and I showed Trusten how to cut out a heart.  My parents' marriage anniversary had just passed, too, and they were about to visit us, so William gave his snowflakes and hearts as gifts. 

Before the snow melted away, we made a snow volcano. William made a center, I poured baking soda in, and then I fetched the camera and the baby, and William had mixed some paint in some vinegar and poured it in for fun:

He then delighted in shooting arrows through the "volcano" with his bow:

One day on the way to the grocery store one day, William asked about metal in the ground, what it does if you bury it for awhile and then dig it back up later, whether more metal in the ground would "build up on it."  So, I explained briefly that most metals would break down in the earth and the minerals would disperse through the soil.  I talked about finding iron nails and other iron pieces over the years, while digging, and how rusted the pieces would be, as they oxidized, breaking down and returning to the earth in dispersed pieces.  He said that he recently dug up some metal that he'd buried about a year ago and said that it looked as if it had pieces of other things building up on it.  I told him that was another possibility.

The next day Will talked about metals weakening in the fire.  He'd put some metal piece (can't remember what now) in the wood stove, and he said after the fire was out, it was still in there, and he got it out, and it snapped easily.  I told him metals could melt, and yes, they could also weaken and become brittle.  I explained how different types of metals had different melting points, etc.

The following day a dying fire with still quite a bit of burning embers was in the wood stove, and William took a lighter and was trying to light up something else in there separately.  He discovered twinkling sparks that were quite dazzling.  He called me over to see, and he asked why that was happening.  I told him it had something to do with the electric charge, but I wasn't sure how to explain beyond that.  Nathan later told him that...well, I can't exactly remember--ha ha--and poor Jaden William couldn't exactly, either, because the next day I told him I would film him making sparks, and in the video he forgot how to describe it.  There was hardly anything in the way of embers this time, though, so the video is not nearly as spectacular as the show we saw the previous day:

One of William's favorite things is to build with blocks.  The sixth day of the week is video game day where he gets to play video games (with breaks) if he's exhibited good behavior during the week (which he usually does).  One of his favorites is Lego Star Wars, so he likes to build Lego spaceships.  I told him I'd like to take a picture of some of his creations (the ones he had currently laid out on his dresser top).  I told him I'd post them to this blog, and he insisted that he tell me the name of each.  Some of them bear names I know he got from the Star Wars game, but some of the things he made up himself:

From l to r, front: 1. News-telling spaceship  2. News-telling spaceship guard 3. Tie fighter  4. Rescue spaceship 5. Half bull-dozer, half crane  6. Naboo Star Fighter.  From l to right, back row:  7. "Just a trailer"  8. battleship  ("white and yellow things are telescopes, blue ones are cannons")  9. Big-engined spaceship  10. race car (he explained his turbo engine setup to me...he's so cool).

Side 

11. "20,000 MPH Spaceship" (He explained in detail about how there are bombs stored, 20 seconds after they are shot, others have formed and then take their place, and then he explained how it has six places that are in control of speed, which is why the ship is so fast.  Doesn't look like there could be room for all that stuff, I know, but he showed me how he had it all figured out.  

If anyone wonders the same thing I have, namely that his colors aren't always symmetrical, he has explained to me that he runs out of certain blocks, so he has to use other colors.  It's because he will keep built ships, cars, etc. on his dresser for the longest.  He doesn't want to disassemble them.  What do you all think about the guys wielding their swords?  Pretty cool, huh?  Shhhh...no one tell him, but I'm planning to get him the Star Wars movies for his eighth birthday.  I haven't seen the recently-made ones, the 1-3.  I've only seen the old ones, 4-6.

  Some other things of which I've taken pictures are as follows:

The binder I made for Jaden William in which to file his history stuff

His new sock monkey "Sara" that he bought and a journal entry in which he wrote about it.

Will update again in a few days, so until next time....

Mystery of History, Snow, the Eye, and Pasting

Some highlights since my last post....

Jaden William:  Will loves talking about the periodic table of elements.  Nearly every time we sit down at the table to eat, he looks at the big poster on the dining room wall and quizzes us and asks us questions about various elements.  He has many elements memorized. 

He has been cheering Trusten on and encouraging him whenever Trusten is doing book work or talking about numbers and counting things. 

We started the Mystery of History Volume 1.  So far we've done three lessons.  He's done two projects:  following instructions by himself to make a book about creation, including the six days of work and the holy seventh day of rest, complete with writing and pictures AND forming his own animal out of clay and giving it a name.  He has also started making out memory cards on 3x5 index cards that will be used to help him memorize the high points of his history lessons and for games.  Trusten sits with us on the couch and listens to the lessons or plays quietly in the floor with Olivia.

He has practiced more on his addition with carrying.  He's been working on finishing his last spelling lessons and language arts pages in his Complete Curriculum Grade 2, and he's been regularly writing and drawing in his journal. 

He has read something like eleven Cul-de-Sac Kids books now and three or four of his graphic history novels.  Concerning the latter, he said he's "taking a break from them."  He says they are a little difficult for him, but he does like them.  I told him that it was okay if he wanted to wait and read them when he got a little older.

Trusten:  I introduced him to pasting.  I cut out pictures for him, and he made a collage on a piece of yellow paper that he cut out by himself.  He just about cut up the entire yellow sheet.  I got up to get something, and he went to cutting more on it!  When I got back, I had to explain to him that he was only to cut out the yellow portion of the page so he could paste pictures on it, not cut the page to pieces!  He also learned how to make a paper chain.  I cut out the pieces for him, and then I showed him how to do it, then I helped him do a few links, and then the last three links he did all by himself!  He did a great job.  He's also shown that he is understanding numbers pretty well up to ten. 

Both boys:  Bible reading every day.  William likes to read our daily Proverbs chapter.  He thinks it's fun, and I think it's GREAT!  I've also been randomly selecting sections (usually about a chapter, sometimes less, depending on the amount of information) from the gospel accounts so that the boys can learn directly from our Lord Salvation himself how to be like him.  On last Sabbath, we went over Choosing Obedience lesson 3. 

We started learning about the human body.  We  use books we have, and we have a flannel board with felt pieces.  Jaden William wanted to start on the eye, so we learned one day recently about the eye and the various parts and how it works, as well as a few cool facts about the eye. 

We've taken a few hikes on the sunny days.  The boys have been having fun playing in the snow we've had this week.   The last two days have been sunny, so even though we've had cold air temps, the sun has been nice, and we've taken the last couple of walks w/o Liv, during her nap time in her play pen. 

The boys love to play on the Playstation 3.  They play Lego Star Wars and Wall-E.  Trusten doesn't really know how to play very well, but he likes to watch William or play with him, anyway.  They also never get tired of playing with their various blocks.  Their overall favorite blocks are the Lincoln logs, but lately they've played a lot with the wooden baby alphabet blocks, and Will has been enjoying creating various structures that look like the Roman Colosseum.   He actually constructed the first model and called me to look at it and told me it was like the Colosseum.  :-)

Well, that's it for the highlights.  Here are some pictures:

Top, from r to l: Trusten making a collage, children sitting to listen to me read and talk, William working on his Creation book.  Bottom, from r to l:  William and his animal named "Three-Legged Big-Head," one of Will's Colosseum models, and Trusten with his paper-chain

Top, r to l:  Boys playing in snow, boys headed to top of hill for our hike.  Bottom, r to l: Jaden William's name written in the snow with his PEACE "sword," and William with an icicle

Until next time...