Ahh, the joys of Spring!

I love this time of year. Having the windows open, sending the kiddos outside to play, seeing Luke bringing me the heads of flowers (not the stem, just the top of the flower) - it's a great time of year. It's also the time that I (knowing my type A personality) make final curriculum decisions for the next school year. To help in making those final decisions, I made a trip yesterday to the Homeschool Gathering Place in Raleigh. Talk about a kid in a candy store! I looove going there! The funny thing is that the kids love going too. Rachael said yesterday that she loved looking at new school books. She also loves all of the used books they have for sale. Rach always comes home with a stack of new books to read when gets to visit that store.

Anyway, I was able to look at many different math books (that's what I've been struggling with for Rach this year) and I decided! Yay! That's such a hump to get over. We decided on Saxon Algebra 1 (how can she possibly be old enough to be in Algebra 1?!?!) with the DIVE cd. That will allow her to get the lesson taught by someone who knows what they're doing (it's been a loooong time since I was in an Algebra class) and then I can check it. This will also allow her to stay with this curriculum until she goes to PCC for 11th & 12th grades. That was one of my goals - I really don't want to change her math curriculum for the next four years.

While we were looking through other materials, we found the Further Up, Further In study. It's a literature unit study based on the Chronicles of Narnia. She and Alex will do some of it together, but Rach will do all of it. I think she's looking forward to that.

In talking with Elliotte last night, he wants to do the kids History. So, we decided to start Mystery of History together as a family! I am so excited about this. I've wanted to do this program for a while, but haven't been able to organized it on my own. I just spend too much time each day putting out 'brush fires' and can't get to a good history program that we can do together. So, starting in a couple of weeks, we are going to begin Mystery of History book 1.

The kids will have testing during the last week of April - and we will be done for this school year. And we are all looking forward to it! We'll take the month of May and some of June, then we'll get started back - probably with a 4 day week. I've gotta leave time in there to take some trips to Kings Dominion! We are going to use our Christmas money (thank you Auntie Lois!) to cover most of the season tickets! The last time we did this was the year Elliotte started grad school - 2006 - and we haven't been able to since. Until this year I didn't think I could take the kids with me alone, so with Elliotte in grad school, it wasn't going to work to get tickets. But, this year, we can go a lot and we'll have my brother and family to go with, as well as some good friends! We are all looking forward to going - the kids are bigger now and can ride many more things than three years ago. Rachael is taller than me, so she can ride anything she wants to. Alex and David can ride most of the rides, where last time they really could only ride kiddie rides and some with a parent. In 2006, Luke could barely ride the kiddie rides, since he was only 15 months when we started going. Now, he and Brinlee (his little friend!) will be able to ride a bunch of rides together! It was a shocker looking at a scrapbook from our visits in the summer of 2006 - the kids have grown so much! I'll have to post some 2006/2009 comparisons once we go to KD in April.

We are loving our time at Open Door Ministries. It's been a time of resting (over the last year), getting to know new friends, learning and growing. We have a small group with two other couples - together we're learning more about marriage. I'm glad God has given this opportunity to us. We have a heart to see other couples have a better marriage - not just one to settle for. There's so much that we've been through and have come out the other side closer, more connected with each other and with God.