Second Half of August

 First Day of School!

I have never felt less prepared for a school year, but it came anyway. And we are plugging along just fine. It always feels good to get back into a rhythm. I always try to make breakfast special our first day. They had new notebooks, treats, and their special cereals that they picked. Miles is in 6th grade this year, Gwen is in 4th, Lindy is in 1st, Benson is in Pre-K, and Davy's just happy to be here.  I know I'm biased, but I have some pretty good looking' kids!

First scenes from homeschool! Back into Poetry Tea Time, Co-Ops, and schedules. I've been so impressed with Miles and Gwen jumping back into things, waking up early to get school done. It's hard, but I'm a pretty lucky homeschool mama and I'm so grateful for the freedom to do this. 

Found a cool mural "downtown" and I pulled the car over to take a picture (because I knew I would never purposely find it again-dang you lack of sense of direction) and made the kids get out and take the quickest picture known to man because Miles didn't have shoes and the ground was super hot. He literally stood in the gutter water, ran in for the picture, and ran back to the gutter water. :)

We decided we needed a few more chickens, so we ordered about 100 more. We wanted more egg layers (In hopes of selling some in the Spring), and we wanted to try our hand at producing all of our own chicken for the upcoming year. So far so good! The kids are loving it. And I still want to giggle and scratch my head at the fact that they send baby chicks through the US postal service. 

Using what we have around the land to make our own egg layer box. Brand new, metal, roll away nesting boxes like this can cost $1,000. We are building ours for free. 

Richie is the best. He comes up with the most random and fun things I'd never do with the kids. Today it was picking all of the unwanted nectarines off the tree and engaging the kids in a fruit war. Dad vs. kids with the tramp fort for cover. :)

Another attempt at church at home. Started out well enough, ended in tears. Sounds about right. 

We tend to shy away from busy parks in the summer, but once public schools are back in session, we take advantage of less busy places! Woop Woop! This is the coolest park we've found so far. We haven't looked too hard yet, but I can tell, this one will be hard to beat. 

We've also taken a liking to grabbing a couple Little Ceasar's pizzas one day of the week, heading to the library and picking up some books while eating our pizza next to the fountain. The library still isn't fully open, but you can pick up books you've had on hold and check out grab bags they've put together of different themes. We'll take what we can get, right?

We finished reading "Little Britches- Father and I were Rachers" with the kids. Richie grew up reading it, I've read it before, but it didn't stop us from crying just about every chapter. It's so tender, and Ralph's Dad is just the best. I love sharing good books with my kids, it's even better when it's the whole family. Our celebration was pretty simple. We tried to eat foods they would've eaten in the book. Including meat and potatoes, celery, and a custard pie. We watched some horse trick riding videos YouTube, then we went to our neighbor's house (Jeff and Slyvia). They let us milk their goats and brush down their horses. It was a new experience for us all! 

Other random pictures. 1.Miles and Gwen have been learning about Family Search. It makes me happy to see them figure that out. This day they were taking a "how well do you know your ancestors" game and seeing who could get the highest score. 2. Beautiful foggy morning (Although now we are having these kind of skies regularly from wildfire smoke. 3. So.Much.Canning.  4. Another cool mural! Love these!