Three Months old

I am just wanting to wish my sweet little Daphne a Happy 3 month old Birthday! She is getting so big. I haven't had her weighed in over a month, but I would guess that she is about 13 lbs now. She has been my hardest to get on a schedule, but I waited patiently and now she is on a schedule. She goes to bed at 8 and she wakes up at 8 with one or possibly two feedings during that. She then takes a 2 1/2 hour morning nap and like a two hour afternoon nap. She is also getting very into playing with her toys. She rolls onto her side and grabs the toys or kicks at them. She is also so sweet and happy. I am such a blessed Mommy! :)

Also her three month birthday happens to fall on my Dad's birthday so Happy Birthday to my Dad. I am so lucky to have had him as my father. I truely love talking to my dad. He is so smart and insightful. He always has interesting topics to discuss. He also gives the best and most compassionate advice. I love my dad!

September Homeschool Highlights!

I love the month of September! In August we started back into the homeschool year, but September is when it really feels like school time. We have been busy again with F.A.I.T.H. Co-op and Mops. The girls love school. Valerie is even becoming so independent. She no longer cries when she gets left in her room. She is just so ready and excited for it! We are breezing right through Lily's first grade school work. She just has such an excitement for learning. It makes it hard not to fly through it. I already need to get Lily into second grade curriculum for reading here in the next few weeks. Also the main highlights to this month have been field trips. We went on three very fun field trips this month. The first one was to Laura Ingells Wilder's home in Mansfield, Mo. We went with friends and had such a great time learning all about her. Lily already loves the little kid versions of the books. I can't wait until she is a little older and we can get into all of the Little House on the Prairie Books!

We also went on a fun field trip as a family to the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame! Lily and Valerie had both received family passes when they did the library summer reading program. The girls' favorite part was the race car. It had a racing game inside it so they both liked playing that. Lily came in 30th place every time. Valerie played it and got 20th place. Wonder who will be our race car driver? :)

There were areas on each sport. Lots of things to read, but also fun things to do. There was a putting green and a basketball shooting area. There was also a very cool football throwing area where you tried to throw the football through the wholes. Jason really enjoyed that. I think we could have left him there for half the day.

There were also statues through out it. Since I am a Yankee fan, I posed next to a Yankee coach or player. Okay so I am not a very good fan!!!

Jason was very quick to then show me what he thinks of the Yankees! Not funny!!

The girls posing by a female basketball player that was outside with some other statues. Okay not sure how educational I truely made this field trip. Sports are not my thing, but we still had fun learning a little. lol.

The last fun field trip of the month was to the Harvest Festival at Rutledge Wilson Farm. We had a great time. Here the girls are posing for a picture. I love their new Fall hats!

Lily also learned about how to get the corn off the cob and ground up for the chickens. She really loved that. The girls both got to ride horses and pet different farm animals.

The girls loved looking at the honey bees. As a treat, we got them little honey stick candy.

And ofcourse we needed to pick out some pumpkins. How fun! The girls even painted their pumpkins as soon as we got home.

One of our favorite times is doing science together. We just love how hands on it is! The other day we read books on volcanoes and learned how they erupt. We then had a model volcano and we used baking soda, food coloring, and vinegar to make it erupt. How fun!

Just wanted to share a little of the highlights of our educational experience. There are lots of other things that we could share but these are some of the best things we did this month!

Precious Daphne!

I just wanted to write a blog about how much I enjoy my precious little third daughter, Daphne! She is so sweet and so cuddly. I think that she is probably my most challenging baby, but that actually is only because the other two were so easy. I really think that Daphne is pretty easy too. Actually today as I write this, Daphne took a 3 hour nap from 8-11 this morning and then went back down from 12:15- now (1:30) and she is still sleeping. She also sleeps great at night, but she does wake up more often then the other two did at this age. Daphne really is such a smiley baby. I just love how much she lights up and she just is so happy when I hold her. She loves her big sisters and really is good for them. She doesn't seem like she is in a rush with anything and I am not either. I just love her little face so much. I am enjoying our time together so much. I really don't want her to grow up too fast.

I love these pics of Daphne. They really show how different she looks from her big sisters. She has such a round little face and beautiful blue eyes. I am trying to get more into cloth diapers with Daphne...atleast at home. :)

I also forgot to say that Daphne is 2 mths in these pics. I am now looking to find her a cute outfit for our Fall family pics. I can't wait!!!

A little more school stuff

I wanted to add a little more info about the school work that I am doing with the girls. We have been using Hooked on Phonics since last March and we love it. There were 6 boxes in my set and we have almost done 4 of them. I think she will be done by the end of October or a little sooner. She has loved this program. She does great at learning new skills and then there is lots of practice time. Lily loves reading. She is so good at her phonetic skills and she does great with the comprehension questions. I love that she loves it so much!

Math is my least favorite thing to teach. I hate that I am not better at teaching it, but she does seem to learn quickly. Right now we have beend doing a kindergarten full year book. It has lessons on graphing, sorting, adding, subtracting, telling time, etc. She enjoys it. I don't love worksheets, but it is a very good way to make sure that I teach her everything she needs to know.

In October, we are planning to start on the Hooked on Phonics Math program. It looks hard to me. I hope that I can get her ready for it soon. I like that it comes with play money and dice and other fun manipulatives. I also need to be working on other things that I haven't found in the books. I want to work with her on counting by 5's and 2's.

Can't leave Valerie out. She is 2 1/2. I am thinking that I might start her in preschool at 3, but for now I am doing some worksheets with her. She loves them. She has a letter sounds one and a colors and shapes one.

We are starting with our colors. Valerie is doing great!

I love homeschooling my girls!

School is about ready to start

Back to School Time!!!! Our homeschool co-op starts back on September 9th, but we have already started the homeschool year. Lily was just too excited about learning for us to wait. I love that about homeschooling. We can start whenever she is ready and we can take breaks when needed. Due to co-op, we needed a beautiful new backpack. Lily found this monkey one at target and loved it. We then had Poshy Tots Boutique put her name on it. Lily loves it sooo much!! Today the girls tried on their back to school oufits. Don't they look pretty!!

Lily is so proud to finally be a Kindergartner...even though all of her work is first grade level.

This year, Lily's favorite subject is history. She is working on Alpha Omega's first grade history. There is a different book for her to study each month. The first month is all about herself and her friends and her faith. She loved it so we went through it twice as fast as I had planned. So we are already starting the second months book. It is all on different methods of communication.

She reads all of the lessons and then completes the activities. There are also three quizes in each book and one final test. Lily loves being tested! ;)

My favorite subject to teach is bible. She has two devotionals. One of them we just finished and it was so perfect for her age. This next one is just for girls and I hope that it is perfect. We will be finishing the first one soon.

When teaching Lily her bible lessons, I also want to do activities each week that teach her about generosity and giving so we will be looking for ways to bless people around us. I think that is so important for her to learn.

We are also learning about Paul and his journey. Here is a map of his travels and Lily has been practicing reading the names of the cities. That is not easy, even for me. lol.

The last thing that I will share here is just a little bit of Lily's writing and journaling. We do writing every day. Some days we work on getting the letters properly made, but other days, I let her just free write about whatever she has done lately. I try not to be too picky with spelling and such because I want her to learn to try to spell on her own and to have initiative.

That first writing was about her fondue party and the second one is about riding her bike. I am so proud of her already. She is doing great!!

I left off reading and math and Valerie's work from this blog so I will add those soon. :)

Peters Family Update

I have a friend who writes the best blogs on her facebook. She kind of updates us all on her life and her kids. I just love it. So I thought that I would try to just be better about doing a whole family update every once in awhile. Here it goes! Lily is very ready for school to start. She will be doing co-op every Thursday and we will be doing a mixture of different curriculums at home. I have to admit that doing school work with Lily is one of my favorite things. I think it brings the best out of Lily. She is a very hyperactive and often challenging child, but when she is focused, she is brilliant and funny and a true joy. I love watching how quickly she learns and she loves school. She always wants to do more than one days worth of work. We are also going to be getting her signed up for girl scouts this year. I hope that she gets a great leader. I think she will make some great friends through that.

Valerie is the funniest little child ever. I love that she is still my cuddly baby girl. I have never seen a child smile so much and so true. She is always giggling and making silly faces. She truely has her daddy's goofy personality. I think she is much harder to teach though. She is so stubborn and she does not like showing off like Lily does. She does things when she wants to! One thing she really loves though is drawing. She is so much better than Lily was at this age. She makes circles and straight lines like crazy. She even writes the letter V for her name. We have had a really fun time lately with her speech. She is talking so much, but she definitely has a hard time with saying certain words. Valerie had a hard time saying Daphne. At the beginning, she was calling her Baby Daddy...lol. She just couldn't get the right sound so we practiced and she started calling her Dappy...so then we all started calling the baby, Dappy Duck. :) Now she has been working really hard and she calls her...Daaaa____Ne. I think it is so cute!

Daphne is our sweet little baby. I can't believe that she is already 5 weeks old. She definitely loves to smile and she loves car rides. Really if she is ever crabby, a car ride fixes that. This is very good since I love to be busy and on the go. She also loves to breastfeed...sometimes more than I like. lol. She is sleeping great at night. She really only had a problem for the first 3 or 4 days after she was born. I love having a baby again! I realized today though that both of the girls were rolling over by 6 weeks and I have hardly even layed Daphne on her belly...she is not a belly baby like they were and Jason is really letting her get her way in that. lol.

Jason is doing good. He is working a lot, but his job is pretty flexible so he can take off when we need it. That is wonderful. I actually really hope that it picks up more so he can hire a second employee, but I don't think that is going to happen this year with the economy the way it is. Everyone just can't afford to get their carpets cleaned every 6 months.

As for me, I really got my hopes up on selling our house and buying a new one, but houses keep going down in price and that scares me. I don't want to have to sell our house for too little, but I know we could probably make that up by getting a really good deal on a house. I think that we are going to take our house off the market. I just don't want to think about it for awhile. Our house really is big enough for us as a family. I think I just really wanted a bigger house so I would have more room for homeschooling and for having friends over. I love having playgroups and friends over. I really would use my house for that every single day!

Well that is pretty much all that is new with us! Just thought that I would share or atleast write this down for myself. I am not very good at journaling, but I love to keep these memories to look back on. :)

Daphne Moriah is here!!!

Wow it has been almost two months since I have posted on here. We had a busy end of May with Lily's birthday and then June was mainly waiting for Daphne! June 28th at 10:55, Baby Daphne Moriah entered the world! She was 7 lbs 11 oz. and 21 inches. We are all so in love with her. She is such a sweet baby. Here are some pics that were taken of her at less than a week old. Isn't she precious!!! :)

So I didn't mean to not post, but it has been a crazy time lately.