I'm never sure how to start off a blog.  Do I just jump in with what we did today?  Or do I write an introduction?

I think I'll write an introduction.  If I'm done fiddling with my settings for a while.

Hello, my name is Angel and I'm trying to homeschool a 9 yo and a 6 yo while wrangling a 2.5 yo and 2 month old twins who never, ever sleep.  Really.  It's 8 PM and they have had approximately three 15-20 minute catnaps since 9 AM this morning.  Aren't 11 week old babies supposed to sleep more than that?  I think I'm supposed to sleep more than that. 

Anyway.

This year we've been through a lot of changes.  Until April we were living in St. Louis, Missouri.  My husband had an hour to an hour and a half commute every day, we were sick a lot, and our neighborhood association wouldn't let us put in a garden.  (On the other hand, our neighborhood was a very tightknit community and our kids had some very good friends there, and we miss them.  A lot. )  We had three kids and had just taken the plunge into letting God plan our family.   Then my husband got a job in upstate New York and almost simultaneously we found out I was pregnant.  When I started bleeding, my doctor had me come in for an ultrasound, and surprise!  It was twins.

We made the 1000 mile move when I was 10 weeks pregnant.  For the first 3 months we rented half of a 100 year old farmouse on a dairy farm, and my husband had a 5 minute commute to work.  Unfortunately, I couldn't take true advantage of this learning opportunity because I was sick most of the time.  ( The constant smell of cows did not really help.)  But our stay there did prompt a persistent obsession with tractors in our 2 year old!

When I was nearly 30 weeks pregnant, we moved into our own home on 15 acres.  It was too late to put in a garden, but we have high hopes for next year.  (My 6 yo daughter is pushing for goats.)  Miraculously, I avoided bedrest until the very end of the pregnancy and two healthy baby boys were born to us the first week in October -- a month early, but without any time at all in the NICU. 

And now we have almost a foot of snow on the ground, and my husband and I, both of us from Tennessee, are trying to figure out how to use a snowblower, and how the wind can blow 8 inches of snow completely away somewhere, and why our neighbors are all putting up snowfences, and also how to be in 18 different places at once when both of the babies are crying at the same time and the 2 yo is putting all kinds of non-food items in his mouth so we'll look at him and the 6 yo is running around naked because she can't find her socks and her 9 yo brother wants to know where that book on dinosaurs is that he read about 6 months ago.

I'm not really sure we're going to survive this, even though people say we will.  People who've had twins. 

Of course, they don't really remember the first year either.  So I'm not sure how much to really believe out of them, you know?