We are busy finishing up work today so we can all have a nice long weekend together.  Ted and KC will be off and with us all weekend too.  We hope to go cut down our tree on Friday sometime.  Today we are cleaning a little and finishing some school work.  Erin is done with her first half of her Math workbook (Singapore).  Jesse has completed cursive writing and is practicing daily.  The 50 states and capitals are memorized, with a little practice over the weekend.  They have a test next week which will also include naming where every state is located and all the countries in North America.  I will also be baking pumpkin pie and pumpkin pie squares today.  I only have one pie plate so I am trying a new recipe.

        JoAnne and Roland, Ted's parents are coming Thursday evening after dinner at Angie's.  They are planning on staying over and driving to see Charles new baby boy Landon.  It is exciting our family keeps growing!  Best Wishes to my cousin Christine on Friday as well.  She will be a married woman.  And most exciting, my sister Camille is an engaged woman as of last weekend.  We will be having a wedding next year as well.  I am to be her maid of honor, very exciting. 

       We have been traveling a lot lately.  Our trip to the cities was great and the pictures turned out wonderful.  My friend Emily has a great talent in photography.  The kids visited their mom this weekend.  We did not have a busy school week with our studies, but I know that will be made up for the next two weeks.  I have the kids Monday through the end of the month.  Last week we did accomplish lots of reading.  Jesse is working hard on his oral reading and comprehension.  Erin is working hard on her math speed and venturing into long division.  We should be through our state capitals by the end of the month.  I am pretty much done with my Christmas shopping.  I am looking forward to doing some crafts with the kids in December.  They will be making their Christmas cards as well.  I will be mailing out pictures with our cards this year.  This week and next week will be serious study weeks for us.  I hope everyone else is doing well. 

              Hello everyone,  I hope you have a festive day of fun planned with your families and friends.  We are off to Keewatin to spend the day with my mom, sister, and Tim.  Mom is making lasagna, yummmy!  We will probably pass out candy to the kids who come trick or treating.  Camille and Tim want to take Gus to a few houses on our block.  He is going to be a cowboy!  I don't know if you'll be able to see his costume with his jacket on though!  Grandma got him a elmo candy bucket that he loves. 

             School is going well.  We did a community service project last Saturday.  We helped peel apples and put together 150 apple pies for the Aitkin food shelf.  The kids worked very hard and I was very proud of them!  It is good experience to learn to serve others from a young age.  We didn't bake them the food shelf froze them.  There were about eight of us helping make the pies.  They will pass them out in November so the 150 families who come to the food shelf monthly will have a pie for Thanksgiving.

             Sorry about the picture last time.  I am having difficulties with this website.  I am trying to work out the kinks.  If you really like any of the pictures we have up please save them to your computer.  I might have to delete them.  I am running out of room/space but I think the problem is when I upload them they are too big.  So I am going to attempt making those changes.  We are going for pictures on the 11th of Nov.  I'm sorry to say that Ted and KC will not be with us to take them.  My friend Emily is going to take them for me and she does an great job!  I will let you have her website when she posts them to look at if anyone wants to suggest the ones they like.  I will be able to order anything because she doesn't do packages.  Auntie Di the kids say thank you for the Halloween card you sent them!  Erin also got her B-Day card too!! 

The days are meshing together rather quickly.  We are busy with school and life's activities.  The kids have memorized the first 25 Presidents of the United States.  We are working on state capitals too.  Their brains pick things up rather quickly.  Spanish is going well and I think next year I am going to order Rosetta Stone spanish.  I have heard great things about the program from other people.  Jesse has improved greatly in his writing in the last two months.  He is starting to notice the details more closely.  Erin is an excellant speller, much more efficiant than I am.  The kids are enjoying their pen pals and writing letters to family.  Geography is our focus this year and we played the geography game today for the first time.  Jesse and Erin really enjoyed it and I can see how much more a child learns when they are having fun.  The kids are embracing homeschooling quite rapidly.  I can't believe we are almost done with October.

We are celebrating Erin's B-day tomorrow because everyone will be around.  Well not everyone, but our whole family plus my mom, Gary, & Camille.  My tradition I have started with the kids is they get to pick their dinner of choice and cake of choice.  Erin has choosen nachos with bacon and a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting with a white chocolate cookie crunch.  Don't forget the vanilla bean ice cream.  Sounds real healthy right?  I am hoping to take our Christmas card picture tomorrow because everyone is home and I will have extra hands to snap the photos.  This starts the season of parties for us.  Erin, Halloween, then KC and Gus together, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then New Years, then Jesse.  It's like a three month party that doesn't stop.  Food, candy, presents, cake, presents, cookies, and more candy, then we visit the dentist in February after Valentines, lol. 

The morning snow was beautiful, but of course cold.  It is like a present for everyone to wake up and have the world covered in white.  I keep saying the longer I live in MN, the more I like the winters.  Our cabin is quite warm with our new furnace and our fireplace to curl up to and read a great book.  I have been enticing the kids with lots of reading and poems.  I am trying to build a strong love of good classic literature.  I want them to be excited to read a book.  I want them to have a child's heart with a bit of fantasy dripping from the fiction.  I am reading a book called "Honey for Your Child's Heart."  It is about choosing the right books to give your children and how to help inspire a love of reading.

We met some new people this week at the co-op.  The kids had fun, but I'm not sure if it is the right place for us.  There were a lot of kids and it was a little unorganized.  I told the kids we would try and visit a few more times before making a descision.  It is hard to judge anything on one time.  We are meeting lots of new people and I told them it takes time to truely get to know someone.  It is always better to have a few good friends than many acquiantances.  We are invited to camp again this Sunday for family games and potluck dinner at 4:00 p.m.  The kids are excited and Ted and I are looking forward to building some new friendships as well.  KC is with us for the next three weekends so he will be able to come and join us for dinner and 4H on the 18th. 

We are trying new ideas everyday on how to be the most effective in our schooling with great time management.  The kids and I are aware that we must experiment a little with our schedules to find the right fit.  Do we let the clock run our day as in PS?  Do we focus on unit projects?  How much is too much work?  Or did we not acomplish enough today?  Who works better this way, or that way?  It is fun to learn more about each other and how we function together best.  Today we focused just on english, writing, reading, and spelling.  Tomorrow we are going to focus strongly on math, other than our daily journal.  Thursday, we will focus on science and spanish.  This is a small change from previous weeks, working mostly on one subject a day.  

We have been invited to join a homeschooling co-op.  We are visiting on Friday to see what it is like.  The co-op meets every 2nd and 4th Friday of the month.  It starts at 9:00 and goes to noon, bringing a bag lunch.  There are about 40 kids involved and we are excited to see what they could offer us.  We start 4H on the 18th of October.  We meet as a family one Sunday afternoon a month. 

Welcome to October, brrr.  I love the weather this time of year.  We get to change our clothes to sweaters, turn the heat on, and bake yummy things.  We made apple crisp yesterday.  The cabin is quite cozy.  We are reading by the fireplace often.  Next week we are starting the Little House on the Prarie series together.  Erin hasn't read them so we are all going to enjoy them.  It is a great time of year to cuddle up with a book.  I have a set of the Little House series, so we are borrowing one from the library, and then we are also borrowing from a friend, so we all have a book to read.

School is going well.  I have been challenged in one way or another everyday as a teacher.  It is by far the hardest thing I have set out to accomplish.  Gus keeps us on our toes.  He is very busy and probably our biggest distraction, but one we gladly accept.  He is starting to try and put sentences together, and more words together.  It is frustrating when he says a new word and he knows what he wants and I don't understand him!  He still really likes Elmo and Sesame Street.

We started Spanish yesterday.  I taught the kids the spanish alphabet.  Erin picked it up very quickly.  Jesse needs a little more practice, he can't roll his r's yet.  I think Erin really enjoyed it.  I ordered a bunch of books to receive from the library about Mexico and it's culture.  Also I requested a few kids spanish dvds to watch.  If the library doesn't have what I want I can just request it to be sent from another branch.  We are now traveling south in North America to Mexico.  The kids stamped their passports.

     I have my schedule for the kids through November which is great.  Tracy really wanted to take a subject to teach the kids and I am excited about that.  I ask that everyone pray that she keeps an interest in teaching for Erin and Jesse's sake.  I have one more day of rest and we will have a four day week of school.  The kids have a long weekend with mom, which is good for everyone including me!

      Ted put in our new storm door today.  It is nice because it is an all glass door and we can look out on the lake.  In the summer we will have the screen on which will blow a nice breeze in the cabin.  It was a cool weekend and I feel the October weather creeping up.  We are not going to make it to Illinois for Christine's wedding or Thanksgiving, sorry everyone!  We miss you all.

      We have plans this week on Thursday evening to visit some people in our area who are involved in 4H and homeschool.  I got in touch to get the kids involved in 4H.  The lady who called me lives at and runs a year round camp near us.  She is the 4H leader.  And there are a few other families that live at the camp and they homeschool too.  They invited us out to meet them and we are excited.     

This was a spur of the moment thing.  We had eggs and bacon for breakfast and I had extra egg carts.  I buy eggs 2 1/2 to 5 dozen at a time because we go through them so fast, plus they don't spoil very easily.  Anyways, I was going to put this in recycling and I thought, hmmm.  We were studying forests and I thought this could be a fun painting project.  So these are our forests!  I know these are big words, but Jesse and Erin can tell you the difference between coniferous and deciduous forest and trees.  I also know our trees are bigger than the mountians, but it was fun, lol.  Gus took a great nap today!

The surgery was a hard day for me.  He couldn't have anything to eat or drink.  We were scheduled for 9:15 am and didn't get in pre-op until after noon.  He was very hungry and kept asking to eat and for milk.  I just ignored him, which was hard to do.  Ted was very frustrated with the hospital.  Erin and Jesse came with us and that was a blessing becasue they helped keep Gus distracted.  There was a playroom that we all hung out in.  I went up with Gus to pre op and he fell asleep in my arms waiting.  I handed my sleeping baby to the nurse who said, "We'll take good care of him."  I was in tears in the elevator on my way back to the waiting room.  Thank-God the surgery went well and it didn't take very long, about an hour before he was back in my arms.

He is recovering very fast.  He had a fever on Sunday, but Friday and Saturday he was great.  Monday, he was needy with a low fever.  Today he seems back to normal, no fever.  His incisions look great.  We do not even have to go back to take out stiches.  The stiches are internal and they use superglue on the out side.  We will see the doctor in January after the holidays to make sure his nuts are in the right spot, lol.  Thank you everyone for the prayers!  This picture was taken on Saturday after surgery.  Grandpa and grandma Anderson came to see the kids.  Grandpa put up our swings and the kids are very thankful!  We love you all!!! 

This week we found pen pals in Alabama that are the same age as Jesse & Erin.  The kids sent out their first letter today.  It is an exciting way to meet people and practice writing skills.  It is always fun to get mail as a kid.  In fact it's fun to get mail at any age especially when it's not a bill.  Thanks for the card Auntie Diane, we miss you.

Gus has his surgery on my Birthday, Thursday.  He has a undesended testicle and hernia.  It is a common surgery, but still a surgery none the less.  We will go to Duluth, but it is out patient so we will be home the same day.  The doctor says kids usually make a quick recovery.  Everyone keep Gus in your prayers on Thursday.

We are in our first two weeks of our geography program, Exploring Countries and Cultures.  The kids have learned all the continents and oceans.  They made this world cake all by themselves.  We can't wait to eat it.  I hope we don't find any egg shells, lol.  Besides North America and Africa, I think they pretty much got the outline of the continents.  I learned something new as well!  There is a new ocean, the Southern Ocean made official in 2000.  In weeks 3-8 we start exploring North America.

Farmer Jesse and his rutabaga he planted.  The wheel burrow full of potatoes the kids helped Gary pick.