This last week feels like it lasted a month.  But flew by.  If you know what I mean.

Last Sunday, we were in the middle of a heat wave.  All I did was sweat profusely for days on end.  Thankfully, my Pampered Chef host had central air conditioning when I went to her show on Sunday afternoon.  What a blessing--it's never any fun to melt in front of the guests.

Monday afternoon, all three of the kids got their teeth cleaned--NO cavities!  Woo Hoo!  We were supposed to go to the church softball game, but Steve got stuck on a job, and I figured it was a good chance to conserve some gasoline.  So we stayed home, and were glad we did, because it poured buckets here (but apparently only spit a bit at the ball field).

Tuesday morning I went walking with Sue & then we swapped kids.  I stopped at Joann's to pick up some embroidery floss for the girls.  I told them I would teach them how to make friendship bracelets.  They love making them.  I made myself an anklet:

I can remember making these when I was in grade school!  My sister is so jealous--I may have to make her one.  That was the first crafty thing I did this week. 

On Wednesday, we went to the Showcase Cinemas Bookworm Wednesday--free movie with a book report!  The movie was "Happy Feet", which we hadn't seen before.  I have to say, I hated it.  Next week is Curious George, so we won't go.

After the movie, we headed down to my parents' house for a visit and dinner.  We beat my dad home by an hour!  So we hung out--I had brought my computer, and was getting expense reports done, and the girls worked on their bracelets, and I think Eli read a book.  Anyway, we had a nice visit, although Madeline wasn't feeling well and spiked a fever.  She was fine the next day, thank God! 

It rained Wednesday night.  Really poured.  I was so happy to miss most of it, although we had left a window open, and Steve came home to a soaked living room, TV and cat.  I'm glad I missed that, too.

Yesterday, it rained all day.  Strong winds, sudden downpours, but not the thunder and lightning that we had Wed. night.  Luckily, I didn't have to go anywhere until last night.  I had a Pampered Chef show at my friend Theresa's house.  She only lives about 15 minutes away, so that was great.

Today is also a stay at home day.  I've been working on some rag quilts for the girls.  I have all of the squares done; next week I'll start piecing them together.  Here's a picture of all of the squares laid out:

I'm really happy with how it's going to look.  I also figured out how to clean my sewing machine and oil it.  I'm so proud of myself!  And that was the 2nd crafty thing I did this week.  If you knew me IRL, you'd know that's quite a bit of craftiness for me in one week! :)

Well, my dad just called, he's stopping by for a visit, so I'm going to cut this short!

Around early evening the other night, I heard Alex shouting for me from the garage, "Mom, it's a hummingbird moth in the garage!"  Evidently hummingbird moths, unlike most other moths, become sedentary at night, and this particular one had taken up residence on my garage wall for the evening.  Over the last week or so, we had been given a few opportunities to watch this beauty in action on the red clovers in the field next to us.  See my post on that HERE.  But this time we were given a wonderful opportunity to study this magnificent creature really up close!  So many times the Lord has done this, when we take interest in something in particular in His wondrous Creation, He just loves to hand it right to you to enjoy!

This little fellow had no intentions of leaving us, he climbed right into our butterfly pavillion and stayed for the evening.  During the early morning time, we got him out and he sat contently on our fingers (we were too excited to think of taking a photo then!).  We took him outside thinking he would fly right off, but he actually acted like he wanted to stay.  The sun wasn't quite up high in the sky yet, perhaps that's why he was so comfortable.  So I sat him on the marigolds on the back deck and got some fantastic photos!  Please do "full size" these photos!

Can you see the irridescence on the back of the body.

The edges of his wings almost look like they were sprinkled with glitter.

Or how about the little tuft feathers at the bottom of his body?

 I love the cute little beady eyes and cool stout antennas!

Can you see the black proboscis curled up under his chin?

Ok, how could you think that's not cute?!

He looks like he has a little yellow beard. 

 He can hover and fly like a hummingbird, has the body of a moth,

and looks similar in ways to a bumblebee.....

another remarkable Creation.

He stayed here just until the sun got nice and high in the sky and the temperatures were on the rise, and then just as if a switch had been flipped, off he took to the skies to go about his business.  Later in the morning, when we went out to take our nature walk, we got a great video of one (who knows if it was the same little fellow or not) buzzing about happily doing his work! (please ignore my son telling my 2 year old to be quiet in the background, he has no patience when Gabby is being whiney!)

The following is a great web page on the Snowberry Clearwing Humminbird Moth, which gives lots of info plus shows all it's stages of life.  We will be using this next week to complete a nature journal page.

Snowberry Clearwing Hummingbird Moth

LOL!  Okay, so in reality, I do not have fans, but I do have 1 person that *requested* an update on my blog (the person that least needs an update, LOL), so here is that update...

We finished camp without any major fiasco, after getting through the first day.  The kids had a blast and want to go back next year, so it must have been good.  I did get a glimpse, this week, of what life would be like if we had the boys in school rather than homeschooled.  We woke up every morning before the sun came out, packed lunches, dropped them off for 7 hours, picked them up, ate dinner early (because they were STARVED by the time they got home) and sent them to bed early (because the schedule was exhausting).  It was a weird week, because I am not used to feeling so left outof my own kids lives, ya know?  And Shawn literally only saw them in passing every day (with his work schedule, he was asleep when we left in the morning and leaving for work as we got back each day).  I'll be glad to have my kids back all day tomorrow!

I did manage some fun this week for myself.  Shawn and I went to lunch a couple of times with just Ella, and we went out once with friends.  We hit some yard sales and got the schoolroom cleaned quite well (yes, to me this is fun, LOL...  I'm sad, ain't I?  LOL).  I also got caught up on some things I needed to get done for McCheo and Community Co-op, which is a relief! 

Well, it is 9:15 and I am exhausted.  I am taking the kids to a waterpark tomorrow (to make up for not letting them go on the field trip to an even more crowded water park in a bigger, scarier city), so I'd best get to bed.

Black and Purple Petunias, by Georgia O'Keeffe

I really love it when I can combine lessons!  And yesterday I was able to combine many lessons into one fantastic project!  For this year, I have our Art and Music lessons scheduled on Wednesdays.  We do not try to accomplish a great amount of other subjects this day, because I wanted this day to mostly focus on this.  Because the truth is that Art projects usually take a larger amount of time, but they are so worth it!

I'm going to attempt to walk you step-by-step through what we did:

1) Read a Book:  Through Georgia's Eyes, by Rachel Rodriquez

- This is truly a great living book on the life of Georgia O'Keefe!  It was our favorite that we checked out at the library.

2) Discussed Ms. O'Keeffe's Style of Painting Flowers.

- I showed them several examples of Georgia's flower paintings.  We discussed how she saw great beauty in flowers and she painted them big, close-up, and colorful in hopes that other people could see them the way she would!  Isn't that beautiful?  I want others to see them that way as well!

3)  Nature Walk

- Took a nature walk focused on looking at the details of wildflowers.  Each of the children picked their favorite flower, which they would be using for an art project.  Hannah and Alex both picked Chicory, I picked Spotted Touch-Me-Not, and Gabby picked a Robin's Plantain.

Also while we were on our nature walk, using super macro on the camera, the kids and I tried our hand at taking wildflower photos as close up as possible, just like Georgia would have liked it! After uploading the photos on our computer, we cropped them in even closer!  Can you see the beauty?

Chicory

Queen Anne's Lace

Black-Eyed Susan 

After returning inside and placing our picked flowers in some water vases, I moved onto the next step.

4) Read the Summer Section of Nature's Paintbox, by Patricia Thomas

- We've been working our way through the seasons in the above book.  Our Spring study can be found HERE.  For Summer, the illustrations are done in watercolors, my personal favorite art medium.  So, we used watercolors to do our art project!

5) Listen to The Four Seasons - Summer, Masters of Classical Music - Antonio Vivaldi

- I put this CD on to listen to while completing our Art project - specifically on The Four Seasons - Summer suite.  I reminded the kids about the last time we listened to Vivaldi and about The Four Seasons suites.  And like the last time we listened to it, we discussed the music and how it sounded like the season.

6) Complete Art Project:  Georgia O'Keeffe Watercolor Flowers

- The children used their selection of wildflower to paint a watercolor picture, George O'Keeffe style.  I gleaned this art idea from this book:  Discovering Great Artsts, by MaryAnn Kohl.

The two older children used Reeve's brand watercolors, it's an excellent quality paint for the price, and Loew-Cornell brand artist brushes.  For the toddler, Crayola watercolors and brush worked just fine! ;)

Alex is my art scoffer, so sometimes I can expect refusal from him, but he gave this project a try!  However, he did not like working with the watercolors and became very frustrated and discouraged with his work.  He was about to quit and I asked him if he'd like to try a different medium.  He chose good old-fashioned crayons.  And he ended up very pleased with his project!  And he got the point - he drew a smaller Chicory in the background and a larger one in the front to get your attention - Georgia style.

Hannah also did a great job with her Chicory.

And, of course, I couldn't refuse trying my hand at it!

Spotted Touch-Me-Not

Gabby, well, she did her painting "toddler-style" and only painted for about 3 minutes!

We used our final projects as a fantastic addition to our nature journals!!