Some Days...

I love these kids so much that when one of them is hurting, I hurt.  If more than one is hurting, I feel like I'm dying.  I can fix things for little kids, but the big kids have to start solving their own problems.  That's part of growing up, right? Oh, growing pains or so painful for this mama!  At least we had a perfect evening where my heart was so full of love for these guys that it nearly exploded...

This afternoon, Ian soaped up the trampoline!

Lula slipped big time!

Heidi asked Ian to spray her...and didn't like it

Jason didn't seem to mind

Lula loved being sprayed from under the trampoline!

This scares me, but Ian is really good at back flips

Jason was so cute...he wanted to keep up with Ian and Daniel so bad.

He'll grow up too fast too.

Shane is gone for the weekend on the SSS Odyssey.  This is the sailing season and the Sea Scouts have charters almost every weekend!  It's strange not having him around, just like it was strange having Ian gone all week when he started high school.  Ian's gone all week, Shane's gone all weekend.  One by one, these guys are starting to leave my nest and I don't like it.  I like keeping my babies close.  I just have to learn to let them go slowly like this mama:

She lets her little one day old gosling out from under her to go walk around even though there are turkeys and chickens nearby.  The two geese that sat next to her had all their eggs stolen by a little raccoon over several nights.  It's a miracle we were able to chase it off the night before this little gosling hatched. 

Lula School-la

Lula, I think, is going to be a fun kid to teach.  She's so low energy that she happily sits in one place for long periods of time.  I can't remember the last time I had a "good" student that just wanted to sit around and leaf through books and color. 

Playing with Heart Patterns in February

She is almost five and would be starting Kindergarten next year, although she would be a very young Kindergartener because of her summer birthday.

Doing Kindergarten Math

I just recently got her going on workbooks, using Memoria Press Junior Kindergarten, plus we've been making a binder of alphabet pages:

Gluing Feathers on the letter F

And being the younger sister of more demanding siblings means she has had more time to just peacefully develop her own skills and interests on her own timeline.  I pulled out this old Lego Simple Machines kit I bought years and years ago, back when these kits were considered "consumable."  I had Daniel work through all the task cards (that is his favorite way to learn/discover), but Lula had fun too:

A machine that drills holes in mountains- designed by Lula

Now I'm looking at all the books/curricula I own and wondering... What is Lula's learning style? What do I own that will work for her?  She isn't going to be a rat to teach like Daniel (the other day he used logic and then violence to prove that L was a vowel and the next day covered his ears when I tried to teach him how to count by 25s).  She seems to catch on and remember things better than the next sister up (who shall remain unnamed, but Daniel has now caught up to her in math grades-they are both in 2nd grade, but on different ends of the book).

Playing with kites that Daniel made

She loves having her sisters read to her and play school with her, so I'm thinking about refilling my shelves with good reading books that read on a 3rd grade reading level...