Monday, August 31, 2009

Busy Weekend






Oh my, where do I start?! Here's a sort of play-by-play of our busy yet relaxing and fun-filled weekend.
Friday: My Birthday! I'm now 26 years of age. It's odd to have passed the half-way mark from 20 to 30 and other than feeling odd about this I haven't spent too much time contemplating this; I'm afraid if I did I would feel old. For my birthday Erik bought me a scale ruler ( I really am excited, it will make drawing floor plans and elevation drawings so much easier!) and a massage. He surprised me with the massage. Thursday night he told me that he had something for me to do on Friday morning. My parents where still here so they watched the kiddos and he drove me over to "Sea Essence Massage". It was very nice and relaxing.
Then we spent all afternoon packing up to go camping and headed to LL "Stub" Stewart State park to meet Erik's parents. It was a nice little camp ground. We got the tent set up and then left the kiddos with grandparents while we headed out to dinner for my birthday. We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory. Neither of us had been there before but we really enjoyed it and the food was yummy. We hadn't heard from Erik's parents so we assumed the kiddos were behaving and made a quick stop at Old Navy so I could spend some of my birthday money.
Saturday: We left 3 of the kiddos with grandparents again while we headed into Banks to pick peaches. The farm where we picked them was really nice in allowing us to use their cooler to store the peaches until Sun. morning so that they wouldn't be over ripe by the time we got them home. BJ and Ashley and little Bellalisa showed up at the campsite not long after we got back from picking peaches and we spent a relaxing day of just hanging out, though it did rain off and on and every time most everyone would run to the RV. Jon and I just sat through the rain. I knit for awhile but it was hard to knit with wet yarn and needles (good thing it was synthetic yarn!).
Sunday: Woke up, packed up and headed back to Bays Farms to pick up our peaches. We also picked another 25 pounds or so of peaches and 10 or 15 pounds of nectarines. We made it home and I started canning while Erik unloaded everything from camping. I got 42 jars of peaches done yesterday and have about as many more to do. I'm waiting till after lunch and Hannah's violin lessons today.
The kiddos enjoyed camping and I think we'd all like to do it again, but we do need to invest in sleeping bags for the kiddos and maybe an air mattress or some camping pads. We had tons of blankets with us this time. They worked but they take up lots of room in the packing.
I also talked to Liz about ideas for homeschooling Hannah. She suggested a very laid back approach. She did a program called "sing, spell, read, write" and then just worked on shapes and numbers from books she picked up randomly. This is along the lines of what I was thinking. She said that's what she did with all four of her kids and that her experience has been that if you make learning fun and not strenuous the first couple years that kids "catch up" just fine in everything else by the time they hit second grade and they want to learn. I'm actually excited to get started now instead of feeling so overwhelmed. But first things first, I must clear my kitchen of peaches.

2 comments:

B said...

Happy Birthday! :o) Glad you had such a great weekend.....

Mama Griffith, said...

sing spell read and write is what I did for kindergarten when I was young,sometimes I still sing the song..my sister in law has done it too and she really liked it also, im so excited for you! and your canning!