Things are slowly getting back to normal

It takes a while for life to get back to normal after having a baby.  I was super tired, we had a bunch of big events that were taking up a lot of time and mental energy, and my husband was off on paternity leave.  That was great, but also changes the dynamics of how our life runs!
Now that he is back to work, and our renovation is 99% done (why do they stay at that stage for so long?) and we are trying to wind up our school year, I hope that things get a bit more settled!

Just for fun, I thought we would have a little flashback!
Last week while Ballerina was cleaning up in the front room she found a blank disc. But when we put it into the computer to put some music on it, it wasn't blank after all!  It was pictures from 2005!
Here is our family in 2005

And this chubby little sweetheart is .......

 did you guess?  I didn't try to trick you - it is Princess~!  Although she looks an awful lot like a baby who is living in our house currently!!  See..

Then I found some more similarities between kids...check this out

Who does this remind you of?? It is of course tapper - when she was just 4 years old, but she looks an awful lot like.....

THIS little monkey!!  Crazy kids!  I never really saw much resemblance, but now I see they have so many similar features!

look at these little cuties!  I mean seriously!  I can't believe they are so big and old when I compare these pictures to now!

Hello long lost blogoshphere!!

I almost forgot completely about blogs and blogging and the like!  Sorry about that!
I was a little foggy from the lack of sleep.
We started a crazy renovation.

 

It actually started with a bunch of destruction!  Destruction is necessary before you can rebuild, right?

 Tapper was so funny that day, she said "Well mom, I guess instead of home EC today we had home WRECK"  Which was very true.  I am so glad my hubby let them be a part of smashing out that wall and stuff!  So awesome.
We also had Grandma and Grandpa here for a while so Grandpa could help move that exterior door that you see in the above picture and help with the wiring.  If you can't tell it used to be a laundry room and a hallway, but now it is just a big laundry room, that is getting close to completion!

We were busy looking at all the cuteness around here.

 We had Christmas celebrations!!!

Training up apprentice builders - she was a real little Grandpa's helper!  All she wanted to do was hang out in the construction zone!

 We got back to school a bit...

 And we have started doing laundry in the new room!  There is still nothing in the cupboards, but we are doing laundry!!

 This isn't even the most recent picture, because now we have a countertop and a sink!

 And someone found her thumb!!

 Yes, we have been a bit busy!

A new baby

I finally realized that if we didn't take a picture of my pregnant belly, it would be too late, so here is our baby just days before she was born, already overdue!

She is finally here!! 7 lbs 13 ounces, born November 4
Super sweet and everyone loves her!

 Some have said she has blonde hair, but we are pretty sure she'll be as red as the oldest three!!

 All the redheads!

You can't really see her there, but she is in that blankie!

An unexpected job

I wish I could be more organized, I wish I was better at housekeeping and I wish I loved all of it - but I don't really.  I do what I can and I try to find the joy in it and I do have to say that I like it better than I once did.

My husband likes things super un-cluttered!  I often don't see the clutter.  This has lead to both the Tupperware drawer and the pantry to be 'the banes of his existence'.  So once I did a bit of de-cluttering in the pantry and often I do a bit of sorting in the Tupperware drawer, but it is a lot of work and hard for my brain so I don't do it as much as I should.

Well, the other day the pantry fell apart and so I had to finally organize it - check this out!!

 One side of the brackets that held the shelves up fell right off the wall.  Luckily nothing fell off the shelves, because there was tall stuff under the bottom shelf to hold up the whole assembly of them.  I wish I would have taken a picture of the skewed shelves in there before we took out all the food, but this is apparently how much food we have in our pantry - if fills the top of the island and a bunch of the floor!

My oldest daughter wiped all the shelves and so they are super clean - just like when we moved in a year ago!



My awesome husband re-hung the shelves and then I spent the evening, with help from the Princess putting it all back in.  Half empty bags of stuff were put in Tupperware, labeled and other miscellaneous items were sorted together in baskets.  I even took pictures so that we can try to keep it looking like THIS....

It is super awesome!  Now I can hopefully keep it that way!

Astronomy

 So the little girls are studying Astronomy.  I had the hardest time choosing which science to do this year, because Dash is only in Grade 1, and she doesn't have a huge attention span for sitting and writing. 
She has a great work ethic, and is super smart, but sitting still is not her strong suit!
Astronomy is rumored to be the best for younger kids in the Apologia Elementary series, so I chose it.  The extra bonus is that we already owned the text, and so only had to buy the notebook journals (which of course are optional, but help me immensely) and the lab kit.  Obviously the lab kit is optional as well, but the reality is that if I don't have EVERY thing I need for experiments, they just won't get done.  I can't even begin to tell you how many times science has crashed and burned in my 12 years of homeschooling because I didn't have what was required for a specific experiment.
Some moms could just move on, some skip experiments all together.  Some watch someone else do the experiment on YouTube and are happy with that.  Not me.  I can't do that.
Anyway, they are having a blast with it.  The upper picture and the next two are the girls acting out the solar system.  Dash is the sun, the Toddler is the moon and Princess is the Earth.  So the moon is revolving around the Earth all the while they are revolving together around the sun and the  Earth is rotating on it's own axis.  Very fun.

 Here Dash is remembering to SHINE like the sun!  LOL

We also made a model of the solar system that I bought from Scholastic.  In the book they tell you to use balloons and they tell you how big to inflate them so they will be in proportion, but I didn't know where I could hang that up so we made the model instead.

So far, so good!