Taking Initiative

A few days ago we went to the park and while I was getting dressed, E took it upon herself to pack us some picnic snacks. She has seen me do it 100 times, so she knew just what to get- apples, oranges, raisins and water is what she chose. I thought it was neat that she did it on her own, without me saying anything and knew just what to get because she has watched me and helped me.





It was pretty windy, but we had fun!

When they watch the same thing over and over and over

and over and over and.... you get the idea. If you have a young child, you've seen it in action, they will watch the same movie or ask you to read the same book 100 times. It happens here, both because of that typical young child tendency and also because we only own a few movies. We see new ones when we rent or go to the library, but if we don't have any, they are left with the few we own. As annoying as it is, I understand that it is an important part of development.

So, we've seen Brother Bear countless times, but E is still gathering new things from it. Yesterday, she asked why Kenai (the man who gets turned into a bear) was being mean to Koda (the little bear cub) when the cub hadn't done anything to him and was actually trying to help him. She said that wasn't right that he was mean to the cub, just because he was a bear and Kenai didn't like bears. So I told her about stereotypes and we talked about some other stereotypes like about boys liking blue and girls liking pink, which she knows is silly because her daddy wears pink shirts and my favorite color is blue!

Inventions

Today, E came and showed me pictures of some "machines" she had drawn. One was a "machine that would help people breath if they couldn't breath" and she showed me the air tank and the hose that went to the person's nose.

Then she showed me a picture of her machine to "help people get voices" if they couldn't talk. I had a harder time understanding this one, because my initial thought was that it would talk for the person, so I was asking her "how did the machine know what the person wanted to say?" But apparently I had it all wrong! I *think* it is a machine that actually *gives* people a voice if they can't talk.

Then she showed me a picture of a machine that would give people water. It also had a tank and a hose that went to the person. I asked her where the water came from and she said that "you just have to bring a big, huge bucket of water to fill up the tank." So I asked her where I would get the bucket of water, from the ocean? Or the river? Or the rain? She said the ocean, but then said "wait, you can't drink water from the ocean, can you?" and I told her no and told her about salt water dehydrating people.

Later, I got on youtube and found this while looking for oxygen tanks:

Respiratory Care- Oxygen E Tank

And this, because I was looking for videos on scuba diving tanks:

Turtle Necropolis
This one had video of dead turtles and their bones, so we talked about turtles for a while.
Then I found How To Use An Air Tank in Scuba Diving which talked about this different kinds of tanks.

That led to Nebulizers and we talked about asthma.

Then I found her videos of babies in the NICU using oxygen .

Which led to her wanting to see homebirth videos

Math Game

We found this math game that E has been enjoying. We haven't explored the whole thing yet, but she likes doing the addition game.

Numbers, numbers eveywhere!

We live in a mobile home park now and of course every trailer has a number on it. We pointed this out to E and she names them off now and then as we drive by. Today we went for a walk and started out by trailer #1 with the intention of walking around the whole park until we had seen all of them (about 100 I think). We ended up stopping at ours, #46, but it was a nice walk and we'll probably do the rest another day.

Here are some pictures we took while we were out.

E's First Race

E ran her first race on Saturday. She did 1 mile in 12:05 and had a lot of fun! I asked her if she wanted to keep running and I told her she could train with me for the next race. She said she wanted to, so we are going to start running together. I started the Couch to 5K Program and I'm on week 4. I'm running nearly 2 miles now and it feels so good! I try to run every other day (though last week I didn't get to run at all because of D's hectic schedule) and I'm going to run with E on my off days. I'm doing a 10K in October with my sister and I hope they have a kid's run for E to do too.

Catching Up

Wow, I haven't blogged for a LONG time. It has been a crazy 6 months. Here's the highlights:

My third baby girl- Z - was born December 25th. Yes, that makes her a Christmas baby, no it doesn't matter to me. We celebrate Hanukkah, so she gets 8 days of presents and then her birthday, so I promise she's not missing out on anything. And no, she does not share a birthday with Jesus. ;) She was born at home into my hands after 71 hours of labor- my second homebirth VBAC. I still haven't written up the whole birth story, but I'll be sure to share it here when I do.

On December 31st, we unexpectedly lost our apartment managing jobs. It was a shock since we had perfect or nearly perfect performance evaluations for 2.5 years. They claimed that the new managers could do major renovations, plumbing, electrical etc. that D was not capable of doing, but they had never once told him that he needed to do more than he was doing. So who knows! Now we've heard from a friend who still lives there that they have gone through 3 managers in 4 months. Their loss!

Ultimately, I think it was a God-thing, because we had been praying about what to do/ where to go long term. We knew we didn't want to manage apartments forever! I think this was his way of saying "time to go!" We stayed with my parents in California for a few months and then decided to stay in our home town while D goes to school for firefighting.

The girls are adjusting pretty well here, though E often says how much she misses her friends and L asks to go swimming every day. There is no pool here, which is quite disappointing for them both. There are lots of things that we are all missing- swimming, friends, cultural events, homeschooling groups, events and play days, the ocean, the greenery..... but I do believe this is where YHVH wants us for now, so here we are.

And it's not all bad. I am enjoying the sunshine here after the years of Oregon clouds and rain. It's nice to be near my parents. And we are slowly getting plugged into the community here.

I am going to start posting regularly again to journal our unschooling adventures and my random musings.