Natalie, Overheard

A lot of impromptu singing goes on at our house - mostly made up songs, as in made up as the song progresses. Really they are more operatic than anything else. Natalie was singing back and forth with Annalise and the lyrics came out :

"We'll do everything together! We'll eat a whole jar of pickles together!"

Another song Natalie sings a lot is one she made up. It goes:

There once was an alligator with a grandmother stick.
He met a grandmother with a grandmother stick.
They married and ate each others heads off.
And then the end!

(A "grandmother stick" is a cane - and neither of her grandmothers uses a cane, but one day she wanted to say cane, but couldn't think of the name and pronounced it a grandmother stick.)

An observation:

You know what would be good about being a vegetarian? You wouldn’t have to actually eat any meat!

A recipe to try:

Chicken Invisible

The ingredients are chicken and vegetables.

Week in Review

This week:

We found a baby bird that had fallen from a nest in a palm tree near out house.  There had been a storm overnight and we think that is why it fell.  Thinking it best, Rob got a ladder and put it back in the nest, but evidently it was not accepted back and it fell again and died.  Of course the take away for the kids is: we should have hand raised it.

It was a mockingbird.

The same storm caused a tornado that hit the park where we take swimming.  Caleb and Irene and I surveyed the damage - it was pretty minimal, but the playground cover was torn off and that looked impressive!

More room work!

Spotted a thirsty lizard!

Hit the beach:

Tammie came to visit!!!!!!

We finished swimming lessons:

Natalie & coach

And I don't have a picture, but there was a BEAR in our neighborhood.  It had to be tranquilized and removed.  It was about two streets away from our house in a tree we've walked by hundreds of times.  There are plenty of bears in Florida, but not in our part of Florida, so it is a real mystery how it got there.

Progress on the New Room

So this time it's for real - we are building a 3rd bedroom!

Here is some of the progress made in the last week:

On the first day - Rob and his friend dug two holes in the floor to place support poles along the wall.  This means that eventually the wall won't be completely flat, but we consider that a small price to pay.  The poles will support the trusses that will support the floor.

Next they removed a strip of drywall along the area where the trusses will be placed:

This makes it much easier to visualize the bedroom.

There is now a delay while the poles and trusses are made.  The poles will be ready next week, but the trusses may take until mid August.  We can use the bottom room during the delay, but we switched the dining room with the living room because the table is easier to move than the living room furniture.  I like the switch and we may keep it that way.

More to come!!!

Irene Turns 2!

My finger slipped when I typed the title and I accidentally wrote Irene Turns 21

Oh my.

So little Irene turned 2 this week!  Terrible two, terrific two.  Two is such an intense age.  She understands so much, but is understood so little.  What a frustrating predicament!  But we understand that she likes zebras and that she likes to blow candles out :)

 Rob had to be out on her actual birthday, so we had cake the day before and ice cream the day of, both with candles!

She enjoyed blowing the candles out much more than eating the ice cream - and that is saying something!  I relit them for her several times.

Although I cannot remember specifically about Caleb, I think Irene is our latest talker.  She actually talks a LOT, but until recently, almost nothing of what she said was intelligible.  This is probably the only area she is not ahead of the game in.  She is mostly potty trained, can jump with two feet, plays pretend like a pro, and  - believe it or not - can fold a washcloth.  She likes to dance and sing, she loves the moon, owls, bears, and trash trucks.  She likes books a lot.  She adores Anna and Elsa (even though she has never even seen Frozen).  She loves for me to sing Jesus Loves Me and rub her back at bedtime.  She is challenging too, more so than I remember her siblings being, but maybe that is because I'm older!  Happy Birthday to our littlest lady!

Week in Review

Seizing the moment, I am posting a weeks worth of pictures tonight. There has just not been time for blogging lately. There is so much that needs to be done and sometimes it is really hard to know what is most important and whose needs are most urgent.

Here are some highlights from the last week:

On Sunday, we went to Layton, FL to visit a church where the radio station has a temporary antenna.  To me "Layton" doesn't sound like a place in the Keys, but it is - it's on Long Key, which is a small, very sparsely inhabited key.  Most of it is a state park. It is about 15 minutes north of the 7 mile bridge, so we drove down to it.

It was low tide and we saw LOTS of very big fish!

Monday meant back to swimming lessons.  I have struggled with finding a workable schedule all summer (and by summer I mean, since we restarted school in March).  I finally decided to make a schedule that would apply to the weeks we had swimming lessons and then we will take a week off and recoup.  My thinking was that maybe we hadn't found a good schedule because I gave up before we got the hang of it.  I thought we'd stick to the schedule religiously for the swim days and see if that helped - and it did seem to be helping.  I put the girls in the 8am class, we'd have breakfast at the park after the lesson, come home, and get into our routine.

And then on Monday afternoon, Natalie's swimming teacher called me to ask if we would switch classes.  So on Tuesday we did swimming at 9 and my beautiful poster is wrong now.

Fortunately, Monday was 7-11 and our neighborhood got at 7-11 in the last year and we all got free Slurpees.

Swim swim swim.  Natalie is doing a 2nd session in level 1, Annalise got moved up to level 3.  Level 3 is a lot more exercise and it took a few days to get into the groove.  They asked Natalie to move because in the 8am class, all the other kids in 1 moved to 2 and she is not ready.  The move to 9 was good for Annalise too because a girl from our church is in the same class and because the 8am level 3s are more advanced too.  (8am turned out to be the hour the park's summer camp took lessons - this was not the schedule in the past, so the classes were bigger and most of them have taken lessons all summer.)

On Tuesday we went to a family of friends' house.  That is, I'm friends with the mom, A and N are both friends with the sisters, C was happy to poke around the little brother's immense car collection and Irene just loves toys of all kinds.  While we were there, a squirrel fell out of a tree and broke its back.  It was the most bizarre thing and very sad.

On Thursday, we got a spontaneous invitation to the park in the morning and had already planned an outing to the marina for the afternoon.

On Friday, we broke ground on the 3rd bedroom.  Or rather, broke floor.  We have been preparing for the addition for a long time.  The paper work was nuts, but we are set to start and Rob has hired a handyman he knows to help him do the work.  It will be in fits and spurts, but there are two gaping holes in the floor, so things are visibly moving forward now.

Of course they made those holes with a jackhammer, so the kids and I made ourselves scarce.

First we went to the zoo - they have been building a new entrance and it opened Friday. 

They are also adding a new Everglades exhibit, but it won't open until the fall.  It looks really cool and I've been eager to see it.  The entrance is pretty and bright, but a little anti-climactic, since we did not plan on seeing any more of the zoo.  By Friday I'd sweat enough.

We had to kill more time than that though, so after we ate packed lunches, we got ice cream at McDonalds.  The girls all wanted cones.

Caleb wanted a McFlurry and was disappointed when I told him he had to get the "snack" size, but he has a history of getting things for free and they happened to mix in the wrong mix-in, so he got two!

Free activities not being in abundance, we ended up at the library where we were happy to soak in the a/c and kept busy enough keeping Irene from pulling books off the shelves.

With our schedule struggles (Next week we have to be out two days), I've been on homeschool blogs and discussion boards looking for ideas.  I found more empathy than ideas!  I guess there are just times when things won't work like you want them to.  But I did find encouragement to list 3 things we are doing well.  So here are 3 things:

1.  We notice little things - weird bugs, butterflies, host plants, differences in types of cichlids, squirrels mysteriously falling from trees....
2.  We fold laundry and we put it away - I am currently folding less laundry than I did before we had kids - I only fold adult clothes and oddly shaped items.  Irene got so interested in the process that she has figured out how to fold a washcloth - really!
3.  We are all learning a little more Spanish - the organic way - we hang out with our Cuban next door neighbor a lot.  Did you know that nene (neh-nay) means little kid?  I did not!

A Dream Realized: Recirculating Slip and Slide

A few years ago, we set the slip and slide up for the kids and let them play for a while.  When they came in, no one turned off the water and two things happened:

1.  Our water bill was very high the next month.
2.  The water spilled out under the fence into the street behind out house. 

I have long thought that day inspired Rob with the idea of building a slip and slide that would recirculate the water.  The design has been developing in his mind for years, and finally, it became a reality!

The slide ends in a tarp lined puddle where it is suctioned via marine pump back to the top and squirted back down the slide.  It is battery powered.

Swimming Lessons

This summer, Annalise and Natalie are taking swimming lessons. Caleb has learned all they teach at the Red Cross lessons, so he is watching with Irene and me.  This is Natalie's first year and naturally is in Level 1.  Annalise was placed in Level 2.

First day - waiting to be placed in classes.

They don't teach any diving techniques until Level 3, until then they just take a flying leap!  The jump off the diving board is the treat at the end of the lesson.

Natalie wasn't too sure, one of her teachers lowered her down to the other one.  They have been very positive and patient with her.  I was really impressed with the one who knew everyone's name by day 2 - they teach 5 classes a day and they aren't small.

The cheering squad!

Mangoes Galore

It is that time of year again - mangoes are ripe!  I have never bought a mango half as good as the ones I get free from neighbors.  These pictures represent just some of the mangoes we received this week! 

If you think you don't like mangoes, you haven't tried Glenns

At the Fruit and Spice park they told us that mangoes are the most commonly consumed fruit worldwide.  (I'd never tasted one before I moved to Florida.)  I am not sure what kind the bottom two are - the kind I see most often turns a pretty purple color before ripening, the trees are just covered in them.