The weather outside today is simply gorgeous! I couldn’t pass up this opportunity, so I surprised the kids by squeezing in a trip to the park, somewhere between lunch and nap time. Seemed like the perfect plan to take advantage of 74 degrees and sunny. Plus, the public school kids were still being held prisoner [...]

We love the library. What homeschooling mom doesn’t love a chance to read free books?!
But, oh, how I hate that the library eventually wants their books back!
I’m kidding. Sort of.
We had a family trip to the library awhile back. We checked out a stack of books. About 25, I think.
When we went to return them, [...]

Since I’m the player agent for my boys’ baseball league, I get to be among the first to know the team assignments. My kids are giddy to “finally” know which teams they’re on this year.
Nate and Connor will be birds this year, orange and black ones! They’ll be on the Orioles T-Ball team. Connor, who [...]

It’s true that we LOVE having a bigger family. (I say “bigger” because I still don’t think of us as a “big family.”)
I love that it’s teaching my children to always be considerate of others, to continually look for opportunites to serve and to share, and to understand the blessing of children from a very [...]

Due to the chaos that is my husband’s work schedule, we have a strange, fluctuating homeschool schedule.
We “do school” just four days a week.
Some weeks it’s Monday through Thursday. Other times it’s Tuesday through Friday. Sometimes it’s randomly taken off in the middle of the week to work around a doctor’s appointment or, more importantly, [...]

My oldest boys are intrigued by mascots. They think it’s so cool to learn the names of college teams, high school teams, professional teams, etc.
They were recently asking me what my school mascot and colors were. “What were you in college?”
“We were the Tigers! Our colors were black and gold.”
“What about high school?” they wanted [...]

Connor is 4. He likes to learn new things. He is still, however, struggling with the order of a few of the letters in the alphabet.
Often his version goes something like this: “A B C D E F G, H I K J - lallalala - Q R S, W X Y Z…” It’s a little [...]

My girl Ferris loves food. All food. It took me more than two years to find any foods she didn’t like.
But I succeeded!
Since the other day was St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d do something fun and make green omlettes for the kids. I just put a few drops of green food coloring in and [...]

These are important days around here! Yesterday was a day of mini-milestones. I love watching my children learn new things… and I don’t just mean at the homeschool table.
We had small successes all around yesterday. Ferris pottied in the toilet! We haven’t officially started potty-training, but when she asks, I let her sit there. She [...]

The weather is finally above freezing here in Chicagoland! I love it when it warms up.
Today, as we finished school, I sent the 5 oldest kiddies out to play. When I looked out the window a few minutes later, this warmed my heart even more:

I didn’t even ask Andy and Brady to swing with their [...]