Christmas decoration - done :)

The day after Thanksgiving was met with great excitement by my lovely daughters. Why? Well, they could get all the Christmas decoration out and have fun.
I enjoyed taking pictures and having some tea while the girls enjoyed themselves and decorated the house. Jamie put up all the lights on the windows, the Christmas tree and the garland in the kitchen. Nina decorated the rest. It looks beautiful and all the little light chains bathe the rooms in a beautiful, cozy, warm light. We enjoy sitting here and just taking in this wonderful atmosphere.

Jamie untangling the lights for the Christmas tree

draping the lights around the tree

the garland in the kitchen on one side

the other side

done :)

Isn't it beautiful?

Happy Thanksgiving

Today is Black Friday and I am at home, I have no desire to leave the house today. The kids are excited because today is the day we decorate for Christmas! We are almost done and I am taking a break to write this blog post. I hope everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving! We had a nice Thanksgiving. It was  our first Thanksgiving sitting at our really nice and new dinette set :) The food turned out really well. The turkey was great, I seasoned it and added some fresh rosemary and sage and then closed the bag and put the bird in the oven. We had potato dumplings, carrots with peas in a sour cream sauce with parsley, sweet corn, stuffing, coleslaw and a vegetarian turkey.  Jamie was happy that I had a vegetarian option for her :) For dessert we had mango jello with real whip cream. Though this is not the typical american meal for Thanksgiving, we really enjoyed and were very stuffed afterwards. We talked about being thankful for the many blessings we have in our lives and how blessed we are to even live in a part of the world where we have an abundance in everything. Even if we are 'poor', in comparison to the majority of the world we are still rich....
It was wonderful to be together and have time to talk and enjoy each others company. Somehow there seems to be so little time for that in everyday life. I wish we could change that.
Later we had some homemade pumpkin cheesecake, that with some coffee was delicious!
We watched the movie "Amish Grace" and talked about that for a long time. We had a good discussion about the amish and their faith and our faith. We concluded that we would not want to live like the amish, but we can certainly glean from them. Their lives a kept purposefully simple and maybe we should try to simplify a little bit. We talked a long time about forgiveness and how I realized last year, when I saw "Amish Grace" the first time, that forgiveness is not something you do once and then are done. You may have to do it over and over again. For some things it is impossible to forgive without God's help. One quote in the movie was " Forgiveness has to come from an open heart, or it won't come at all."  It was a good day. Thank you, Lord for all your providence!

stuffed turkey with rosemary and sage, so good :)

the new dinette set 

our very cute but simple Thanksgiving table setting

A new dinette set :)

When we moved to Minnesota, we were blessed with a dinette set. Which was really, really wonderful, we could sit at a table and eat versus holding our plates in our laps. Now, four years later the table has worked well for us, but was showing signs of age. For about a year we kept tightening the legs but after a few days the screws came loose again. I guess you could say I have - well, had, - some screws loose ;-)   Since the table top was tile, it was pretty heavy. I think that added to the wear of the table.
The other day I decided to finally get a new dinette set. So the kids and I went to Ikea :)  We it really like going there. I could find a LOT of beautiful things there - sigh.  So, we all went and looked at tables and chairs and finally decided on a table and found chairs which are very similar to the ones we had in Germany. That made us feel very good, kind of like getting our stuff, which is still in storage in Germany. When we got home it was late but Jamie and I build the table and Jamie with a little help from Jeremy put all the chairs together. We had our first breakfast on our new dinette set :)
The only thing we had to do with the chairs was finish them. So I went to Walmart and bought some spray finish. Jamie Sanded the seat down, so it would be smooth after sanding and then treated all four chairs. It was pretty hard to wait for 24 hours before we could use the chairs, but we did it and now have a beautiful table and chairs! Thank you Jamie for all of your hard work!!!!!  I love you !!!!

my Jamie - thank you Love!

still sanding the chair...

the left chair is before, the right chair is after sanding and spraying.

The "little" guy starts the Birthday parties...

Jeremy is the first of my three lovely children to start with Birthdays, which we will be celebrating once a months from now and end the last one in January. I have often wished that the kid's Birthdays would have been in the summer and we could have lovely garden parties, decorated gazebos and lovely warm breeze accompanied by lots of children's laughter. Do you remember Meat Loaf's song " Two out of three ain't bad" ?  Well, in this case it is more like one out of four ain't bad :)  We have parties and we have decorations and we have lots of children's laughter. Because we live in a rather small apartment, we have to 'outsource' the parties. This year my 'little' guy wanted to go to a Go-Cart place, which proved to be waaayyy too expensive. So he thought about Paintball - really???? In my mind I could see injured and crying kids and very upset moms. That didn't sound like a lot of laughter. Luckily he finally settled on a trampoline park. We had a part of the trampoline park just for us for 30 min. That was really great and the kids enjoyed themselves very much and bounced all over the place. They threw the balls and played some sort of trampoline-dodgeball. They were jumping and falling and bouncing and running and laughing. After the thirty minutes we had to leave that private court and join the public, which was much more crowed, as there were about three or four more Birthday parties at the same time. The kids jumped and played for another sixty minutes after which they were very hot and exhausted. I think they were kind of happy that they got to sit down and have pizza, something to drink and cupcakes. Jeremy had a great time and enjoyed the company of his siblings and friends. After we got home and he had a shower he fell exhausted and happy into his bed. We had a fun day celebrating his 11-th Birthday. Though to me the past 11 years seemed more like 11 months  :)

Siblings :)

trampoline-dodgeball

yeah, well, the camera didn't do well with kids in mid-air

Everyone is enjoying pizza and something to drink

Happy Birthday, mein kleiner Frosch :D 

Sickness in the house

For the last few days the kids have been sick with some sort of bug. They have headaches and feel dizzy and have stomach aches. It seems to get better - very slowly......
Needless to say that we had to take a break from school for now. I took the the chance to look some more into our schedules. I have heard so many good things about the "The Well Planned Day" that I decided to order it. It has many good schedules and encouraging articles and it said in the description that it can be used for up to four students. Well, at least that is what I understood....

Isn't this pretty? Just the thought of having all kinds of schedules in one book makes this homeschool mom's heart beat faster :)
They have a class schedule, daily schedule, grades and attendence schedules, semester goals and even a shopping list and Dinner menu schedule for the week along with these encouraging articles. I really, really like this set up!

Isn't this awesome? I really like it! So I was all enthusiastic to start using it. I thought that this would be great, since I have only three children there would be enough space to add all our subjects. So I started adding the information and our work and quickly realized that no matter how I try to squish it together, it is not going to work for us. Now that was very disappointing on at least two levels. One, I really, really like everything else about it and - two, I hate to spend the money and not use it. So I was wondering how to make this work for us. I think I spend a whole day looking at schedules all over the web and I didn't find anything I liked. I was getting pretty frustrated thinking that I couldn't use this otherwise marvelous book that combines everything a homeschool mom needs. Since I researched all kinds of schedules, I found what I don't like. However. what I wanted started to crystalize more and I finally set out to make my own schedule. When I was done, I was quite happy with a very simple yet very workable schedule that finally works for us. It was still upsetting that I thought I would have to print it all out and then put it in a folder which I then have to use somehow together with the Planner. Then I had a great thought. Why not combine the two! The question was just how to do that. I went through several possibilities in my mind and concluded that I would just print the needed sheets out and tape them with double sided tape in the Planner.
Here are some pictures of what I did. The letters in the boxes are the beginning letters of each child. This gives me enough space to briefly write what is to be done today. I have the lesson plan for each child and each subject in my teacher's binder. I wrote in greater detail in the lesson planner, so this is a great way for me to have all the assignments for all three kids together. I am surprised to see that the most simple template works the best. Maybe I am just strange, but I never had enough space for each subject we are doing. Now I am writing my own and I got every subject for every child together. This is a great way - for me - to continue to use this awesome Planner :)  If you are interested in a template, let me know and I will send it to you.

Now I better go and attend to my lovelies :)

North Shore

When I wrote last, I was still planning for Co-op. We are done with all the planning and had our first meeting already. I think it went very well and I am looking forward to a great year. As a reward for all the work I had to do, Nina for working 40 and sometimes more hours per week this summer and the other two being on the back burner we took a few days to reconnect, refresh and just enjoy each other and the very beautiful nature around us. We had our first camping trip at the North Shore. We had a good time. We talked a lot, played cards, at Pizza, slept, read and just sat and looked at Lake Superior. A few years ago we read 'Paddle to the Sea' from Holling C Holling. Paddle started his journey at Thunder Bay Canada and traveled along the coast of Lake Superior, well not only the coast but mostly. We were in Germany when we read about it, now we are here sitting at the shores of Lake Superior. Who know what else God has in store for us and everyone else? Where will we be in 5 or 10 or 20 years??? Well, I decided to just enjoy the time I have with the kids right now because I don't know how much time I am granted on this earth. So instead of me talking, how about if I just share some of our pictures?

He enjoyed the little playground

the light saber was a must on the trip ;-)

God's beautiful creation

and I thought only the Ocean has big waves....

having the kindle with us was really nice, so much easier than bringing three or four books (though I still prefer books )

I can't tell you how often I held my breath because the kids were so very close to the edge.....

another moment when my heart was pounding because I was scared that they might fall

They named it "Jamie Island" though that name didn't catch on with everyone ;-)

obviously staged but kinda funny....

beautiful evening sky

sisters .....

he was very persistent, though his line kept getting caught on rocks and he lost his favorite lure

this looks so endless and made me feel so small... is that why water has a calming effect on my soul?

breath-taking beauty

 it might have been a little well once upon a time.....

of course all climbing was done in flip flops

so peaceful...

If you look closely you can see a part of a rainbow :)

the other part of the rainbow

the clouds seemed to be almost low enough to touch .....

not such a great quality but beautiful nonetheless. Maybe a motive for Thomas Kinkade? :)