I thought I’d share a few of the things that my mother in law has written down in her book that are cute things my kids have said over the years. They are both cute and funny. I hope they are a delight for you, as well.

Ben (4 1/2)
He held his hand out and asked, “Is this my right hand?” His mother said, “yes”.
He asked, “Is this my right foot?” Mother said it was.

He ran out to play. A little while later, Joe (3 1/2) ran in from playing and held up his hand and asked his mother, “Is this my wrong hand?”

Eric (1 1/2)
His mom pointed out the different vegetables she had growing in the garden.
He told her she should plant meat.

Bethy (3)
Someone at church gave Bethy a drink of water. She told her mother later, “I didn’t like that water very much. It was too wet.”

Twins, Emily and Katie(4)
Anne (13) was fixing sandwiches for the twins (4) when she asked them if they wanted a half or whole sandwich. Katie said she wanted a whole. Emily said, “I want lots of halves.”

Ben (3)
While being kissed goodnight and during goodnight prayers, Ben asked his dad to pray for Jesus’ Birthday. When questioned why, he responded that he liked cake. His daddy said his Birthday was coming up, so Ben said, “Let’s pray for yours!”

Anne (5)
She was telling Gramma all about TillTill, her mother’s cat, and how old she was – she was so old, she was turning brown. She looked up at me and said, “Gramma, you’re turning brown, too!.”

Dennis and Ruth took the (then) 4 kids on a trip to Sacramento, California. It was their first experience of seeing palm trees. They said, “Look! Giant pineapples!”

Eric (2 1/2)
(You have to understand, Eric is a very compliant child) Eric was supposed to be cleaning something up with the other boys and he wasn’t doing his part. Ruth asked him if a spanking would help him do it. he replied, “Uh..uh..uh..uh..NO!” Ruth asked, “What would help?” He answered, “Pop!”

Tags: Anne, Ben, Bethy, Emily, Eric, Family, just fun

My daughter, Anne (pronounced Annie), has toiled over a very long post, which includes many pictures of our family’s first hunting trip of the year. There will be another soon.

Click on the link below and enjoy! Don’t forget to view the video of the moose!

http://www.allanne.com/hunting-2008-part-one

Tags: Anne, Ben, Bethy, Dennis, Elle, Emily, Eric, Family, hunting, Joe, Katie, Photos, Vehicles

The agenda today consists of … and not in any particular order:

• Coffee
• CTBHH chat
• Watering the yard
• Quiet time
• Wish my twins Happy Birthday!
• Finish getting our network hooked up to use SOS (Switched on Schoolhouse)
• Finish our MOTH schedule before school starts next week
• Attend a maquillage party, hosted by two of my daughters, Bethy and Anne
• Laundry

Tags: Anne, Bethy, Birthday, Emily, Family, Katie, MOTH, Organization, schedule

Sorry life has taken me away from posting. But then again, maybe it’s best if I don’t post too often. You know the old saying, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Do you grow fonder the longer I am away?  Hehe

Well, the Superbowl is today. I have no clue what number year this superbowl is. We haven’t watched it in over 17 years! But I do know this: Steelers are playing the Seahawks. Being the Northwestern gal I am, and since I was born just outside Seattle…and because my Dad is a huge Seahawks fan, I guess I’ll officially, silently, root for the Seahawks.

I did find out, however, a few years ago, that today is a great day to do any shopping at Costco! Anne and I went there to find a very vacant warehouse! Oh! We did bump into our neighbors.  They told us they make an annual event of shopping on Superbowl Sunday because no one is around.  So there’s my tip to you today!

Dennis has been heavy into recording for our new CD. This one will be much more professional than the last, which was really intended just for fun and family.  I am excited to see parts of it coming together.

The purpose of this CD is to encourage the Saints and to plant seeds in non-believers. You can come visit our band’s site at www.electricchurch.net.  Please join the mailing list and enjoy reading!

Dennis has a 3 day weekend! Yippee!!!  What a treat for us! He really needed a break. He works between 14-16 hour days 6 days a week, usually.

The mice have been keeping us on our toes here, lately. It seems that they have all moved from the shed into the house. Understandably, right? I mean… the house IS warmer and there are crumbs…yes, crumbs. I know, it messes up your pristine image of me.

Anyway, the mice never keep us short of excitement here. I think their life’s goal is to taunt me.

School is moving right along! I enjoy sitting and working with the girls. The boys are mostly doing independent work.

I haven’t been feeling real well lately. I think it has something to do with the fact that we are expecting [again] in September!

We had a worm (a virus) infect a couple of our computers recently. It wiped out a lot of personal items, for which I am sad about. Just another reminder to have things backed up on CD!

Yesterday, Bethy and I sat and went through a large box of photos. It was so enjoyable to do this and everyone in the house came by us more than once to view all the photos of memories past. We managed to get them all organized into 2 small shoebox sized boxes.

I guess that’s enough for now. I need to get started on my day.  Until next time!

Tags: baby, Bethy, electric church, Family, health, television

MOTH = Managers Of Their Homes

In theory, it’s supposed to streamline and organize your family.

Reality is another thing…or is it?

This year, I sat Anne down with me to help me work out our schedule.  You see, the main reason we’ve been using the MOTH is because we have 3 networked computers and a handful of students and I needed a way to coordinate everyone doing their Switched on Schoolhouse Language Arts and their DIVE math CD in order to do their Saxon, not to mention all the “earned” computer time and educational “stuff.”

We got the schedule down.  It looked like a dandy!  It was beautiful!  I was pleased.

A few things have changed since last year due to Benjamin graduating and working full-time, as well as Anne taking on a new job of sewing hunting decoys for MT Decoy and Cabela’s.  (She does this from home)

The first day of our schedule arrives.  We are poised.  Mom is excited and motivated to take on the days ahead!  The schedule has been gone over, checked and rechecked.  By the end of the first couple of hours, it becomes very apparent something’s amiss!

I knew that something was wrong when Emily came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS.”  Ok.  I could deal with that minor oversight.  Another child came to me and said I had forgotten to schedule them for a bathing!  Hmmm  Later, Elizabeth came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS, but put me down for reading three times.” (Poor girl. Imagine that! What a rough schedule when reading is your very favorite thing to do in life!)

Of course, I got the usual complaints, “Mom, can you reschedule us to feed and care for the chickens at, say, 7:00?  6:30 Is too early.  “No, sweetie.  If I did that, then you couldn’t eat breakfast.”  “Mom, I don’t like that my ‘free time’ is scheduled.  It doesn’t feel free if it’s scheduled.”

Back to the drawing board…or in our case, Excel.  I work our MOTH in Excel.  Since there are so many of us, it seems to work well.  Some great ladies at the Titus2 forum, since closed to any ol’ yahoo, helped me out to learn how to monkey with the cells to get them to conform to my likeness. At least that is the hope.  In the past, I color-coded everyone, but this year, I am trying something new by color-coding times in which a person is on a computer in order to keep it all straight! It also helps that each of our computers have names.  My computer is fondly called “Mother” or “Mothership.”  Since the other two computers came from our office, we lovingly named them after the people who used them, “Darren” and “Valarie.”

I finally made the unfortunate decision to delete Abigail (1) and Jayden (2) off the schedule since we were hanging off the edge of the paper and I couldn’t find my tape to print more pages to put together like a puzzle.  I didn’t want to attempt “landscape,” for this old brain of mine just couldn’t handle further confusion.

Well, after a week of stumbling through my first draft of the final schedule, or was that the final draft of the first schedule… I sat down and revamped it once again.

Of course, there is an exception to every perfect schedule and our exceptions are those of Thursdays when one son has guitar lessons, every other Wednesday, two sons work in the morning, they just began a job each afternoon at a neighbors “until the snow starts flying”, Monday’s Daddy’s home, so we have to remember that we may not always follow schedule on Mondays…shall I continue with the “exceptions to the rule?”  Of course there’s sick babies, and sometimes, sick mama’s.

We used to have a “loose” schedule.  Up by 8 o’clock, chores and fed by 10 o’clock then start school until lunch, finishing in the afternoon.  When baby number 9 was on his way, I knew a few things had to change:  One, we needed curriculum that freed me up a bit, and two, we needed more order and discipline in our lives.  However, many other benefits have come from this schedule:  I can make sure we are doing everything Daddy wants us to get done in a day, if laundry is sitting there, I am assured it will be taken care of “in it’s time.”  You know the old saying, “A place for everything and everything in it’s place?”  Well, using this MOTH schedule is like that.  We could say, “A time for everything and everything has a time.”

Tags: Abby, Anne, Ben, Bethy, Emily, Eric, Family, Jay, Joe, MOTH, Organization, schedule, school