Family Interviews

We had father and child interviews today. Of course this resulted from a prompting during priesthood meeting where we studied Elder Ballard's address about fathers and sons. Each interview began with a kneeling prayer (as mission president interviews always did) where I expressed gratitude to the Lord for each child's individual positive attributes. Afterwards, Abby mentioned that the part of the prayer that mentioned "Abby" made her feel happy. Nikki was just beaming with smiles and bubbling with joy. Josh also mentioned that he heard the part of the prayer where I was grateful for his love of learning about the world around him and prayed that it would continue. He took great joy in outlining--in quite a bit of detail--his progress thus far in school this year. I was impressed with how little children listen very intently when they hear their own name in our prayers and how much that means to them. It is a simply concept, but incredibly powerful, and one I think I've underestimated in the past.

--Jeremiah

To Jesus

Dear Jesus Thank you for president Thomas .S. Monson I Even love you. I collected trash from the church. Love: Josh

Isn't that cute? He wrote this letter after he got home from church. He's always picking up trash he finds on the ground to put in the garbage.

Scentsy Party! Come join the fun!

If you live by me, my party is on May 28th at 7:30pm. It'll be lots of fun! I'll have treats and it'll be a fun break from the kids. If you don't live by me and you want to order for my party you can do that too! Visit: www.scentsy.com/scentsohio Click on "place an order" and the select "Julie Glosenger" and it'll take you shopping. Anything you buy will be credited to my party and shipped directly to you! Thanks for your support! Scentsy smell so yummy and are completely safe for full-time use with young kids in the house (a big plus for me!)

Buckeye Candy

I needed to give Kim the recipe and I thought I'd post it here for anyone else that might want the recipe because these are really yummy! That isn't my picture, lol. I found one on the internet for you so you can see what the buckeye candy is supposed to look like...just like the nut.

Recipe:
Mix together 3 cups creamy peanut butter, 1 1/2 sticks softened butter and 2 lbs confectioner's sugar. Form into small balls. Using a toothpick, dip balls into 16 oz melted dipping chocolate until almost covered (gotta leave a light brown circle to make it look like the real nut!). Refrigerate.

Super easy snack that is really yummy :)

Happy Birthday Relief Society!

Here's my cake for the cake decorating contest for our Relief Society Birthday enrichment tonight. I made it yesterday. It's my 3rd time working with fondant. I still have lines in my fondant and what not but oh well. I'll eventually be patient enough to keep kneading and rolling until it's perfect (right?). I was too cheap to buy the gum-paste that I was supposed to to make the bow and I was too impatient to wait 24 hours for the bow pieces to dry before putting it together. After 5 hours of drying, I just wanted the cake done so I didn't have to think about it anymore. I'm so impatient. I don't think I'm cut out for cake decorating. I used my joann's coupon on a fondant mat, next time I'll use it to buy gum-paste so the next time my fondant bow won't be so flat and sad looking.

Sequential Spelling

We started using Sequential Spelling a month ago. When I decided to do homeschooling completely on my own this year (not through on online school), I found several websites that had spelling lists for each week online. I figured for spelling I'd just use one of those free lists. Some were even from websites from public school teachers that were posting them for the parents of the kids in their class. Josh was way too smart for those. He never got any wrong and we never had to practice them. He's in first grade and I started with the 3rd grade spelling lists and still he was flying right through them, even the bonus questions! I needed to challenge him. So finally I heard about the Sequential Spelling program. It's 7 books. Each book is a complete year daily curriculumn for spelling. This is awesome! Instead of making smaller words for younger grades and larger words for older grades, it has a system. You learn to spell by a pattern. For example, the first day (well, not really the first lesson but for his pattern day one) would be to spell stall, then you'd spell stalls, then install, installs, installing, and then installment. That was totally off the top of my head, but you get the picture. They build off each other and they learn to spell all forms of each word before moving on. At first they are spelling 20 words each day and then they work up to 25. Josh just did the 24th day and we really like it. He gets easy words to do and then learns the proper endings to make the past tense, plural, etc and then he gets some challenging words mixed in. They want the kids to correct their own work as well, which he learns from fixing his own mixtakes a lot. This curriculumn was made by the AVKO Dyslexia Educational Research Foundation to help people with dyslexia as well. I bought the book from Sonlight curriculumn's website for $10.52, I believe. It was well worth it. They also have a student book to use for the kids just to write the words down each day. They have it so that day 1 is on the first page (along with two other days that aren't close to day 1), day 2 on the next page, etc. Anyways, I didn't want to spend the $$ on the book so I made my own. I saw the first 3 pages online for the student response book and know that it goes just like mine...may not be exact, but it's close. So if you're intersted you can download it.

Happy Birthday Nikki!

I know it's been forever since I updated! Not sure really why, but it has! Anyways, on March 8th, Nikki turned 3. It's crazy to think that my "baby" is 3 now. It makes me feel old realizing that my baby is 3 and my oldest will be 7 soon. I'm not old enough for a 7 year old?? What has the world come too, lol. Nikki had a great time at her birthday party. We had a bunch of little kids over to play in the backyard, face paint, pizza and play with water balloons. We threw them at the targets on our fence that I made out of felt and staple low to the ground because it was the first warm day. We got lucky! Her party was very last minute because I went out of town by myself! Yup, you heard me right....I was childless. I was gone for about 4 days. I drove out to Milwaukee and stayed at my friend Paula's house with her sixteen year old, now driving, son (scary!) j/k. It was fun. During the day I was mostly at the Trucksa's house. They are a couple that Jeremiah and I became very close too. They are amazing and I love listening to their stories. Jane Trucksa is the Quilting Bee star and does every craft well, known to man and Ed Trucksa helped body gaurd 5 different presidents. So it was great whenever we went to their house when we were living in Milwaukee. I'd talk to Jane about all the crafty things and Jeremiah would get to talk guns to an experienced shooter :)

Back to Nikki's birthday. She had a ton of fun. Here are some more pictures from her party: