Bless This Mess

I’m way behind on all my blogging, but oh well.  My life isn’t that exciting, so I’m sure you guys don’t really miss it.

Some over due “first day of school” pictures!

Ashley started school first.  Fourth Grade!!!  She has 7 stinkin’ book reports due this year!  Plus tons of other large projects the teacher has them doing.  I don’t know if it’s just her teacher who’s so into all the projects or if it’s a school wide 4th grade thing.  It’s tons more than I was excepting.

Eden started the day after.  First Grade!!!  This year, Eden is in the Chinese Immersion program at the school.  Basically, half the day is taught in Mandarin!  They don’t teach it the was I was taught Spanish in school.  Instead of pointing to a picture of a dog and saying “This is how you say dog in Mandarin…” NO, instead they teach math, social studies and a few other subjects all in Mandarin.  But never fear, they teach the same subjects in English too!  Even though her teacher speaks English and Mandarin, she’s from China and isn’t allowed to speak one word of English to the kids! If the parents ever visit that room, we’re not allowed to speak, unless we can say it in Mandarin.  So parent/teacher conferences with her have to happen when the kids aren’t around.  (Basically she has 2 teachers one who speaks English to her and one that speaks just Mandarin to her.)

The program is supposed to continue through high school!  I’m thinking around that time, we might go to China and Eden can be our interpreter!  So far she likes it and is already learning tons of stuff from it.

Amanda started the week after, for her second year of preschool!  I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I absolutely love this preschool my kids have gone to!  They had Ashley and Eden reading books before they ever started Kindergarten!  Amanda is loving it!

The last week of August, I saw this leaf.  So did my kids, which is why we started decorating for Fall before September even got here.   Don’t get me wrong, I love Fall, absolutely love it!  It’s my favoritest of all the seasons, with Spring being a close second.  I just wasn’t ready to decorate for it yet, but my kids begged and begged.  So I told them if they got things cleaned up, we’d decorate.

Here’s a little something I did with my vinyl machine!  All the stuff stuck on the wall was my design!  The pumpkins, the fence, the haunted house, the moon and cloud!  All of it!

But this sign, I saw on someones blog and now I don’t remember where.  This totally wasn’t my idea, but thought it was too cute not to do!  I think it looks cool on the bead board.  I still need to blacken the edges though.

If you saw my last post, you’ll know what this picture is all about!

And on a totally unrelated topic… yes, the picture below is of a deer’s behind.  We have had 4 small deer get trapped in our backyard ever since we put up the fence.  But this one takes the cake.  With the others, all I had to do was open the gate or move something over to reveal a hole, but this one was really trapped!

I don’t know how she got in our backyard in the first place, but our dog scared her so bad, she tried to run through the bars.  Her head and shoulders made it just fine, but as you can see, her hips were totally stuck. (Those darn hips, mine are too wide too!)

My brother had just gotten home and we worked and worked trying to pry those iron bars a part.  I finally got 3 pairs of denim and some thick sticks.  We twisted and twisted the bars until they started to bend a bit.  Then Paul, who finally got home from work, took the last pair of jeans and lifted up the back end of the deer and we slid her through the fence. That was 45 minutes of work, and she didn’t even say “thanks”.

She wobbled off over to the wild area right next to our house.  I haven’t seen her since.

We now have chicken wire along the bottom 1/3 of our fence.  Hopefully that’ll keep the deer from getting trapped.

So there you have it, my not so exciting life.

Well, it’s not exciting anymore, the primary program was yesterday (I was in charge of it) and it was a huge success!  Instead of coming up with lines for the kids to say, I sent home questions for every single child in our primary (50 of them) and then the answers they gave is what they said!  It was a hit!

I’m off to go get a violin book, Ashley starts lessons tomorrow.

Have a wonderful day!