As usual, I am having some difficulties with the camera, and therefore do not have as many pictures as I would like for this week!!! There have been so many times I thought, O I would love to capture that in a picture!! Like Miriam pulling herself up all the time now, Isaac doing "push-ups" with daddy or the two of them playing with the new bowling set. But I just tried to take a snapshot for my memory.
It's been a good week, I think we've been home for most of it! The coming weeks will be picking up speed... lots of things planned at the church and for us personally. One thing I am super excited about is the Women's ministry that is beginning to really take off at the church! I have had a burden for Women's ministry for a few years now and have been wanting to really see some fruitful Bible study groups for our ladies among other things. Well, right now we have 18...yes 18!!!! ladies in a Bible study group! (Out of a church of 100!) Praise the Lord! I can not tell you how excited I am! I know that God wants and IS going to do amazing things in the lives of these ladies and in their families. I pray that each of them begin to hunger for the Lord like never before and dig into His Word. And that each of them (and me!!) might be open to the Lord making a transforming difference in their lives.
I have also started teaching the youth Sunday School class again. I come to this with apprehension and excitement. (Youth can be somewhat intimidating! And I am definitely not up on all the latest movies/tv/music!) But I love each of them and desire for their faith in the Lord to be deep and for them to be faithful to Him.

Isaac loves trying on our shoes. Here he found my tennis shoes.

Trying to put on socks by himself (even though they are mommy's socks) This is a normal occurrence when I'm folding laundry in the living room with the kids.

Aaron picked up a bowling set the other day for $5. The kids have had a blast with it this week! This was Miriam's first time playing with it. Isaac was asleep at the time, otherwise he would have been right in the middle of it!

I was laying Miriam down for her nap the other day and Isaac was already sleeping. He stirred a little and ended up in this position. I could resist taking a picture ;)

I won these fun magnetic pom-poms from Erin at Home Grown Hearts. This was our first week using them and Isaac's first real experience with magnets. He had lots of fun with them and I'm looking forward to using these often! The printable "A" page was downloaded from Making Learning Fun.

We've been focusing alot of colors. I'm pretty sure he can recognize his colors, he's just not verbalizing the names of them at this point much. Here is a fun color matching file folder game that I got from Erin at Home Grown Hearts. The first time we played it, he matched them all right away with just a little bit of guidance.

The next few times (when daddy was watching :-P, he put all the colors on the wrong pictures!!!! "sigh" I think he was just playing with me. Crazy kid!

Other fun things we did this week during Tot School:

• Our Little Leap Pad: Animal Book
• Leapfrog Animal Farm
• Baby Einstein: Baby McDonald Day on the Farm video
• A colorful alphabet puzzle we picked up at a consignment shop. (LOVE consignment shops!)
• I found a fun poster at the Dollar Tree that has numbers 1-20 with the appropriate pictures. I cut it in half to focus on 1-10 and also so it wasn't so big and bulky. We then spent time counting and used Cheerios for fun.
• Lots and lots of reading! We went to the library and found lots of fun books about farm animals. His favorite is Millie Waits for the Mail by Alexander Steffensmeier. When I get to the end and say "The End", he does the sign language for "more". I am so glad he likes for me to read to him! Precious times!
  

I thought this was too cute of Miriam and just wanted to share. She was busy playing today, Isaac was napping (It is a rare thing when their naps are at the same time!) I was sitting on the couch reading when I looked down and she had fallen asleep like this. lol

So, the biggest thing I've been working on at home is becoming more organized with my time and pretty much everything else to do with homemaking. (Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember another post with a similar sentence.....hmmmm....so I'm a work in process) Sundays will hopefully be the day that I post to the blog, upload pics to Facebook, keep up with correspondence, etc. (work on any Thanks-You's is on this day too, thankfully my wonderful hubby is taking care of the most recent ones) So for the last few weeks, I have been doing better and feel myself slowly getting more things done and being less stressed about it. Saturdays are my planning days. So after I devote my Sat morning to a little extra sleep, pancakes and Veggie Tales in our pajammies (is that a word?) with the kids, I sit down and plan my week: my list of what needs done around the house, menus, grocery list, any appointments, try to find out hubby's schedule, any church related thing, plan Isaac's Tot School for the week, etc. Than afterwards I work on anything I need to make to get ready for Tot School during the coming week. It might seem like alot, but with a just an hour or two, even though it may be a crazy week ahead, I feel much less stressed. I've been able to do this the last couple of weeks, and Wow! what a difference it has made! I try not to get obsessed about it or wear my husband out with it, b/c I know I could very easily do that! I just try and use it to guide me through my week. The best feeling was when I was working on it yesterday and I realized how much I had already accomplished in the past few weeks, and my list around the house was much smaller this week! Then I had the energy and time to get the kitchen decluttered (once again!) and get my fridge cleaned ou t... so now they're already marked of my list for next week! Hooray! Well ..... enough about that ..... hopefully I didn't bore you and you will continue to check back in! O and by the way, I use the Busy Body Book planner and LOVE it! It has a grid system for each week so I can track what each of us are doing plus use one part of the grid for menu planning and another for Tot School! This pic is the example page they give for the planner. http://www.busybodybook.com/