I Love Charleston

The high today is 79 degrees!  We took a quick walk on the beach on Sunday night, went camping at the beach last weekend, and we have beach plans again for this weekend!  I can’t believe its November.  What’s not to love?

Yes, we left the kids in their church clothes!

  Bobby is so cute I could just eat him up!

Gob LOVES the beach too!

Camping boys!

At Botany Bay on Edisto Island…This beach was AMAZING!  Its illegal to take the shells so there are huge shells everywhere.

Adeline is growing up so fast!  She looks like a little kid, not my little baby girl!

Internet At Last!

After living in our new house for the past 4 months, we finally have internet and cable!  We have had internet on our phones through our data plans, so we haven’t been completely unplugged, but I realized just how careful I had to be in keeping track of my data usage and trying (not always successfully) to not go over my limits.  But Comcast has finally laid the cable in our neighborhood and we couldn’t be more excited!  They haven’t buried all the lines yet, so there are nice big cables running through our yard, but I don’t even care because I can actually use my computer again, watch netflix and hulu again, and we even splurged and paid 10 extra dollars for some basic cable.  No more library dvd rentals for us!  If Rob and I gain 15 lbs in the next week or 2 its because we are sitting on our butts catching up on our favorite shows (Parks and Recreation, The Office, 30 Rock, Community, Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy—this one is all me), and I’ve even started branching out and trying new shows like Terra Nova, and Mad Men.  Any other suggestions? 

In other news, Bobby is growing up so fast!  He is crawling everywhere (mostly commando crawling, but he’s just starting to get up on his knees more often), pulling up to everything and climbing the stairs!  He still puts everything in his mouth.  I have to watch him like a hawk!   He also eats like a horse.  He will scream if he sees food that is not in his hands or his mouth and I don’t think he ever gets full.  But he’s not a huge kid.  He’s heavy, but more like solid heavy, not chunky or big.  He is absolutely a mamma’s boy.  He can say a few sounds, but no real words yet.  And he LOVES cords!  He will find them, no matter how well we hide them.  If there is something plugged in in the same room as Bobby, he will race for the cord as soon as he gets in the room.  And when I tell him “No” he just looks back at me, smiles, and then turns around and laughs and squeals as he crawls as fast as he can toward the cord.  He’s at such a cute age, but very tiring for me!

Adeline has transitioned to a toddler bed and does great in it at night.  However, she has stopped taking afternoon naps, and instead, plays in her room.  Luckily, she will play quietly and happily in there by herself for 2-3 hours (don’t worry, I go in a check on her every now and then), so I still get a nice break during the day.  But it also means that she is ready for bed by 6 pm and that’s when Rob gets home, so she’s usually pretty grumpy by the time he is home.  She talks like crazy at home (I can’t believe how big her vocabulary is getting), but is very shy in public.  She’s a loner and doesn’t really like to play with other kids, but loves to play with adults.  She is excited for Halloween, but really has no clue how much she is going to love it.  I can’t wait to get her and Bobby all dressed up.  They are going to be too cute!  Of course, I will post pictures afterwards!  Maybe I’ll even get the posted before Christmas now that I don’t have the excuse of no internet!

Birthday Girl

So I’m only 3 months late on posting these!

Rob’s parents came out for Adeline’s 2nd birthday and we spent the day at the beach (Adeline’s favorite thing to do in the whole world!).

  

She loved riding on Grandma Sherie’s “boat.”

She fell off a few times, but she still kept getting back on for more!  Isn’t this picture just classic?

When we got home we had sand cake!  This is the easiest “cake” ever.  It is crushed up vanilla Oreos layered with cheesecake pudding.  And it was really good.  Adeline doesn’t ever eat much cake, but she LOVED this. 

What kid wouldn’t love eating with a big shovel?

The next weekend we had a birthday party/BBQ with some new friends and neighbors.  I decided to go with a monster themed party because it seemed cute and easy.  I had tons of fun planning all the food and goodies for the party.  Here’s the food spread:

The kids had fun coloring, playing bean bag toss, and blowing bubbles, and it was nice to get to know some friends better.  Adeline absolutely loved everything about it and has been singing happy birthday and pretending to blow out candles ever since.  Seriously, she does this multiple times a day…even 3 months later.

   

Free Food!

I know I have written about Harris Teeter’s online grocery shopping before and I still love this method of shopping.  But they did make a big mistake last night.  They gave me someone else’s groceries by mistake.  Since I just drove up to the drive through and they brought the groceries and loaded them into the car, I didn’t even look at the groceries at all.  Well I got almost home when I get a call from them asking if I got the right groceries because someone else had called and was apparently given my groceries.  At first they wanted me to bring them back to the store until I explained that I had 2 very tired and very fussy children in the car and it was past bedtime.  So since the food was perishable, I got to keep it and still got my regular groceries this morning!  Thank you to the random grocery shopper who ordered fresh salmon, 4 lbs of chicken, fresh pre made chicken kabobs, tons of fruits and veggies, fancy deli meats and cheeses, Greek yogurt, fresh mint (I can tell she had a good meal planned here!), milk, yogurt, and a lot of other goodies that I wouldn’t usually spend a bunch of money on!  Now I’m off to plan a meal with my surprise groceries!  I’m thinking lemon, mint and asparagus risotto (Jaime Oliver Recipe) and salmon with citrus yogurt cream sauce (epicurious recipe)!  YUM!  I really wish she would have ordered some steaks though ;)

Looking for Input

Lately I have been thinking a lot about alternative options to public school for my children.  Yes, I know that Adeline is only 2 years old, but I am at home all day with the kids and I have a lot of time to think about this kind of stuff.  The more I think about it, the less I want to put my kids in public schools.  I went to public schools and I taught in public schools for 5 years, so I know the pros and cons pretty well when it comes to public schools.  I want my kids to learn more than is available in public schools.  I feel like the biggest thing I learned in schools was how to follow directions and test well.  I obviously learned the basics as well, but I know I have/had the potential to learn so much more and that’s why I want more for my kids.  I want to give them the opportunity to excel at things other than following directions (ironically, this is what I am trying so hard to get Adeline to learn right now!)

My dream for my kids is that they will love to learn, know all the basics in reading, writing, math, history, science, etc and then choose to learn more based on their own interests—be it math, science, art, music, writing, etc.  I want them to be critical thinkers, to learn to work well with others, to learn leadership skills, entrepreneurial skills, business skills.  I want them to understand politics, be financially intelligent, be athletic, have friends, be spiritually minded, socially well-adapted.  I want them to learn about things that interest them and spend their time becoming this person instead of sitting in a classroom learning how to succeed in a public school. I know this is probably a little idealistic, but if I don’t start idealistic, I may just settle for the everyday public school thing.  And lets be honest here, I may be so ready to get my kids out of the house when it comes time for them to go to school that I’ll just scrap all this talk of the ideal education for my kids and use that time to go back to school myself (or sit around the house watching soaps, eating bon bons and napping all afternoon…if only…)

So this is where I would like some opinions.  Have any of y’all looked into home schooling, charter schools, Montessori schools, community schools, starting a school, or anything else of the alternative schooling nature?  Have you read any books on education that you would recommend?  Do you have friends who have gone down any of these roads?  Are you sitting around all day and thinking about the same things? I’ll take all the input you’ve got!

Utah Vacation

Still trying to catch up on my blog!  We have internet on our computers now (but we’re still waiting for the good, aka unlimited, internet to come…I think I saw them laying cable today!!)  so I’ll try to post what I can for now!

We took a 10 day vacation to Utah at the beginning of June and had a great time visiting with friends and family.  We hadn’t been back to Utah together in over 6 years, so it was fun to go back and take a trip down memory lane.  We stayed with my sister, Kelsey, in her awesome new house in Riverton, but we drove all over Utah, from St. George, to Provo, to Salt Lake, to Layton, and even a quick trip up to Mountain Green (where I was born) and Morgan.  Needless to say, we put a lot of miles on our rental car.

Traveling with 2 children under the age of 2 is harder than I expected.  It probably would have been worth it to buy the extra seat on the airplane for Adeline, but we survived!  Bobby loved being toted around the airports in his carrier.  This picture just gives me the warm fuzzies!  This boy is too cute!

My Sister Britney also came down from Seattle with her daughter, Grace and we had a great time getting to see them as well.  It’s too bad my kids don’t get to see their cousins more often. We went camping in St. George and then played in the sand dunes at Snow Canyon.  It was absolutely beautiful!  We also visited Rob’s Grandma Gretchen while we were there.

We also were able to visit Rob’s Grandma Patsy and Grandpa John.

We saw lots of other family, but I guess we didn’t take pictures with them, but it was so fun to see everyone! 

And here’s just a bunch more pictures of us that I thought were cute!