Boundries

Adjusting to new places is hard, moving (again) is hard. The kids were having some issues obeying, respecting people and boundaries about a month ago. I decide to get creative after hearing whining, complaining and having no one listen to me. I took away all (within reason) boundaries. They were allowed to do what they wanted, eat what they wanted, stay up as late as they wanted and anytime they asked me a question my response was "you can do whatever you want." I did this for three days and it worked wonders. They were in tears from exhaustion and frustration. After this had gone on we sat down and talked about respecting people and things and what boundaries are for and why we have them. And what the Bible says about parents and their responsibility. I definitely think it gave them a new understanding for those things. And it gave me something to point back to when they complain about a response I give, I can remind them of why we have boundaries and what happens when we don't have them. :-) Hannah drew this picture shortly after.

The kid got eaten by the alligator because he jumped the fence and didn't respect the boundary.

Creative Children

The girls have wanted a dog for awhile now. I think Hannah said she's been praying for a dog since she was eight or something like that. Years....anyway, recently they decided to take their campaign to a new level. They made up little cards and put them all around the house. Here are some pictures of what they did.

Science Museum

Fort Wayne had a day where they opened a bunch of the museums for free. We took advantage of it and checked out the science museum. It had some pretty cool stuff, the boys enjoyed the two story slide the best. It was pretty crowded, but definitely worth going to again sometime.

The kids enjoying their different looks in the mirror

Playing with pulleys

And other fun things

Field Trips!

This year instead of joining a homeschool co-op we joined a field trip homeschool group. I figured it would give us a chance to get out and get to know the Fort Wayne area. Plus, the homeschool co-ops are way different here than what I'm used to....there are tons of options, there are lots of just pay and drop your kids off, there are a bunch of gym options and there is the we give you the material and you teach it and we only offer the class(es) we decide we want, all very different than what I've done in the past. Anyway, our first two field trips were back to back on the same day. First we went to an apple orchard, like 27,000 tree orchard that sells apples to Wal-mart. Kind of crazy! Unfortunately because it's been such a weird growing season they didn't have any apples ripe yet and the warehouse wasn't processing anything, but it was neat to see the apples on the trees and hear about the process from picking to bagging and see the machine that washes and bags the apples. The machine that sorts them also weighs and measures them and decides what bag to put it in based on the weight to get it as close as possible to the weight of the bag they are filling (3lbs or 5lbs).

Heading out to the orchard

This tree is grafted and has two kind of apples, red and yellow

Evie and I were hanging out across the wagon(?) from the other kids

I unfortunately didn't take any pictures of the machines that do the sorting and such, I guess I didn't think of it since there weren't apples running through them.

 

The second location was a bison farm! There we got to hear a little bit of the history of buffalo (or bison) and then they took us out into the fields to feed them. The kids had a blast feeding them and being so close to them.

Maybe not so thrilled to be there at the beginning...

Riding out to the fields

Bison! 

Isn't the baby cute? 

Here's Kaleb feeding them

Hannah hanging out with the buffalo

My, what a big tongue you have!

Afterward the kids enjoyed the see-saw by the farm store

And the girls turn

And smiling by the end

Only how many holds?

We went to library last week and checked out 90 books. Yep, that's all, just 90. Okay, so my kids may still go a little crazy at the library, at least three of the four of them now, we're still working on the fourth. Going to the library almost always results in requests for holds because the kids want more books in the series that are not available at the library we went to. This has never been a problem in the past, I've just gone into the system and cued up hold items like any crazy person who checks out 90 books would do. Well I went to do that here and found they only allow five holds per card. What?! You let me check out as many books as I want but can only put five on hold? Who makes up this rules? Even if our entire family had cards (which we've never done because I haven't wanted to keep track of six different cards) that would only be 30 holds (yes, only). We're obviously going to have to change our library hold habits....

God at work - selling the house in Alpena

Our house in Alpena had lots of title issues, some of which Nathan had already fixed like the kids bathroom over Thanksgiving. Others he worked on after he resigned at church....and kept working on until the day we moved!

The boys helped him tear out our master shower floor

They both had a lot of fun taking the title up. This is the only title we replaced, all the other title in the house Nathan was able to remove without destroying it and just laid the same tiles back down (which shows you how poorly it was put in). 

As you can see it was not pretty under the title and it really needed to be replaced!

Here it is with the new title in, Nathan did an amazing job! He also grouted the walls (they were caulked before).

We spent quite a few late nights redoing the grout in our front entry and dining room right before moving as much of it was loose. It was crazy, but we left the house in much better shape than when we bought it. 

After clearing out of our house in Alpena, we put it on the market the same day we closed on our house here in Fort Wayne, July 19th. We had two offers that first day and a third came in the next day. The third was above asking price! Alpena is a small market, houses often sit on the market for months before selling. In fact, last year, before we bought ours it had been on the market four months. God totally blew our mind and the realtor's when it sold that fast. Owning it less than a year we made money on it, that is the kind of God we serve.

TinCaps Game!

We've been trying to get out and do things in the Fort Wayne area since there is lots to do. One of the things they have is a class A baseball team. We made it to the last game of the season, it was a warm day, but the kids enjoyed it.

Hanging out waiting for the game to start.

I missed the green memo.....I don't have a green shirt, so even if I had gotten the memo I couldn't have matched. 

The TinCaps warming up!

Watching the game. 

It was a pretty lite crowd, as you can see by all the empty seats.

At the end of the game they let the kids run the bases, Evie was the only one who wanted to, but she thought it was neat. 

And here she is running (green shirt, pink shorts)

We had fun it is something we will probably do again next year. 

Bugs

We've been finding a lot of cool bugs this summer.

There have been a bunch of praying mantis that like to hang out around our house

I found this when mowing and thought it was a bird at first because it's so big. We think it's a Carolina sphinx moth.

And this guy is super cool! It's a a wheel bug and is a type of assassin bugs.