Weekly Review - Strawberry Picking

In Our Home - 

We went strawberry picking for the very first time ever!

It was a lot of fun! 

We made strawberry popsicles...yummy and messy!

After Baby G ate his popsicle, I gave him a bath.  The next pictures are my feeble attempts to get a picture of his hair which gets really curly when wet.  He is always moving, so it was a difficult task!  But I post these because as imperfect as these pictures are, I want to remember his curls.  Oh, my Mommy heart just loves his curls!

In Our Homeschool - 
We finished "The Wind in the Willows"!  Hooray!  Which means we started "Pilgrim's Progress" or "Pilgrim's Process" as Miss R calls it no matter how many times I correct her otherwise.  =)  She loves it and I love it. We started with listening to the first audio cd to get a taste of what we'd be reading.  Now we read it, section by section, and Miss R begs me to let her do the worksheets (from Answers in Genesis) that correspond to each part.  I am not really a worksheet-type Mom, but how can I refuse?  The sheets are actually pretty good...much better than the typical worksheet.  They have her looking up Bible verses, comparing and contrasting Bible portions to the story.  So, I really am okay with these.  =)
I found a gem of a book on archive.org - "The Burgess Flower Book for Children".  Since we're reading about plants/flowers for our main science text this term, I thought it would be the perfect supplement.  Peter Rabbit learns all about flowers and takes us with him!  So far, we learned about the Skunk Cabbage being a sign of spring.  It was very fitting because our reading in our text this week was on the scents of flowers. =)  I love when God orchestrates these things for me.  (Because I'm just not able to do it on my own!)
For nature study last week we introduced the concept of fungi/mushrooms through a library book.  And wouldn't you know it, Miss R found some mushrooms on a piece of decaying wood in our yard, right where the book said she'd find some!  They were hard as rock.  We had read that mushrooms are mainly water and the best time to find them is after a rain.  It's been pretty dry here, so Miss R took some water from the kiddie pool and watered them.  The next day when we checked them out, they were nice and squishy.  Nature study success!  And I do say this because while I completely agree with Charlotte Mason on the importance/value of nature study, I'm just not very good at it.  So, when it happens, I get pretty excited! 
In Bible we've been slowly reading through Matthew.  It's led to some great discussions on baptism.  A lot of R's friends at church have been baptized this past year so it was good to talk about it together.  Today we started the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 - one of my favorite parts of the Gospels!  I am very excited to study this with her, learning right alongside of her.
Miss O has continued her workbook pages.  She also began her new character trait focus: patience.  She's got the definition down, and now we're working on the memory verse. 

What I need to work on - 
I've been playing around with our schedule lately and I'm trying to determine the best time to do our morning Bible time/circle time (right now that consists of a Bible storybook, reading from the actual Bible, poetry, and hymn).  It's always after breakfast as I don't think I could get anyone to focus before we eat.  But sometimes one thing leads to another leads to another (like child a needs to go potty and child b spills milk and child c is disobeying and child d needs a diaper change and on and on).  I want to make this time a priority.  This week the best time was directly following breakfast at the kitchen table.  The location seemed to make a huge difference with Mr N and focus.  He can't sit through the whole time yet (and that's okay with me) but I do want him to listen to at least the Bible storybook portion.  He also loves singing the hymn with us.
So the other thing about the schedule I need to work on is actually making a schedule.  ;)  We have some routines/rhythm to our days, but I do think having more of a schedule where each person knows what he/she should be doing, would really benefit how much we are able to get done and also eliminate some behavior issues which stem from not having any direction on what to do.  I'm writing this on here, because I've been reading Managers of their Homes (which was a find at the used book sale the other week!) and really feel I need to do this, but I get overwhelmed and don't do it. So now that I've posted it, maybe that will remind me to get 'er done!
So, that's what's going on in our neck of the woods!