Life At The Circus

I read an article a few months back that really made me think.  The gist of the article was “Moms, watch the way you talk about your body because your body image will shape your daughters body image .”  There was more to it than that, but that was gist.  It seemed like wise advice, so I tucked it away. And man, I’ve had to practice it a few times and wow is it humbling.  I was changing in the closet with my oldest daughter.  She was picking out my outfit for some reason.  And while changing she looked at my legs and said, “Mom why do your legs jiggle?”  hahahaha Oh boy.   The article came to mind right away. “Well, because my legs aren’t strong there.”  I decided to go with matter of fact truth minus elaborating or apologizing.  She accepted it and we both moved on. Last week I started a fitness challenge and part of the challenge required getting weighed and measured at the beginning of the challenge.  My kids were...

“Hey Mom,” he said to me this morning.  “I figured out how I can fly like superman, look.” 

When we switched out history curriculum this year so that the whole family studies the same period of history (with varying level of work catered to their age level), one of the reasons I was MOST excited was that our field trips would be applicable to all.  When our tutorial gave off for Presidents Day, I was eager to take advantage of the day free of book work to go on a field trip.  Being Presidents Day, I did a search for some American Revolution themed activities not far from us.  And I found out that Valley Forge scheduled several special activities in honor of Presidents Day.  In fact, I know there are other days when they hold special events, but I really think Presidents Day was the perfect day to visit the park, because there was so much going on.  To make the day even better, we got to to go as an entire family.  It was a little over a two hour drive from our house.  We left around 9 am and got there in time to enlist in the Contintental...

Thanks to the snow fall cancelling our evening activities, we had time to bake and decorate some heart shaped cookies last night. (it should be noted after my previous post on Red Lake 40… that these cookies were decorated with all natural food dye from Whole Foods) The snow looked magical as we watched it fall outside our windows.  I called the kids down from bed to watch it for a bit and then let them sleep with their blinds open so they could fall asleep watching it.  I love falling asleep watching the snow fall. We’ve gotten to enjoy several snow falls this winter, but this was the first snowman building snow we’ve had. This was supposed to be the mid section of our snow man, but he made it so big, it ended up being the base. I love his face here. He was so in love with this snow man.  He held it’s hand and said, “Momma, Frosty likes me!”

…she is fierce.” That William Shakespeare quote has always reminded me of my oldest daughter.  She’s small in stature but strong in will and spirit. She turned 8 this week.  I am proud of the girl she’s growing up to be.  She’s not much like me.  So many of her strengths are my weaknesses. She’s logical and practical.  She tells things like it is and is a no nonsense kind of gal.   She is self confident.  She’s not a people pleaser.   She loves, LOVES numbers.  She loves checking the temperature and calculating the time and I am amazed at her brain.  She just gets math in a way that I NEVER have.  It’s her favorite subject.  Doing math can take her out of a bad mood.  It’s her favorite subject and always the one she does first on school at home days.  If I let her she’d happily do page after page of math ALL DAY long… and willingly skip history and writing.   She likes figuring out how an...

It’s been over a year now since we removed Red Lake 40 from our children’s diets.  Cutting a processed food from our family’s diet was not a natural move for us.  However, it has made a HUGE, HUGE impact on our family life and since I decided to do it after reading a blog once, I thought perhaps I should document our experience in case it might help someone else.  The summer of 2012 I noticed that one of my children was having outrageous I mean OUTRAGEOUS temper tantrums.  The littlest thing could set her off into a FIT of FURY.  Kicking, screaming, fists wailing, it was all I could do to physically get her upstairs to her room where she would continue to rage for about 45 minutes or so.  There was no reasoning with her.  And truthfully, no controlling her either.  I would sit outside her door tears streaming down my face praying for wisdom and wondering where on earth did we go wrong.   As the summer progressed I grew quite fearful of...