Catching Up

Life has been very busy in our household lately!  I've hardly had time for the computer at all!  I logged on last night for a few minutes and noticed that my Google Reader has over 300 unread blog posts!  YIKES!  I might have to do a quick "mark all as read" and move on!

Here's what has been going on in our neck of the woods:

My sweet Olivia turned 5!!  Can you believe it?  It seems like only yesterday that she made her first appearance in this world!

We had a small party on Sunday with some of her best friends and our family!  She enjoyed herself immensely!  Her favorite part of the party was opening presents (of course) and she LOVED, LOVED, LOVED the dress up clothes!  Here she is in her best princess garb:

I guess we don't need to wonder what she wants to be for Halloween!

Our parish also enjoyed the annual Oktoberfest!  The kids had tons of fun!  They each got a new shirt to wear for the festivities!  Originally, I wanted all three of them to have the skeleton shirt as this goes along with our recent science studies.  However, I couldn't find it in Nathan or Olivia's sizes, so I ended up with two other ones that I thought were cute!

Olivia loves to wear hair bands, so she was extra proud of her new outfit.

Speaking of skeletons, we've been doing tons of fun activities for our science lessons!  One thing (of many) that I really love about Catholic Heritage Curricula is that the lessons coincide with one another.  The first grade (Amelia) and the fourth grade (Nathan) science lessons are both working on the human body at the same time.  As a homeschooling novice, this really makes things easier for me, and more fun for them.

This week, we focused on the 5 senses.  A great resource that I found is called The Body Book!
I can't tell you how much fun this activity was!  Even Olivia and I made one.  Take a look....

Through the magic of paper, crayons, scissors and tape....we can see how all 5 senses work by using flaps!  We saw the inside of the eyelids, the ears, the mouth, the nose and what our skin looks like!  And of course, none of our sense would work without the brain!

By the end of this school year, we will have the entire body put together!  Next week is "The Tongue"!  I highly recommend this book if you happen to be working on the human body or the 5 senses!

We've also been working on our pumpkin decorating craft.  It seems that every year we carve the pumpkins too darn early and they start rotting because of the very warm Florida weather.  So, this time, I decided we would just decorate our pumpkins instead of carving them.  This idea came from Family Fun Magazine.  The are called Decoupage Pumpkins.  Although I don't have a photo of the finished product yet (they are still drying), here are some pictures of us making a huge mess!

Here's what the finished products are supposed to look like.  I don't think ours will look like this, but we sure had fun making the mess!