Bifocals

Poor Audra....she has had reading glasses for almost two years, but recently she started complaining of headaches while she was reading. I took her in to the optometrist, and her eyes had gotten way worse. Now she needs bifocals! Just goes to show that nursing your babies doesn't guarantee good eyesight- especially when you take after the Clark side of the family.

At least she looks cute in them. Oh, and she can see much better. There's that, too.

4H Strikes Again

Much to Ben's great horror, I had our 4H cooking group come over tonight. Each person (five total) made an item that they could take to fair- for four of them that meant a no bake cookie or bar (side note: If you have an easy and delicious no bake cookie or bar recipe, please send it my way. It's very difficult to find recipes besides the typical pb/cocoa/oatmeal cookie), for one of them that meant a quick bread.

Then we taste tested and "judged" each item. We are still at the beginning of learning how to cook/bake, but I wanted them to get an idea of what the judges will be looking at for fair.

It went really well, although I have sweets overload!

HERE is where I got the girls recipes- No Bake Haystacks, and Butterscotch Rice Krispy Surprise.

Camille cried sad crocodile tears throughout the night. If you look closely, there is a cookie missing off of Claire's wax paper. Camille had a very suspicious chocolate mouth, so I asked her if she ate the cookie. I said, "Don't lie to me- did you eat the cookie?" and she said, "I want to lie to you," and then ran to the bathroom to wash her face. So, she was banned from eating all the other desserts when everybody came over which led to a very unhappy Camille.

Shakespeare and Unit Studies

Today we came home from the library and Audra asked, "Can we please read Shakespeare, Mommy?"

Claire and Audra are loving Shakespeare! I got some books from the library written by Bruce Coville- adaptations of Shakespeare made for kids. The girls are obsessed over them (except Camille- she runs to the other room and grabs a picture book whenever Shakespeare makes his rounds). It's been a lot of fun having them say things like, "I was the only person in my Options class who knew about Hamlet," and such.

It's not like we are doing anything all that great, I just randomly happened to get a Shakespeare book and the girls enjoyed it, so we're going with it. Why not?

Which brings me to our next exciting step in homeschooling...unit studies! As mentioned earlier, I have been thinking about switching our curriculum up next year. Even though I love Sonlight, I want something a little more flexible where I can more easily incorporate things the girls are interested in. After researching, I came across a program called Konos. It is a unit based curriculum similar to Sonlight in that there are a lot of read-alouds (our favorite part of homeschooling), but it is structured by units with lots of hands-on activities. Because of the flexibility, I can add some of my own unit studies without it messing up the school year. The Konos book (which I happened to already own because somebody gave it to me a couple years ago- nice!) is set up in such a way to last for 2-3 years, and easily works with multiple ages, so I am very hopeful this will be a nice fit for us. Plus it is super cheap- it is designed to give you the opportunity to get almost all of your books from the library and not have to purchase them all like I do with Sonlight. I'm very excited about this change!

We will definitely be doing a Shakespeare unit!

Stuart Little

Camille got to play hooky today and I took the girls to go see "Stuart Little" at the PACE Center. They do a great job with their plays. I really enjoy taking the girls to cultural events. We didn't do very many cultural things growing up, which is fine (don't worry mom, I still think you were the best mom ever), but because of that I didn't learn to appreciate the arts until I was older. I like that my girls are learning about props, stagehands, costumes, and all the talent that goes into stage productions. It was a lot of fun!

April Fool's

I think we have, unfortunately, started a tradition of needing to do an April Fool's prank for the girls every year. Last year we rigged their bedroom doors so when they opened them dozens of balloons went into their rooms (I stole that idea from when we were in college and did that to a boys apartment next to ours).

This year we made special "juice" that was really Jell-O. If I had thought ahead I would have a) thought to buy red Jell-O at the store instead of just using the blue Jell-O we already had, and b) not left the box on the counter for Audra to see when she woke up and become instantly suspicious. Nevertheless, the girls thought it was pretty silly.

Gummi Bears

We introduced the girls to the old cartoon Gummi Bears. They loved it. It was fun to watch it again after all these years. It's still a great cartoon!

Happy Easter!

Easter dresses and some toys arrived today!

This pretty much sums up our Easter this year:

The Easter Bunny was kind, however, and hid the eggs indoors.

 The girls were pretty much impossible to photograph. Apparently wanting them to take a nice picture is simply the worst possible thing that I could have ever asked of my children.

Asking them to make funny faces helped a little bit:

I decided to try a "Hummingbird Cake" for Easter dessert. I had never even heard of it before, but my brother-in-law Ken made one and my sister said it was really good, so I looked up the recipe. Apparently this cake is very popular in the south, and maybe people make it for Easter. THIS is the recipe I used. It was really good! I think it might become an Easter tradition (if I remember...).

Then, we went over to Ben's parents for Easter dinner. It was wonderful!

Now I am just annoyed because all day I made the girls wear aprons over their dresses, and in between church and the grandparents house I made them change clothes. They wanted to show Grandma their dresses, so I brought along the aprons.

We came home, and between the time when we came inside and went upstairs to bed 5 minutes later, Camille had written on her dress with permanent marker! UGH! It's so frustrating!

Nevertheless, Happy Easter!