The Ever Popular Dot Points of Randomness

*random photo for this random post

• Josh has been working like crazy this week. 10 and 12 hour days. Plus he's working today (Saturday) and Monday (a public holiday). I hope he takes a couple days off soon.
• The craft room was well on it's way to being organized, we even got shelves hung up, etc. AND THEN...Thursday was way busier than expected and a bunch of stuff got dumped back in there before guests came over. =(
• The school room and the girls' rooms have stayed clean most of the week. Impressive!!
• We had our first church playgroup on Friday. It was nice. We have a 4 month old, a 9 month old, a 12 month old, 2 3-year olds, a 5 year old and a 6 year old. Interesting mix, but nice to sit and chat and play.
  
• The girls spilled milk on our blue rug earlier this week and it wasn't discovered until the smell made me throw it out on the back porch. But the girls LOVE having it on the back porch. Soon we'll have a "roof" out there so I think we might leave it where it is. I wanted to get rid of it anyway as I couldn't get it completely clean and that's annoying.
  
• Emma just swallowed a bead. She came to me and said "I can still breathe Mama, but there's a bead in my throat." So she's drinking a bunch of water and it seems to have moved down. I'm guessing it's not in her windpipe.
• The flies have been REALLY bad this year. Because you can still smell the banana muffins I made this morning there are AT LEAST 15 flies at my kitchen window.
• Speaking of banana muffins, as I took the tray out of the oven I caught it on something and dumped all the muffins back in the oven. Thankfully, it was after they were cooked and not before. But seriously? I'm a klutz.
• Have I mentioned how much I love my dishwasher? I do. It's wonderful. I'm never not having one again. =)
• I got my Mother's Day gift. A new fry pan. Woo hoo! Exciting, hey? LOL Anyway, I mentioned to Josh that I needed a new fry pan and wanted to get away from Teflon. I LOVE my Scanpan copper/stainless steel pots he bought me for Christmas a couple years ago so thought I'd see if they sell fry pans. Well, Mr. Research Everything decided to check it all out. He bought me a 32cm (13 inch) Scanpan ceramic/titanium fry pan. That sucker is HEAVY!! and it came in a velvet bag! Weird. Anyway, it's awesome!! And I can use metal utensils in it.
• Planted my new plants in the garden. I can't figure out why one garden is doing SO MUCH better than the other one. Oh well. Last night we had a salad and the lettuce, tomatoes and snow peas were all from our garden. The girls had fun picking them.
  
• I took out two roses that weren't doing well in the front garden and planted two new ones. I also took out all my gerberas. I've decided to just have roses in that garden with strawberries planted across the front and then some sort of ground cover. Keep it simple. I'll keep my pansies and snapdragons in there for the fall/winter and then pull them out when they're done blooming.
• Homeschooling is going okay. Catie can recognize all the letters and knows all their sounds but for some reason just isn't getting the concept of blending them together into words. So, we're reviewing the sounds one by one and slowly blending them together. We're still using Five in a Row as well as working on Life Skills. There's a few A Beka courses I want to use but they are expensive here so I'm trying to find a cheaper alternative. I bought a series of books called the A-B-C Series by Rod and Staff. I thought they were Beka's level but they're more Emma's level and she is loving them. She does the Five in a Row with Catie and knows her letters and sounds as well but we haven't really worked on reading with her. I don't think she's quite ready. The B book of the A-B-C series is Bible stories to Read and has a companion book Bible stories to Colour so we use that for all 3 for our Bible time.
  
• Ummm...this post is probably quite long enough. I still need to post the story of Josh and the mouse. We haven't seen the mouse since so maybe he got rid of it. Anyway, a story for a different time.