Last, But Not Least, Allison from Life As a Mother...Of Many

While I'm away in sunny San Diego, my very precious IRL friend, Allison, graciously decided to step in for the day!  We've been friends for over seven years now (can you believe she's actually been willing to be my friend after all these years?) and we have such a blast together.  We've done homeschool conventions, curriculum sales, field trips, hiking trips, birthday parties, sleep overs and even pregnancies together!  She has six sweet kiddos - homeschooling four at the moment, and loves all things political and photography-based.  She is one of my nearest and dearest friends and inspires me so much!

Here is Allison from Life As a Mother... of Many!

Large families take an extraordinary amount of organization. I feel like I am still in the early years of the large family and learning the most efficient way to organize. I thought I would do a series on the ways that I organize our large family. Everyone is different in preferences on this sort of thing and there is no one right or wrong way to do it. But this series will share some of the things that I do to make life easier around here. I will attempt to do a "Large Family Organization" post every Wednesday...we shall see...haha.

Today, I thought I would share how I organize all of the little things that we use on a daily basis for our homeschool. I have tried so many different things over the years to organize but, it never seemed smooth and efficient until I did this.

A neighbor gave me this cabinet as they were preparing to throw it away. It had no knobs, paint was scratched off in several areas, and the inside shelves were broken. I invested in a little hardware and paint and refurbished this little unit for about $15. It now sits in our kitchen eating area right by the table where the kids do their book work. Easy access and doors that close were both essential for me. Above is a picture of the outside and below is the inside.

On the top shelf, I put the workbooks and Teacher's manuals for individual work that we use daily along with a plastic box in which the kids place their completed work. This is mainly the Math and Language books.

On the middle shelf I placed several baskets (that I happen to already have from another organization project in another house). I always try to utilize things that I already have in these types of projects...sometimes it works...sometimes it doesn't. This time it worked...aahhh. These baskets hold the crayons, pencils, colored pencils, glue, scissors, and paint. There was even a place for the pencil sharpener (high enough to be out of the reach of the littles). And, there was a media cut out in the back of the unit so I could plug in the pencil sharpener without having cords hanging out the front...icing on the cake!

On the bottom shelf are baskets holding white and colored paper and stencils, stamps, etc.. My kids do quite a bit of drawing/sketching...especially when I am reading aloud to them.

The three drawers on the bottom are where my three older kids can store their personal school items when they are not doing book work.

On top of the cabinet, I placed three more baskets with items that we use a little less frequently like Math manipulatives, extra art supplies, and larger bottles of paint.

Before, I had these things organized in our "homeschool closet" in a bedroom with all of the curriculum that we are not using this year but will need in future years. The problem was that if someone broke a pencil, it took a trip to the other room to remedy the problem and chances of being distracted were high. Now, everything that we need is right at our fingertips without having to leave the room.

I am SO pleased with the result...especially for the price.

I keep all of our "unit study" books (Bible, Art, Music, History, Literature, Science, Geography, "read aloud", etc.) in a large crate next to the couch where we all lounge in the afternoons to learn while the babies are napping. Here is a picture of this...not so lovely but what works at the time.

I then keep our school music cds in a little basket inside the entertainment center where they are handy and yet out of the reach of the littles. Here is a picture of that.

Now, to organize the shoes and socks...haha! Actually, that will be my next post in this series:) Look for it next Wednesday!

I'm seriously considering having her come and organize all our school stuff for next year!  She is such a fantastic mama and is sooooo organized that I'm really grateful to have her in my life so that I can copy her.  Okay, for some other reasons, too, but this is a big one!  Make sure you stop by her blog for a ton of political junkie talk, organizational and parenting tips and ways for making learning fun for your kiddos!!

Thanks Allison!

Homeschooling Inspirations from Heather at Cultivated Lives

We're enjoying San Di-ah-go so much and I know that y'all are in good hands back here at One Blessed Lady!  Today, I want to introduce you to Heather (an actual IRL friend)  from Cultivated Lives, one of my favorite homeschooling inspiration blogs!  She is so creative and passionate about teaching her children and I love to just sit and talk to let her creativity rub off on me. Her blog is chock-full of wonderful ideas of hands-on learning! 

Crafting Play – Cultivating Learning

Drama, drama, drama. Yup, that would aptly describe our crazy home. And I’m not just talking the pull your hair out because life is driving you crazy kind of drama, although we get our fair share of that too.

Over here, we’ve found that drama is a great way to maximize the enjoyment and retention of whatever we are currently learning about. On any given day if you were to stop by, you’d often times find kids dressed up and playing hard. What is so cool is that while they are playing (and I make a mad dash to the kitchen to pull dinner together) they are reinforcing what we’ve been reading about.

As we read books, sometimes the kids will zero in on something and run grab an item around our home that can stand in as a prop. I’ve found that a key prop or costume piece goes a long way to cultivate this learning through play. And this doesn’t have to be crazy expensive or complicated. Oftentimes, one small item coupled with their imagination is enough to transport them into many a historical epoch.

For instance we are learning about the revolutionary war right now. The boys noticed that each of the soldiers has a cartridge box slung over his shoulder. My youngest knew where my stash of purses is kept and remembered that little black purse that I’ve held onto for over 20 years now. That’s right folks, I’m the sentimental person that has kept my first ‘purse’ all these years. That little black leather purse has been the constant companion for my little guy as he travels from battle to battle.

To this end, we oftentimes try utilize our crafting to maximize dramatic play. That was the case a little while back when we were learning about Joan of Arc. Book after book revealed her marching into battle with her white fleur de lis banner.

So we set to work cutting up an old sheet into a pennant shape. I didn’t even bother to hem the edges. I care about those things, but the boys certainly don’t. I simply made sure I made the folded over edge big enough to go over our pvc pole that the boys already had sewed a loop. We’ve even been known to use fabric glue if I’m too lazy to pull out the sewing machine.

 Next, we set to work making a stamp. We had some foam figurines from an earlier craft they made at someone’s home and we repurposed that for our fleur de lis stamp. I simply printed off a picture from the internet and set about cutting it out with an exacto knife. I’m not sure when kids are old enough to do this, but I just didn’t feel quite comfortable turning them loose with that sharp little tool just yet. The boys found an unused bobbin that could be used for our handle because I’m all about not making any unnecessary trips to the store. And then, their favorite part – stamping away!

The result? “JON of Arc” making a courageous stand to free France from the English and help Charles VII claim his throne, over and over and over again! All it took was creating a flag and letting it fly!

Thank you so much Heather!  Maggie will be studying Joan of Arc this next school year and guess which project she'll be working on?  Heather has so many great ideas of integrating play into school and I just love reading and hearing all of her ideas.  Go check it out at Cultivating Lives!

Y'all Say Hi to Miss Kristen from Hope Abound!

Hello all my sweet friends from the breath-taking beaches of San Diego! (Are you so, so jealous? Yeah, I thought so.) While I'm gone this week, I've got a few friends stopping by for a visit. Each one of them is so wonderful and I just love their hearts for their families!


First off is my sweet sister-chick Kristen from Hope Abound. She's delightful, she's fun, aaaaannnnndddd she's the mama of twin girls with another baby on the way.

Take it away, Kristen!

Hey yall, I'm Kristen from Hope Abound. I'm so excited to be here today. But...I'll be honest when I say I've sat down many times this week with full purpose to write this post. Each time ending with some sort of distraction that has led me away from the task I was attempting to accomplish. Last night I sat here, in this very spot with another attempt in mind. That was right after I realized that I had stepped in gum somewhere outside and tracked it into the house stringing it from here to there and back again; right after I put the twins to bed for the 5th time; right after I wiped up the pizza sauce on the hallway walls; right after I took all the toys from the twins and ordered them to go. to. sleep. yet again; but all after I said so graciously to them...I Love you. And that, my friends, is the story of my life. 

Over the past two years, I have truly come to admire Jamie and the life she shares each day on her blog. When she asked me if I would do a guest post my mind started rolling on what I wanted to share with her readers. Faith, my husband and family, my home, or our life as a military family. That list was long and went on and one, but one particular sparkled more so than the others. 

My children. 

There are days when I am simply blown away by the fact that I have been so faithfully entrusted with my girls. They have taught me more about unconditional love than I have ever learned before hand. Each day, they are becoming more funny, dramatic, strong-willed, girly, busy, and their will to learn is expanding by the minute. I love them so!

Through the excitement of expecting a child, no one tells you the fact about the hardship the job entails. It is by the hardest job I've ever taken on...Motherhood that is. At the end of each day, despite all that may have taken place, my heart is full. There are days that I wonder though...Does God really think I could handle all of this? At times it seems almost too hard and I begin to question how I'm going to pull through. He must have faith in me despite knowing that my fails will outnumber the successes because He chose to bless us with a third.

 I know though, through Him, I can and will be able do it. My prayer to Him is that each day I strive to be a better Mom. That my patience is unconditional to the situations that may stress me out and rattle my brain. That my children know and continue to learn my love for them through the lessons and morals I try to instill in their hearts. I'm thankful for the blessings God has bestowed upon my life and for the moments that I've had with my children. Being their Moma is the one thing, out of all the rest, that I am the most thankful for. 

Motherhood. 

It's a never-ending circle of this and that and trying moments that test the energy in this tired body that carries me around day to day. That's how things play out in our world over at

Blog  / Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest

We take each moment for what it is and play it out as it comes only hoping that we made the best out of it just as we did the one before all through the grace and love of God. 

So far, so good. 

Isn't she just awesome?!  She does so many sweet activities with her girlies that are inspiring!  It makes me wish I had twin girls... Thank you so much, Kristen, for coming over here today to share your heart with us.  In the meantime, I'm going to dig my toes-ies a little deeper in the sand and supervise the sand-castle building.  It's dirty job, but someone's gotta do it!

Summer Plans... Maybe

Summer is upon us. The Arizona heat is sapping my brain and I've become a puddle on the ground.  And it's not even August yet.  After having five pregnancies, it's not a good thing for this lady's brain to get any more zapped than it already is.  It's quite dangerous, actually.

Because my brain zapped, blogging has been kind of hit or miss for me this week.  I have so many crucial, life-changing posts (ahem) rolling around in my head, but every time I go to write them out they come out limp and as blobby as I feel. 

So today, I'm trying it again, albeit something super easy.  No crucial, life-changing posts today.  Sorry about that.  I'm entitling it, "What I Plan on Doing On My Summer Vacation."  I would just like to point out the word "plan".  What really gets done remains to be seen.

We're not quite finished with our year homeschooling yet, but I'm okay with that.  I'm okay, you're okay, everyone's okay.  {See what this heat is doing to my poor brain?}  I had hoped to be finished by tomorrow, but we're not there yet, so we'll finish when we get home from our sweet little vacay to San Diego next week.  This has been a tough year for us, homeschooling-wise.  The kids have done great and have pressed through, but Mama's been a wreck.  I usually don't mind schooling into the summer because it's easy to do when it's so hot outside.  But this year, I'm done!  We'll all just sit around and let our brains rot.

Doesn't that sound lovely?

But don't you worry and shake your head at me.  While we're letting our brains rot from the lack of academic stimulation, Mama will be doing a complete overhaul on the chore system.  Just you wait, sweet little children of mine.  Oh yes, just you wait.  By the end of the summer, I'll have them so trained they'll just do everything that needs to be done without me ever having to ask them again.

Right?

RIGHT?!

Please, please, someone tell me I'm right.

I will also be attempting an overhaul on the house.  When we moved into this house a year ago, I was in the midst of something akin to an emotional breakdown.  I just threw boxes into the closets and slammed the door.  Nothing was organized or even put away in a useful way.  My heart wasn't in it.  Now that I'm starting to feel better (some days not so much, but on the whole, I'm in the upswing), I'm seeing what my house looks like.  It ain't pretty, my friends.

We'll also be trying to do some field trips anywhere EXCEPT outside.  No, we'll run from the air-conditioned house to the air-conditioned car, to the air-conditioned wherever like cockroaches scatter when the light comes on.  That's how we survive here.  Like the cockroaches, we are the ultimate Arizona-summer-survivors, not that we don't complain.  Again, it ain't pretty, but it't what we have to do.  Unfortunately, for various reasons we weren't able to get out this past school year when it was actually cool, so I'm trying to make up for it now.  So we'll plan lots of field trips to the movie theater (theatrical art and mathematical word problems about how many bags of popcorn my children would like to consume, like 60), Grandma's pool (aquatic life and bouyancy), museums (budgeting taking into consideration gas prices going from here to there) and the library (oh, the glories of the written word... and free DVDs to check out).

Then we'll attempt art projects and cooking projects and science projects and cleaning projects that we weren't able to get to during the school year.  You know, the fun stuff that actually makes my kids happy that their homeschooled?

I guess with all these plans we might not have as much time as I thought to let our brains rot.  And as lovely as that sounds, maybe that's a good thing.

But first, I'll start off with a nap before my brain gets zapped any more.

What are your summer plans this year?

Yet Another Adventure - FaithfulNest

I've never seen myself as an entrepreneur.  As in ev-ah.  I don't have that gift in even the tiniest bone in my body.  I tried selling Pampered Chef once.  It ended up being the Tortured Chef for me.  I don't have the core of steel to let things slide off of me and/or the ability to not take no for an answer.  I'm not a self-promoter (really I'm not) and do not suffer from an overwhelming sense of self-confidence. 

So why, oh why, would I be going down a road towards small business ownership? 

Because God's taking us on an adventure?  {ACK!} (Remember my adventure posts here and here?)

Okay, okay, so maybe calling it small business ownership is premature.  It's more like a home-grown business that we'd really like to make a few extra bucks doing.  But the best part is that Paco and I get to create things together and that's my favorite.

So what is this new little home-grown business you ask.

I'm so glad you asked!  It's called FaithfulNest.  We love the faithful part because, well, He is so faithful all the time and nest because we love building a home together.  It's our nest.

We've been designing (some) and creating things like:

What we affectionately call our "trough".  With three boys in the house, we'll be needing one of these someday quite soon.  It's long wooden box that I painted our name on.  It's very simple, but I absolutely adore it!  I use it all year 'round as a centerpiece for our large dining room table.  This was how it was filled for Christmas.  Not the best shot, I know, but it was filled with pine boughs, pinecones and Red Delicious Apples. 

This was the project that really started it all off.  Paco threw it together on Christmas Eve following one of my many whims (he's such a good man) and we got so many compliments on it!  We've sold a few, given a few away as gifts and now we're getting ready to make more.

This was my Mother-in-love's Mother's Day gift.  Micah 6:8 is one of her favorite verses but we couldn't fit the whole thing on, so we just painted the reference on the box for her. 

These boxes are awesome because you could use them for so many things!  I have about a million ideas like using them as planters for herbs, table centerpieces, for the mantle with candles in them, filled with mason jars with markers, pencils, eraser, pens for school.  One friend is going to have one with Blessings painted on the side and then pictures of her foster girls in is so she can remember to pray for them daily.  That just blesses my heart so much.

Pat also made some hanging bookshelves.  These are going right by our boys' bunks so that they can put their books in them and then they can look at them in bed.  I'll get a picture of them as soon as Hubby can get them hung up.  They're definitely what you'd call "rustic-chic", which is is a perfect way to describe them (thanks, Kristen!)

And this flag was my Mother's Day gift this year.  Can you hear the song in my voice as I loudly sing in my best opera impression, "I looooooovvvvvveeeeeeee it!"?  Hubby did all the stripes and the blue square and I got to paint the stars on.  Yes, I worked on my own gift and it was an absolute pleasure.  It turned out exactly like I wanted.  It's going to hang right by our front door because our stucco won't support a regular flag base.  This is our very happy alternative. 

We've got a ton more ideas and projects in the works to start up our little business.  I thought about Etsy for about two seconds, but the cost of shipping these badboys would be so high, so we're keeping it local for now.

There's a craft store around here that I'll be selling some things at (piggybacking on a friend of mine's booth) and then a big craft store in the fall.

We're stepping into some new and unknown territory for us, but I think we're geared up for our adventure.  Ohmygoodness!  I can't believe we're really doing this.

Ready?  Set?  Go!

PS We've just bought the domain name faithfulnest.com and so a website will be coming soon!

Five Minute Friday - Perspective

I actually got brave enough to try Gypsy Mama's Five Minute Friday again.  No backspacing, no editing or over-thinking.  I'm not so great at it yet, but I'm determined to keep trying!

I love this week's word... Perspective. 

Go.

I see five paintings hanging on the wall.  Each one different, special, priceless.  Five different paintings tell five different stories even though they've been created by the same artist.

Am I the painter, the art critic?  Not really either one.  Maybe just an art lover, appreciator.  I see the paintings and I'm love with each one of them even though each is unique.

I see the flaws and try to minimize them.  I see the beauties and try to make them bigger, better, more apparent.

Even though I'm the not the creator, maybe I'm the assistant to the Creator.  I know these paintings better than anyone other than the Creator and I still love them.  Because I know them so well, my perspective of them is different, deeper, more appreciative than any one else's.

They are my children, beautiful and flawed.  I try to minimize the flaws by discipline and mercy and grace.  I see the beauties and desire to show them off, delighting in them.

Each of my children will have their own stories written for them, by them and their Creator.  And I will continue to stand back and enjoy them from the eye's of a mama.

Stop.

Care to try it yourself?  Head over to The Gypsy Mama and link up, too!

(image courtesy of bing)

Why I Love Being a Mama

I love being a mama. I especially love being a mama to these five little monkeys.

And of course, I love torturing them by making them sit still for a picture with me.

It's terribly unfair, I know.  But you see, I love them so much.

Even if Jack had poopy and we have to hurry to take the picture before I change him because everyone is coordinating and how often does that happen and "hurry up and take the picture for heaven's sake" said through clenched teeth.

And then they're released and everyone is happy again.

Especially when we're eating away at fruit salsa with cinnamon tortilla chips

and amazing fresh-from-the-bakery cupcakes.  Oh.my.gosh.  Courtesy of my MILove because she knows I try to do everything and so she took mercy on me us and we were ever so grateful.  Except for my non-stretchy pants.  They were most un-grateful.  Go figure.

(MIL Rosie, Mom Robin, G-ma Shirley, Me and sister Jackie)

And so to all the mamas in my life, I hope you had a blessed day, that the pictures you took with your kids were poopy-free and you were smothered in love and kisses by your families.