Smartest kids ever. (They still drive me crazy sometimes, though.)

I'm really keeping busy lately, but mostly with mundane type stuff.

The kids are doing really well with homeschool. I'm so proud of them! I realize that's such a "mom" thing to say, but it's true, nonetheless. :n)

Of course, just as I wrote that I had to scream at them, so I'm feeling slightly less happy with them at the moment. I generally don't scream, but when they are both screaming, one from injury caused by the other, and the other at the impending punishment, I kind of have to scream to get anyone to hear anything that I'm saying. Crikey my throat hurts now.

(Brooke slammed the door in corbin's face and his forehead has a bump on it now. But you know, I had literally just told them to quit horsing around like, less than 5 seconds before it happened... like 3 times in a row.) AUUUUGHHHH!

Okay, I feel better now.

[deep breath]

HOMESCHOOL, the kids are both doing really well. Brooke has made excellent improvement with her letter recognition as well as with the sounds each letter makes. Typically, she has trouble with what I call the "end sounds" letters. Like F, L, M, N, X where the sound that the letter makes comes at the end of how you pronounce the letter, unlike the majority of the alphabet. For example, it's easy to recognize B for it's buh-buh-buh sound at the front, unlike L where she will try to say, "Eh-eh-elll". L is the hardest for her to get, we usually have to practice it three times or so before she'll actually say, "lah-lah-lah-Elll".

However, even with this minor (and very common) issue, she's made such progress in such a short amount of time. The letters that we're working with in her workbook are all lowercase, and she's starting to recognize some of them. All of the fridge magnets that we have are in upper case, so it's an entirely new thing for her, and she's doing really great with it. Today she recognized "j" when I asked her what letter it was. I always make her "guess" which letter it is when I open her book to the next letter. I'm really proud of her. :n)

Corbin is really getting impressive with his reading and writing skills. He's starting to write in lowercase, just like in the workbook, and he's able to sound out words with much greater ease. He can sight-recognize about 90% of all of the words that he's worked on in his book so far. The book goes sort of in "chapters", and at the end of each chapter is a review of all of the words that he's done. He loves to do the review games at the end, and on a couple of them, it's told him to write a sentence using as many of the review words as he can in it. I was really impressed, because last time he decided to write, "Let's go see the big parade." as his sentence, and he didn't even need all that much help writing "parade"; he just needed me to tell him that there was a silent 'e' on the end. :n) I have sight word flashcards for him to use, and... you know, gosh I forgot all about it until this second, but I think I have letter sounds flashcards still, too. So I could use both for both of the kids.

I need to get some easy math stuff for Corbin, too. He loves to add and he's done a little bit of subtraction. I need to get him started doing some age-appropriate math. I should probably just get myself over to Barnes and Nobles. They have all that kind of stuff there.

Our anniversary is this weekend. It'll be eleven years, if I haven't mentioned that yet. I'm a little bit concerned about exercise and calorie intake. I am okay with taking one day off, but having two days kind of makes me nervous. I'll probably still work out on Friday; at least on the treadmill. And then on Saturday we'll be going to Darien Lake, and presumably we'll be walking around a lot that day anyway. I still seem to make relatively sensible choices, so maybe it won't be all that bad. I'll probably binge on some kind of dessert, but otherwise I guess it doesn't need to be that much of a concern.

I really want to get a heart rate monitor. Maybe that will be my gift this weekend. That way I could track my real calories lost instead of going by what the treadmill says or by what someone else on the fitness pal website put in for what they burned doing whatever exercise. It would certainly be helpful for strength training calories burned at any rate.

Aww haha the kids are teaching LeeLoo the alphabet on a picture that they printed out (a picture of the alphabet). They are so funny. :n) She seems really interested. lol It reminds me of that program where kids who struggle with reading are sometimes brought into a special class where the bring dogs in and the kids read to the dog instead of to a person, because it helps them practice, and the dogs aren't pushy or judgemental like people can be.  Ahhh my kids are so cute!