Living along...

Well, after taking a little break from the blog, I am back! It has been quite busy over here since the new year rolled in. I'm happy to announce that we had a beautiful, healthy baby boy on January 28th, and he is already almost a month old as we near the start of March. He has been a gem of a baby so far, and the most low-maintenance of them all up until this point.



Our pre-school year has been going extremely well and we recently reached the halfway point in the year. Now we have about 15 weeks to go until it is officially our summer break. I am busy planning our Kindergarten year and I am SO very excited about it! I have been using Cathy Duffy's book, 102 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum to decide on the curriculum we will be using next year. I'll share my choices a bit later on, closer to the fall. Right now, I have a list prepared of what I'd like to use, and in the next few months I am going to slowly buy the resources that we will need for our year. That way, I can spread out the cost (even though none of the options I have chosen are that expensive), but also will give me a head start on planning out our year. I have loved that this year's program, Sonlight, has a very easy-to-use guide and plan for each day that required zero effort for preparation on my part. It makes me a tad nervous to think about not having it easily broken down for me in this way when using my own curriculum choices, but I am up for the challenge of making things my own. I am really excited about Kindergarten, and so is my little guy!


Around the house lately, I have been busy "Kon Mari"-ing our things. If you're not familiar with this method, check out the book it is described in here. This book is not as long as I expected it to be for being one about de-cluttering your entire life, basically, but I have been so pleasantly surprised so far by the simplicity of the method. It is very time-consuming though, especially because the first step in each section of organizing requires discarding what you do not need. The first section that Marie Kondo has you tidy is your clothing. But in my case, it's clothing for all of us (I leave my husband's things alone though). So I began with my own clothing, and this has been a whole 5 days now of cleaning out my closet. I have gotten rid of SO much and I feel so wonderful about it!! I am excited about my "new" wardrobe of favorite pieces that I have always loved, and basics. Next I am going to go through all of the childrens' clothing, mainly the stored clothes that are kept in tubs in the basement. The point is to get rid of everything you do not love. I am a little bit loose on this with the kids' clothes because kids get clothes dirty and all that, so I am not really applying the "love" rule. But I have already collected a garbage bag full of stuff to get rid of from just a few tubs - things that are too stained to keep, too worn to keep, or just not our style.

And that is what we have been up to lately! Now we will be busy preparing for our little guy's baptism in the next few weeks, and preparing for quite a few visits from my family (yay!).

In the next week or so I am planning on preparing a Great Lenten plan for our family, and that will hopefully be my next post.