About to go!!

Well we've got about 15 and 1/2 hours until we leave for our trip. It's been a crazy couple of days trying to get everything ready. We took our van in on Tuesday for a tune-up and possible exhaust work, and they told us to bring it in Thursday morning and they'd have all the parts ready to go and it would take about 4 or 5 hours. Well it's now been 30 hours and I still don't have my van!!!! Steve is there now and will hopefully be leaving in the next few minutes. It became a big complicated mess with having to take it over the Nissan dealer to have something fixed and it just took forever.

And when it finally gets here, I have to take Jasmine to the vet, go to the bank and stop at the store. I need to get dog food, food for my mother in law and food for us to snack on during our drive. My mother in law is taking care of our pup and she'll stay here off an on during the week, so we like to have food for her to eat while she's here.

I'll be 9 weeks pregnant on Monday. That seems pretty far already!! Atleast to me!! Last week I had bouts of nausea and exhaustion and this week has been pretty good. I've had two days where I was very tired and not really any nausea, just some food seem really gross to me right now, like milk. I usually love milk and drink it twice a day, but right now, the thought of it just makes my stomach turn. I have been able to get some down so I can make sure I'm getting enough calcium, but it's been hard!! I'm a little worried about being tired at WDW, but since Steve and the kids are going to ride so many rides without me (all the big rides), I'll have all that time to rest, so I think I'll be ok. I'll hang out on the TTA for awhile, that's always relaxing!!

Well I still need to finish packing, charge the camera (if I can ever find the charger, or buy a new one), make a bed for my mother in law, clean the fish tank and set out the fish food, set out the dog food, do the dishes, vacuum and all the errands I mentioned earlier.....so why am I sitting here blogging????? Have a great week!!!

Lots of Stuff

I just felt like posting a random post today. I love these two pics of the kids sledding. They looks so intense!! I love waiting until the other kids go back to school to go sledding, so we have the hill all to ourselves!! Ahhh, one of the many joys of homeschooling!!

>I still can't believe we're having another baby!! It's just now starting to seem real. I've wanted it for so long, that it just keeps feeling like a dream. But I know it's real and I couldn't be happier. Abby is so impatient about it!! She wants the baby here NOW!!! I've explained a little of "where babies come from" to them (more so to Noah) but to Abby, I told her she has eggs in her tummy that someday have the chance to become babies and the other day her and Noah were playing and Noah sliced her with a play sword across the belly (it didn't hurt or anything) and she yelled "Noah be careful, I have an egg in there!!" I thought that was so cute!!

Introducing....Poppy!!!

This is the first picture of our newest baby!! We call the baby Poppy because when we first told the kids we were expecting, the internet said it was about the size of a poppy seed (it's grown now, all the way to the size of a lentil bean!!).

I had my first ultrasound yesterday. I'm about 6 1/2 weeks along now. We were able to see the heart beating, so that was very exciting!! I know the picture is blurry, I had trouble scanning it, so I had to take a picture of the picture and they all turned out pretty blurry. This was the best one. The baby is what the white arrow is pointing to.

Our baby is due October 5th. That's the exact week we had our Disney trip planned for, so we had to cancel that one! We are actually going in a couple weeks and then we're planning to go again in December so we can take the new baby as well. Our first ever Disney trip was when Abby was 2 months old and Noah was almost 3. This time Noah will be almost 10, Abby will be 7 and the baby will be 2 months old!!

I'm a little nervous about "starting over". I mean Abby will be 7 before the baby is born, so it's been awhile since I've done this, but I'm also very excited for this third blessing that's been given to me. God is so good.

Well I'd better go start lessons now!! Have a great week!!!

Homeschool Experiment - We Made Butter!!!!

I'm so excited because today the kids and I made our own butter!!! Now why you may ask, are we making our own butter....well, over the past few months we've read in two different sources about how people at different times of history have made butter. It just happened to come up twice in our studies. The first time was during our reading of Little House in the Big Woods and the second was during our Bible studies, we learned about Joseph's life as a boy. Both times butter making was mentioned and we wondered if we could do it ourselves. So I did a little online research and found out that we could and we didn't need to buy anything special to do it. So today we gave it a try. We bought heavy whipping cream to use. We used a plastic container with a tight fitting lid and a marble. We poured about 2/3 of the container full of cream and dropped the marble in. The marble adds more agitation which helps the butter to form. Then we sealed it up and taped the lid just to be sure and started shaking!! Here's pics of the kids shaking (please excuse the pj's and messy hair, this is how "school" normally looks in our home!!)

I ended up doing most of the shaking as it took about 20 minutes start to finish. After about 15 of the minutes, it felt like I couldn't get it to shake loose anymore and we peeked inside. It looked like white whipped butter. I knew from my reading that we were close to being done, but not quite. So I shook it about 5 more minutes and then it became amazingly easy to shake again and I knew it was ready. What happened was the butter finally separated from the buttermilk (as you can kind of see in the picture below). I thought it was so cool how a minute ago it was all mixed together and then it just separated into two different things!! Wow!!! (If you try this, don't forget to take the marble out!!)

So then we strained the buttermilk into a bowl to save and use for a recipe later (pancakes or something???) and had yellow butter left in the strainer. It was also so cool how the butter turned yellow. It was like a miracle!! (I know, I'm easily amazed, but it was so cool!!)

We then all took turns giving the butter a little love pat to get any remaining buttermilk out and then we sprinkled a little salt on it (it keeps it from going bad quickly).

And then I formed it into a shape resembling a butter stick!!!

And then to try it out, I made biscuits with our lunch and slathered some of the fresh yummy butter on them. Oh my where they delicious!!! Here's the kids eating their lunches.

Overall, I think this was my favorite experiment ever (well this and the time we got dry ice in our Omaha steak package and played with it for awhile!!). I don't know how to explain it, but I was just awed at God during the whole process. I mean he created the cows that give the milk to use and I bet he thought of how the butter would be made back in the beginning. It really is such a cool process!!!