My Carpet!

I got it today! It's the magnificent flying carpet.



And here's Abbi and me. This is her epic flight form for her druid.


Mother and daughter flying together, nothin' like it.

Playing is good

I missed my girls the last month with them both off on adventures. First Abbi for 2 weeks in Maryland and then Kyra for a week in Tennesse. Now they're both home and we have a friend staying with us. So the fun continues :)

Kimi is here playing


And we're expecting Christine and Shawn to arrive tonight.

Ren shared about Kyra's stay but I just can't help but put these pics up.

The joy in these faces.


I just love it!


And the fact that she got to enjoy the snow... well, what a treat for us Northerners :)




A couple of reasons why she had a great time.



Imagine that.. even the parents have fun!

Thank you sweet friends!

In case you missed it

This is why we love Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and John Williams for that matter. All of these musicians are amazing, of course. Can you say chills?

And watch Yo-Yo Ma's face, awesome :)

A Great Day

Our hope, our dreams, and our spirits are rekindled.

I, for one, am excited for the next 4 years of our country.

Good luck, Barack Obama, we're thinking of you on this day.

Last week

What we've been up to:

We went to the Atlanta History Center. There was an awesome Jim Hensen exhibit there, love Jim Hensen :) There were lots of other things there too but the muppet king was our main point of interest this time... oh, and Madeline and her boys. And I met another unschooling mama that I've been wanting to meet! Kimba, from Atlanta, she has beautiful pink hair!

Madeline, Gillen and Jesse met us at the Mall of Georgia where Kyra always has to ride the merry-go-round, Yay! and we went to the movie Tales of Despereaux. We really enjoyed it, just beautiful animation. Afterward, they came home with us and stayed the night.

Here are the boys watching Alec while he's raiding.




Alec was so cute. (he'll love me saying that ;) He got both boys all set up with laptops right in his room so they could all play. I've loved watching Alec with the younger kids, he was talking with me about how excited Jesse was about WoW. How he'd go on and on about it, (kind of like someone else we know ;). Madeline and I saw how patient Alec was with Jesse while we were at the museum earlier that week too. It was very cool.

After Madline and the boys left, Alec, Kyra and I then headed up to the Chatanooga area to see another family. Yep, we then visited with Mindy and family. We love visiting them up on their mountain :) They're set back in the woods which makes me feel like I'm right at home. Mindy brought me in to Chattanooga and showed me around. I had never been in to the heart of the city before. It was very cool. She was very excited to share the coffee roasters right there and we had fun checking out the fair trade store! It's a funky downtown and I like it a lot! Later we played games and talked WoW and just enjoyed hanging out with our friends.

Friday afternoon we returned from Chattanooga, did a few things around the house and then early Saturday morning Tim, Kyra and I headed up to the Johnson City area. It turns out that Steph, Nic's mom was making a trip down to Bristol, VA with a friend; so we were able to meet her and get Abbi! yay! We missed her so!

She had a wonderful time up in Maryland. She snowboarded, visited the new Newseum in Washington DC, played games, met new friends and showed us all how wonderfully independent she is. I'm learning how to handle kids being gone, do I call? do I not call? Am I worrying too much?

Oh, and now Kyra is away. She's staying with Ren's family and gets to see Laura's too. Several other families live up in that area and they've been wonderful in sharing their lives with us.

Life is good.

It's winter? and blog talk radio

More weather talk from me... (sorry) It's cool here this morning, 31 I think. I put Bemidji in my yahoo weather search just to see what the temp was there... -32.

Wow.

and on an unschooling note~ Ren and Laura were guests on a blog talk radio show yesterday. If you'd like to listen to it you can right here and also at Ren's blog.

Great show you guys, it was amazing the range of topics that were covered!

Goings on around home

I have perennials greening up! Oh my gosh, I can't believe it. I was out looking around the yard and my mums have new growth at the bottom. Crazy.. but cool. I've been told that I'll get 2 blooming times with a lot of my perennials. Wow! Nothing like flowers growing in January!

Tim's been busy. Besides going back to work after a nice long vacation in December he decided to kick it into gear in regard to our basement.

I have a handy husband. He decided to do all of this himself. This is his first time dry walling and all that. It looks pretty darn good and will only get better.



He's really excited to dry wall the extra bedroom that we're going to finish because he found new tools that really make fillin' in those gaps between the dry wall a piece of cake. And they were on clearance! (and if you know Tim you know how excited he was about that ;)


If you look past the Foosball table you can see the bedroom that's next to be finished.

I helped some, picking out paint and painting.

Here's the room in progress. Can you guess what it's going to be? Do you see the platform he built? Clue: there aren't any windows so it'll be perfect for ......


We can't wait!



Alec and Kyra have been keeping busy and enjoying some time home. Kyra is done with her art class and was very excited to get all her art supplies home.

She promptly drew this elf riding a dragon fly yesterday. She really likes pastels. I love how she blended the colors and I love the water behind the elf.


Alec has been playing some new games that he got over the holidays and what's really cool is that some are for x-box live and they're cooperative. So not only can he enjoy a new game but he can play with his cousin back in Minnesota and with Abbi and Nic up in Maryland. All four of them were playing the other evening and having a blast. Alec's also still playing drums with Rock Band, he reconfigured the set and working on getting the brain working. It's a little complicated because how you have the cymbals and drums tilted affects the sound. The brain I'm talking about is an electrical unit that makes his drum set that he got to play Rock Band sound like a real drum set. So you can play it without the game also.

And, of course we're all missing Abbi. She had a first last week, she learned to snowboard! She enjoyed it but said she was bruised a lot. She sent us a picture of her knees over AIM and we all collectively said ..... "OW!"

A visit and gone to visit

When you hang out with friends, what else would you do but

write on each other





and


braid your boyfriend's hair!

photos taken by Abbi Smith, Thanks Abbi!

The Smiths (Abbi's boyfriend's family) stopped by on their way home from Florida. The Haworths had wanted to visit with them too so they joined us for the fun. We had a really nice afternoon. Drawing on each other, doing Nic's hair, watching football and lots of talking were some of the goings on.

Then around dinnertime we said good-bye and Abbi went with them! She'll be gone for about 2 weeks. They live in the Maryland/DC area so lots of stuff to do around there! She was so excited. (me on the other hand....I'm happy for her, but I'll really miss her and I don't know what to do with myself.. all these independent kids!)

Happy New Year Sun!

I'm not much a night owl and having some flu/cold sickness circulating through the house lately doesn't help. I did stay up long enough to say Happy New Year to the fam and see the peach drop (on TV).

Bringing in the New Year here in Georgia was a little different from what we were used to in northern MN. The peach drop I mentioned was supposed to bring in 100,000 people... gulp. I first asked Tim, "was it 10,000 people that are going to be in downtown Atlanta?" as I watched Dick Clark's Rockin New Year's and Atlanta's Peach drop. He informed me it was more like 100,000! Wow. Pretty much the population of the 2 cities where I grew up... crazy.

Then as I was closing my eyes and laying down to bed I could hear the fireworks going off across the lake. Opening up my blinds I could see through our trees multi-colored lights flickering in the distance. That was cool. Also cool were the happy sounds I could hear downstairs.

Alec talking to his cousin on X-box live. And Kyra and Abbi typing happily away on their computers.

I didn't get any photos of the fireworks last night but I did snatch some snapshots of the New Year's sunrise.



Where's that sun? There's the lake. (and it's not frozen, which I know you all know but I have to keep telling myself that!) These are taken from our back deck.


There it is! Happy New Year Sun!



I'm much more of a sunrise girl.