April Wrap Up

Here are a few things from April:

My Dad has been coming to dinner every Thursday night. It is nice to be able to visit with him every week. I'm grateful for Shantel for helping to make this happen every week, even though it takes an effort for her to make sure she is back at the house every Thursday with a good dinner ready. 

We celebrated my 1/2 birthday with a chocolate bundt cake. 

A haircut for Austin. 

Look at this beautiful picture of Shantel. She and I had a date night and did some reading at the park. She is reading Jane Eyre right now. 

Lucy walking reverently at church. 

Chick-Fil-A did a special free breakfast promotion during April and so we were able to go multiple times and get breakfast and one morning I went and picked it up for everyone and we had breakfast together. 

We are inching closer to our 100th Ranch bottle that we have gone through since Shantel and I started dating. You can see we are on number 94. Hidden Valley Ranch for the win!

Here is what church looks like from the eyes of Lucy. She had Shantel's phone during church and was taking pictures. She was feeling very grumpy and this helped for a few minutes and it is fun to see what things look like from her perspective. 

She was so tired that eventually she fell asleep in my arms. It has been years since she did that, so it was so sweet to get to hold her as she fell asleep. 

A few more pictures of Shantel wearing her Grandma Walker's dress.  

April Homeschool

It's April and spring is here. The earth is warming and the sun is starting to shine. This month I have felt a tangible weight of grey sorrow begin to lift. As the sun starts shining the heaviness is starting to feel lighter and even though we are still sad and will still miss Sue over and over until we see her again (and I'm still crying over very small things) the hope and joy of the Gospel is filling our hearts and home with light and happiness is our most common feeling here. 

Homeschool: 

Spring Homeschool is one of my favorite months: the sun is shining, we are wrapping up a great year, we have some extra time for fun projects, and summer is in sight! It's the last month before the busyness of May hits but the excitement of sunshine and summer is already here. This year we rescheduled the Science Fair for April after I didn't have the capacity for it in February. I think I still prefer it in February - but I was happy that we still made it happen this year. I wrote an entire blog post about this - but I wanted to include it here in the homeschool notes because it was a big part of our April Homeschool. 

The only pictures I took of homeschool this month are this one of Lucy and Austin. Lucy is on Austins shoulders, listening to him while he is reading his Booster words. He is such a good brother to her, and although this picture makes me laugh because it's ridiculous, it also makes me happy because of the time that my kids get to spend together. 

Lucy has been such a trooper this school year. She's not quite old enough to really join in but she certainly wants to. My biggest win was getting her a sticker-alphabet book that she ended up loving. She would insist that she needed to "do her school" and pull out her book. I would tell her what the letter was and have her color it in while I was helping Austin or Caleb with their work, a few minutes later she'd be finished and I would tell her a sticker to find and put on the shadow-shape. "Find the Bee", she'd take several minutes hunting for the sticker, pull it off, and put it in it's spot. There were usually 3 stickers per letter and the letter and a word to color. We would do 1-2 letters per day. It was perfect because she felt satisfied that she had done her school, but I was also able to help the boys at the same time. 

The above picture on the right was an awesome example of math in action. Lydia had been learning about circumference and radius. When she asked if I would help her sew a skirt and we got the the part where we needed to cut the circle for her waistband it was super exciting to realize that if we figured out what we wanted the circumference to be (her waist measurement) we could use the formula to figure out what the radius needed to be (the inches we needed to measure down to cut the circle). We figured it out and it turned out darling. She was so happy and it made my math-mama-heart happy. 

All the kids have taken a day this month for their end-of-year testing. We are able to do the state testing through our homeschool program, My Tech High. I love that we have access to this resource and think it's good experience to be able to take a standardized test. I wanted Austin AND Lydia to be able to go to the testing center this year, but they reached out to me and said that they were moving everything online except the 6th grade science testing. I probably should have pushed a little harder, because this has been such a good experience for Lydia and I want Austin to have the same kind of confidence. Next year we will do it, but this year was fine to do most of the state testing at home. Austin did a great job on the online version.  

I'm just so proud of my kids. I don't really care about the testing scores - it's not a good measure of their learning - but I do like them having exposure and practice with different learning formats. Heavens, I'm just so glad that they aren't spending weeks and weeks studying for this test when there are so many more beautiful things to learn and sunshine to soak in! (Plus, they all did fine on the exams and it helps me see some areas that I might want to cover a little more.)

Service:

Our stake held a day-of-service as part of our stake conference this year and it was so awesome. Lydia and Austin woke up early, early in the morning to go with David to work at a food bank helping to distribute food to those in need. They worked really hard and it was a good experience for all three of them. They joined the rest of our family at the Stake Center where there were lots of service projects going on. Service is important to our family and we were grateful for this opportunity. 

In Girls Club, we continued working on quilts to donate and finally finished them! Lydia and Lucy Rich also had the opportunity to go to Wrap the World with Quilts and volunteered for several hours. It's a really great organization that is helping people all over the world. The girl's quilts were donated to the families in Nebraska who were hit by the recent tornado. 

Structured Activities: 

Lydia had her Makerspace Open House. She made the most awesome final project - a cornhole game made out of acrylic and hand sewn beanbags. She really enjoyed makerspace this year. 


Mini-Coop

We had some really awesome park days this month. The boys have so much energy- one of the days we spent our entire time at the park (I had packed a lunch) because they just wanted to keep playing. It was glorious! We finished out the kids cookbooks and finished our pile of books. Mini coop was a good thing for our family this year. 

Field Trips: 

Hike on Red Potato Trail


Classic Fun Center: 

Ashton Gardens Tulip Festival



Cleaning/Organization:

I also wanted to add that I'm jumping into some spring cleaning and have been working to get our bonus room organized a bit better. This little room has had a lot of different functions in it's life but at the moment it is acting as an additional homeschool storage area. I have a small bookshelf where I keep some curriculum I'm not currently using, a bunch of 3 ring binders with materials that we need to reference or use, unit study books, and other homeschool items. I also have been storing our old curriculums that the kids have completed, but I don't know if I really need to do that. 

This room has also played home to a massive amount of second-hand items that people have given me and I haven't had the chance to go through. Sometimes people just drop things off on my porch in the hopes that I can use them, or I tend to gather resources that people don't need anymore with the intent to go through them and filter for what I want. I have two huge boxes of books and a bunch of old curriculums/resources that have been piling up and the day came where I could not go one more minute without going through it all.

 They say it always gets messier before it gets cleaner, and that certainly was the case here. I got rid of a lot of things and am so happy with the organized finished product. I think I still want to get some clear bins to store unit study books, but I haven't figured out exactly how I want to do that yet. We will see. 

Caleb Science Fair

Hi, my name is Caleb Peaden. I like the book “The Seven Silly Eaters”.

In the book Mrs. Peters has seven kids who will each only eat one kind of food. For her birthday, they decide to make her a breakfast of all their favorite foods.


It doesn’t go well.

First Mac’s oatmeal turned out lumpy, which made poor Mac turn Grim and Grumpy.

In fact, the lumps got him so cross, he dumped them in Jack’s applesauce.

This bothered Jack so much he threw it in the dough of Mary Lou.

Who tossed the mismash that that made straight into Lucy’s lemonade.

And that put her in such a huff she poured the icky sticky stuff

Into the double frying pan that held the eggs of Flo and Fran. Who flung the hodgepodge on the spot into the milk in Peter’s pot.

It was a disaster so the kids put it in the oven to hide the mess. When Mrs. Peters wakes up she finds a “pink and plump and perfect” cake!


For my experiment I wanted to know if you could Make Mrs. Peters Birthday Cake. My brother did an experiment about the seven silly eaters but it did not go well. I thought that if we used HOMEMADE ingredients it would work better.

So I made two cakes.

For one I did exactly what the book said. I dumped each ingredient into the next. It did not turn out very well because the inside didn’t cook, so we left it in for a long time and the outside got burned. Then we set it outside and it rained so it was super soggy. However, the top of it looked more like the book than my brothers.

The other we made with all the ingredients but different directions, it turned out much better - It looked like Mrs. Peters birthday cake but tasted more like bread than cake. 

I found that you can NOT make Mrs. Peter’s birthday cake like her kids in the book.