Has it been that long??

Wow, July was my last post!! Where did August and September go? For that matter, where is October going?

We have been busy, busy, busy! We started school early in August and our days have been a blur of homeschooling, classes, Classical Conversations (CC), gymnastics, church, AWANA, laundry, cleaning (not nearly enough of that), and other things. Good thing God gave us the Sabbath! We are certainly "laboring and doing all" of our work the other six days.

School is going well. We had some bumps at the beginning of the year. I had decided to try some new things that didn't work well for our family. When you have six kiddos under age 9, not every program is going to be a good fit. We're pretty much back on track now, although I did sign the kids up for WAY too many classes this semester. They're loving them, but the expense and busy-ness is just too much. Next semester I will be wiser. For now, we're starting to "get in the groove," so to speak. I've tinkered with our schedule and even our curriculum, and I think we've found a happy balance between educational excellence and, well, real life.

I'm tutoring CC (5th and 6th graders) on Tuesday morning while all my little people are in their respective CC classes. We really do enjoy the Foundations portion of CC. All the classes cover the same material, so we work on it together throughout the week. Everyone from Nathan down to Justin. Carsten joins in too. He's very insistent about doing everything the big kids do.

I'm also teaching Latin on Friday afternoons. That's been fun and it's kept us on track with our Latin studies here at home. We're using the Latin for Children curriculum. I highly recommend it. It comes with a DVD that you can either use to teach the children directly, or (as I do) use as a how-to-teach aid. Anyway, it motivates the kids when they're learning together.

Bryan and I have taken the position of AWANA commanders this year. That's been a big commitment, but we've found it very rewarding. There's such a great group of people that we're blessed to work with, and they make it enjoyable. There are just about 80 kids signed up. AWANA is a good, biblically sound program, and I know the kids are going to benefit from learning God's word. He promises His word won't return to Him void, and that's a promise that we hang on to when we're with the kids on Sunday nights.

Now, on to more important things: Steffen turned one! My little tiny baby man is already a year old! I can't believe it. He is just so cute and has such a big personality already. He loves to do motions to songs and he can already say a few baby words. He took five steps last night, but he's been refusing to demonstrate for his siblings today. They are so anxious to see- I think he's teasing them. He gets into everything. No cabinet is safe with him around.

I know you'll want a picture of our grown-up little baby, so here you are! We combined his birthday with our Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) party. Such is the life of a sixth baby.