14th Wedding Anniversary

On this day, 14 years ago, I married my best friend.

We got married at the court house with a judge performing the ceremony and my parents there as our witnesses. Afterwards, we went to my aunt & uncle's house for a small reception.

It was honestly the best day of my life. I wouldn't change a thing about it.

One of the best things about it (besides marrying the man i love), was my grandma was able to be there. About 10 months before my wedding she was diagnosed with Leukemia. And, although it's not the best picture, i'm so thankful i have this picture of her there, with me, on my wedding day.

5 months later, at 71 years old, she lost her long hard fought battle with Leukemia.

These pictures aren't the best quality at all, but i love them.

And i'm not sure who's idea it was for the white girl to stand in front of the white fence in her white dress... but yikes! I totally look like a ghost. At this point i had only been out of Alaska for a year, so i'm going to blame my ghostly complexion on that.

Anyways, i hope you enjoyed this look back at our wedding day. And to my husband, Happy Anniversary babe, i love you!

My Father's World {Curriculum Review}

Hi there!!

This year we are using My Father's World (MFW) curriculum for my 4th & 7th grader. This curriculum is new to us, so i thought i would share what we are liking about it and not really liking about it (also known as, a pro/con list).

Before i begin, i just want to say i am not affiliated with MFW, and that this is not a sponsored post. 

Now that we got that out of the way, lets move on.

We are using the Exploring Countries and Cultures curriculum. (Picture below from MFW website)

 I ordered the deluxe package and i also ordered extra student sheets.

*The curriculum itself only comes with enough student sheets for 1 student, so you have to order extra for each additional student.* 

For my 7th grader i had to also order the 7th-8th grade required supplement. I also decided to go with their general science for him as well.

My total for all this was $681.83

Now that you know what curriculum we ordered, lets get into the pros & cons of it all.


I'll start with the Pros first....

#1. We love all the hands on activities & that there isn't much paperwork. Most of the student sheets have just been coloring pages so far.

Here Samuel mastered using only 4 colors to color the entire USA and not have the same color touching. He loved this brain game!

This was my version of a Coup Stick we did in art one day. You draw something major that happened over the past year (the birth of Lincoln was mine) and hang it on a stick (our stick was a ruler... work with what you got right?).

Here is Dasean with his Coup Stick...

Here are the passport's each kid gets, along with some Mexican pesos for our "trip" to Mexico.

#2. Lessons are short and simple. We can very easily get done with all this work in about 1 to 2 hours tops. Which is great for kids who don't like to sit still for very long.


#3. It all flows together. For example if you are studying Mexico for geography, then your science will be covering deserts, because Mexico has a large desert area. Then you will make some Mexican arts/crafts, and cook some tortillas, etc. etc. It all just flows well together.


Now i'll share with you my Cons...

#1. No/lacking teacher answer key.  I'm working towards having my children be more independent with their work. However, with this curriculum i pretty much have to be there with them when they do student sheets, because they have not included a teacher answer key.

#2. Price. Honestly, i knew what i was getting before i bought it, but i still feel like for that price (almost $700) it should have included EVERYTHING. I still had to buy separately for both my boys; Spelling, Math, Language Arts, and Vocabulary. (Not to mention extras like foreign language, piano, etc.)

#3. Labeling of sheets. Or should that say lack of labeling sheets. For example, on week 5 in my teacher's manual it said "Prepare Geography Game (see notes)". So i read the notes and they tell me the North America game board is included in the student sheets. That's great, i look through all the student sheets and i had the hardest time finding this magical game board. Why? Because it wasn't labeled. Now, up until this point they had everything in order, for example at the beginning of the student sheets was week 1's paperwork and then week 2's after that, and so on and so on. This game board was at the back of the student sheets, and it's just a map. No where on it does it say North America game board or anything like that. So for me this is a con, because it was frustrating and took awhile to figure it all out.


So, those are my Pros/Cons for MFW. If you are using MFW, leave me a comment and let me know what you like/dislike about them.

Lincoln's 1 Year Old

Last week, Lincoln turned 1 year old!!

So, i figured i would sit down and share some pictures (i took so many pictures of him on his birthday) and just let you all know what milestones he has accomplished (and when he accomplished them) over the past year.

He rolled over for the first time when he was 4 months old.

He crawled for the first time at 6 months old.

At 6 months he was saying "mama"

By 7 1/2 months he was able to sit up by himself.

By 8 months he was saying "dada"

By 9 1/2 months he had his 2 front bottom teeth

By 10 months he was able to walk around furniture while holding on.

By 11 months he had his 2 front top teeth

And a week before his first birthday he took his first steps.

It's hard to believe he has gone from this little guy....

To this big guy...

And here are a few pictures from his birthday party....

He absolutely LOVED his smash cake, he cried when i took it away from him..

Anyways, i hope you enjoyed hearing all about Lincoln's accomplishments/birthday.

Until next time,

Take Care.

Weight Loss Update

Back in May, I shared with you all my Weight Loss Journey.

So, I thought today I would give a little update on how things are going.

If you remember, I started my weight loss journey weighing in at 160 pounds!

I'm really excited to say that I got all the way down to 138 pounds!!

However...

At the end of May i had a little accident.

I fell down the stairs in my house. I was on the landing (where the yellow arrow is pointed at in the picture below) and i slipped and fell all the way down to the bottom of the stairs.

I banged the back of my head on the steps as i was falling down, along with my arm and my back.

The reason i'm sharing this is because this accident made me unable to workout for over a week.

Once i was feeling better from my accident, i started working out again.

However, i then started getting these horrible pains in my stomach every time i would run on the treadmill. So once again i stopped working out.

All these setbacks really got to me and i started eating horribly bad.

 I gained some weight back, 5 pounds to be exact.

But slowly I've been working out more and trying to eat better.

My current weight is 140 pounds.

I still try to get my steps in each day, my current goal is 15,000 steps each day. However, some days i fall short of that.

As far as my diet, here is an example of what i eat in a day. *This was from a few weeks ago*

For breakfast on this day, i had a smoothie bowl. It was made with: frozen bananas, unsweetened cocoa powder, unsweetened almond milk, and natural peanut butter. *Normally you would top a smoothie bowl with extras (i.e. fruit, seeds, etc.), but i was in a hurry, so i ate mine plain*

I had a mid morning snack of trail mix. *I know, not the greatest snack for losing weight*

For lunch i made myself a salad. It had romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, red bell pepper, and was topped with a Greek yogurt ranch dressing. *In all honesty this was a lot of food, i only ate about half of it*

Dinner was breaded pork chops, steamed broccoli and a quinoa/brown rice mixture. *I'm really trying to get used to the taste of quinoa & brown rice, but it's tough*

So, that's where i am at with my weight loss journey so far. I hope next time i give you an update i've reached my goal weight!