I have been really neglecting my blog lately. Wow. We’ve been so caught up in day-to-day life that sometimes it feels like there’s not a lot to blog about.

Let’s see.

Anna’s birthday is tomorrow. I can’t believe my little girl is going to be 2 already.

We got another rabbit – we now have a male and two females. They’re so cute and are actually friendly (which is what we were wanting – we don’t want them to be afraid of us).

I’ve been very busy with jewelry lately. It is such a blessing. I am absolutely overwhelmed at how good God has been with the jewelry business, and am really loving getting to make everything and come up with new designs for customers too. If you’d like to see some of what I’ve been up to, check out my jewelry blog. I started that a while back so this blog wouldn’t be all about jewelry all the time.

On the baby front. . .we’re just waiting at this point. I’m 37 weeks now so the countdown is on. My church threw me a lovely baby shower a couple weeks ago, and I just realized yesterday pictures of that never got posted. So more on that in a minute. Also, a day or two before that, I got put on restricted activity. I’d been having a lot of contractions, and my midwife was concerned that I’d go into early labor. She didn’t put me on bedrest (for which I’m thankful; I would have gone crazy!), but there were a lot of things I wasn’t allowed to do. Now that I’m considered full term I’m allowed to go about my normal life. I never dreamed it would feel so good to make breakfast and do the dishes! Stephen and Samuel have been amazing, doing everything I normally do, but it feels SO good to be able to do it myself.

As a result of so many episodes of contractions, people are now calling me almost daily to see if the baby has arrived yet. I told Stephen last night it’s tempting to just keep it a secret for a couple days once she does arrive. . .not that it’s really possible. . . ;O) I’m just thankful to have made it this far though. We had one preemie (Samuel) and that was hard enough. I can’t imagine having a premature little one while having other kids to care for too!

Anyway, here are the pictures. . .

Our church throws a baby shower for every baby. That was a new concept for me when I moved to the South. I was absolutely blown away at how our ladies gave for this shower. They make me feel so loved. I don’t deserve such a good church family, but I sure do love them!

I was hoping for a good picture with Anna, and this is the best we got.

The expression on Anna’s face here is too sweet; I just love it!

She did NOT like the “melted chocolate in the diaper” game. I like to watch people’s reactions when the game gets played. This time it was especially disgusting as the diapers were still warm from melting the chocolate bars!

Anna really wasn’t interested in helping open gifts, but got really excited when she discovered that one was for her.

I am so blessed – the ladies gave us so much. We’re still trying to figure out where everything will go!

This is what my darling husband has been teaching our daughter lately – to shoot Mommy with Nerf darts.

We all have Nerf guns and frequently have Nerf wars. It’s a lot of fun. Yesterday when I was trying to work at my desk though, I kept getting hit in the back. I turned around to see Stephen teaching Anna how to actually aim and shoot the Nerf gun.

The best part about it was how much fun she was having. She had this expression of pure glee on her face.

After seeing a friend’s picture on Facebook of her workbox setup for her homeschool, I was inspired to try it myself for our house. I had seen various posts around the internet about it, but always pretty much brushed it off because we live in a small house and currently only have one child in school.

Then I started thinking of how it might simplify things. Even though much of our curriculum is very mommy-involved yet (and as it should be for 2nd grade), I wondered how it might work for us. I also wondered how it would work with the My Father’s World curriculum (we’re doing Adventures this year, for those who are curious).

As I mentioned, we don’t have a lot of extra room around here. My solution was to get an old hanging file box, and dig out some empty hanging file folders. I printed the tags from Homeschool Creations, covered them in clear contact paper, and glued velcro to them. My goal was to figure out a system that could be put together with things we already had at the house.

The system looks good so far, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m hoping it will help keep Samuel motivated to finish a bit more, and am really hoping it makes our days go more smoothly!