OurWanderingAdventures : August 2016

Hello everyone! My goodness, as I blow the dust off this blog I am left thinking about so much that has been going on over here. Bloggers out there in the world, do you ever have that feeling where even though you are busy every minute of every day (or at least it seems that way), they you are just not creating anything blog worthy? Yes, vacations and getaways are spectacular but at the same time...well I want to LIVE them and not be a slave to my camera. Have you reached the point where the school work that used to be cute and creative is just WORK now? I have taken photos of the kids at the board doing Algebra and yet what can I say about it? There are no cute games for Algebra! I had decided to step away for a bit and re-evaluate where this blog should go...and then I woke up.

There will always be things to blog about, meals to prepare and fun games to play and learn from. As the kids get older the posts may be fewer and farther between but there will always be blog worthy parts of our life, why? Because I love my life and every miniscule part of it. What may not be interesting to others, may in fact be a time capsule for my children to look back at when they are older. A digital scrapbook is what I have created and though I may not have been blogging for anyone in particular in the past, now I blog for them. These past few months have had us preparing for our County Fair with 4-H and all of their projects and judging and then they found out they made it to the State Fair and it was a whirlwind trip downstate. Here is my daughter at the fashion show for sewing. She made that skirt, those cuffs and that scarf. It's amazing what kids can do when you let their imaginations go wild. Me? I can't sew a button on straight and look at her, taking on the world. She went on to win the Champion prize in this competition!

As we continue down the path of growth, I will share the fun of being a parent to teenagers, the vacations we take and how to prepare for them (we are headed to the beach, Disney and a cruise VERY SOON!). I will still share my menu plans, the activities and sports in the world of homeschooling, along with just every day bits and pieces of my life. I may only blog once a month or every day for a week...it will happen and life will get in the way but I will try and keep a record of it as much as I can. I needed that wake up call, the realization that I blog for me, for them. It's easy to take photos and have them stack up in my phone but to be able to put some out there as a memory that will be here long after I am gone. It's something they can share with their own children.

The fair season took us down several new paths. At the beginning of Spring we brought home a new pet or shall I say our first ever pet. My youngest decided to begin raising a show rabbit and Carrots entered our life. It has been great fun and also been quite the lesson in responsibility. I am proud to say I have not once walked the rabbit (crazy right?!) nor have I ever cleaned his litter (he is a house broken rabbit). He is a Crème D' Argent bunny and is just about reaching his maximum size. It has definitely thrown a kink in many plans as we have brought a rabbit with us on vacation and camping and even on long road trips! Carrots has needed a sitter when we were gone too long and sometimes he even comes with to grandma and grandpas house!

While Carrots was being shown at the fair, my middle son fell in love with a new litter of Polish rabbits (not too new, they were 2 months old) and well of course one went home with us. Cocoa is the newest addition to our family and this will only get a wee bit bigger. It has been a lot of fun watching my boys grow up as they become responsible pet owners. This responsibility will follow them through life and it was something they needed to learn. We will soon begin showing them the cost of having a pet and discuss money and other things, I will post more about this in the future!

Out of nowhere, my shy and quiet middle son decided he wanted to do a food demonstration and enter that competition category this year. I was so PROUD to see him step out of his shell and take on this new challenge that I didn't care how he did, just that he was doing it! He ended up taking Champion on this too! It was an amazing moment to see his eyes register the win and me? Well I was the nerd mom crying in the second row. It wasn't because he won, it was because he was willing to tackle something new and though he was nervous he did it! If you care to see it, here is him practicing at home, I am laughing a lot and I don't even know if we finished the entire video but we were just being silly at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzwCit0-xb0

At the end of fair season, the kids entered 36 projects and ended up with 34 blue ribbons winners (my youngest has green as he is in a different age group) and 2 red ribbon second place winners. They worked so hard this year that they learned their hard work can take them anywhere they want to be. I was there to answer questions and of course help them find things but the rest was up to them and they did a phenomenal job with it all.

This Spring and Summer our National Parks passport has seen a lot of action as we took off in search of history, our swimsuits have been in lakes, oceans, rivers, streams, waterparks and hotel pools this Spring and Summer as we have ventured off many beaten trails to encounter new adventures. Our vehicle has had many miles of dirt roads, gravel trails and highways as we picked up and saw our surroundings but mostly our family has experienced so much time together that we have grown to learn more about one another. Small hotel rooms, tiny tents, cramped backseats, loaded train cars and over flowing buses...we have traveled them all in the desire to see more and learn more and we also came out loving more. The world can be anything we want it to be and as a family we are all seeing it through the same eyes and yet different ones too. Life is all about living and we are doing plenty of it.

As a new school year begins, we may spend some time in the classroom but we will make sure that we spend more time out of it. Learning is happening all around and life is sailing by, we don't want to miss a minute. We only have these few years with our children and if you take the time to realize that at 11 years old our oldest will only be living under our roof a handful of years more, it's why we do what we do. The bulk of her life under our guiding hand has come and gone so quickly that we need to hang on to these slivers we have left. The middle son is only one year behind her and the youngest 2 years behind him. The time goes too fast, though I want to take it all back and do more, I am eager to send them out into this world and see what they can do with all that they have been given and developed on their own.