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Monday, how did you get here so fast? I hope the weekend treated you all very well! We have been busy, busy, busy but also very happy! Our weekend was full of fun but busy activities. We spent Saturday morning painting doors in our house. The front door got the RED treatment! The frame will eventually be painted black, but one thing at a time right now! Hahaha!!! The hardware is going to be spray painted black ASAP...well ASAP for me and for my husband it's pretty low priority! I also want to completely re-do this front porch. Planters, new mail box and hopefully a new screen door is on the list!

The other exterior doors were painted black and we plan on doing the same with the interior doors! This was definitely a time consuming project but let me tell you, the price of a couple cans of paint made a HUGE HUGE difference in this house!!! I love, love, love how the black looks!

We have begun our family hikes again. We plan on trying out different forest preserves and parks in the area and this is proving to be so fun! We are aiming to do at least 2 a week after dinner. Here the kids are learning how a water pump works and it got everyone pretty excited! It's a good thing we came across this AFTER our hike or this could have easily taken up the entire evening.

We trekked down into swampy areas to see if there were any signs of different animals around. Roman took a water sample here to check out under the microscope and YIIIKKEESSS!!!

The kids followed dog tracks down to the beach, but they suddenly stopped! It was fun watching all the different things they encountered and what they chose to take small samples of.

The first mini golf of the season was AWESOME and quite interesting! We were all incredibly rusty but it was sooo fun! (Pssst....I came in second place!). The interesting part came when we turned our clubs in and the skies opened up and suddenly a lightning storm began with pouring rain! It was incredible to watch from our car.

We spent much of the weekend at Home Depot and Lowes just picking up things for around the house. The kids love riding on these flat bed cars whether it is at Sam's Club or a home store, if it's on wheels, they are trying to hop on!

I spent the entire weekend fueling on this fantastic Iced Mint Green Tea that I made myself at home with MINT FROM OUR GARDEN!!! Even the kids absolutely fell in love with it!!
How to:

1. Boil 4 cups of water in a pan
2. After water is boiling, turn off and add 20 fresh mint leaves and 1 bag of green tea if desired.
3. Let steep for 6 minutes.
4. Remove leaves and Bag
5. Serve over ice! 

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Corner of my Home...

Welcome to another Corner of my home! This is our educational nook. I am hoping to find the RIGHT rainbow colored rug some day to place right in front of it! In these shelves are games and toys and books that are for learning and educational play! These toys are ONLY allowed to be played with right here, since things have a tendency to grow legs and walk away to their bedrooms and the playroom etc. There are 8 bins in this shelf and I wish we had actually gone with something bigger! I may purchase and set of 4 if I can find one! The unit is the Expedit from Ikea, the BEST store for organizing children!

At the top left you will find workbooks and school curriculum books that I am building up to keep the Summer learning going this year. We will have 'school' for 3 hours every day (Broken up into 2 portions with lunch, playtime and relaxing in the middle). I also have a small bit of markers, pencils etc. here for quick projects or games that we need something to write with and then a large jar of crayons!!

Going to the right, we have our reference books like a couple Atlases, maps, Dictionaries, experiment books etc. and the bell for our reading game (I will touch more on this reading game in another post!!). The next shelf holds our reader books (Levels 1-4), I have 2 beginning readers in the home and I like to keep these out in the open and not their personal book shelves, so that they can look up any words they need in the dictionaries. This also holds our Microscope, that I LOVE LOVE LOVE, it's by Geo Safari and it's FANTASTIC! Even the little one gets into being a Scientist! (This may move to our Science Nook, if I ever get it more under control). The little silver tin holds the slides.

The Microscope Nook is the only one that has recently changed! I moved the beginning readers to the reading nook, where they can snuggle in better with them! I now added the reading manipulatives here, since that seems to be the 1 part of our collection that continues to grow!

The next bin is 'organized' but it still looks like a mess! I really don't know what I want to do with this area (hence the need for the bigger shelf!) This entire corner is full of some learning board games that fit in the nook (I change out these games weakly, so it's like getting new games each time!!), and magnetic boards!

The Bottom shelf is full of 8 bins (one was in use at the moment!!) with the larger ones being labeled (I am having my daughter WRITE the labels for the top row) with photos so that everyone knows how to put stuff away right where it belongs! The Lego Box, is topped with a bin full of Unifix Linking Cubes that are the perfect thing to use with Legos or even alone as a Math manipulative (More on these in a future post). The craft box holds a little bit of everything crafty and the bin above it holds construction paper). MagnaTiles are next and they are FABULOUS!! These magnetic tiles have the kids AND mom and dad enthralled every single time they come out! I even posted about them here! The green bin on top of that one, holds more MagnaTiles! haha! We are obsessed and running out of space!! Finally is our flashcard bin, this holds all flashcards of any sort! We even make our own and those are in there too. The green bin above that holds our Spanish bin, I speak Spanish fluently and will be teaching the kids this Summer as part of our curriculum!! I am so excited!!!

All of this sits beneath our Nature Table! There is so much going on in this nook, that is seems to be their favorite place to play. 

Hope you enjoyed this corner of my home! Share yours in the comments please!!

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