August

The first week in August brought the start of a new school year for us, and a bit of change. Isa started 4th grade and loves it! She has the same 4th grade teacher that I had (Ms. Leonardo) and we both love her!! It was so weird for me to sit in the same classroom w/the same teacher (22 years later) on back to school night!

The other change was Brendan entering middle school, 6th grade. Since we're not at all impressed w/the middle schools around here, we started looking into charter schools. The more research we did, the more we realized we just didn't feel right about anything, until we thought about homeschooling. I was pretty intimidated with the thought of it (I have several friends in NC that did it and developed their own curriculum), but it still seemed overwhelming. I had several people in the community tell me about AZ online virtual academy, which is basically an online charter school. We looked into it and decided to do it. We love it! Brendan has a teacher, a curriculum already set up day-to-day, books & workbooks for each subject, & tons of supplies for science experiments and art projects throughout the year! It was so great to have everything done for me, and he's doing great. He's very disciplined and plowing through really well. I'm so proud of him! He doesn't like pictures of him so much anymore, so I don't have one of him to put on here. I'll sneak one soon...

Isa and Gabriela got their haircut at the salon in preparation for the new school year, and Gabriela had a blast being a "big girl".

With everyone back into a routine, I'm able to pick up more sewing/quilting time again. I wanted to make Cajsa a baby gift, but couldn't ever settle on what to make. After I saw this pattern for a baby ring stacker, I knew this was it! It turned out really cute and Adison enjoys it now.

I stole this picture from her blog :)

My parents went up to Utah and brought back down tons of tomoatoes & cucumbers from Cajsa & Brad's garden. They were SO good! They also brought with them a HUGE zuchinni from one of Cajsa's neighbor's garden. We made 4 batches of zuchinni bread and had fun experimenting with different add-ins (chocolate chips & pecans).

With the camera flash these loaves look a little flourescent orange, weird. They weren't. They were so good we ate all 4 batches within a week (the plan was to make them all at my parents house so that they could eat most of it :) It worked)!