Spring & Summer - Busy Days!

Well Spring is officially here which means busy times in the Noteboom household. Between Curtis' traveling for work, teaching preschool to 4 kiddos, planning a neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt, fundraising for Ruth Harbor's Walk for Life, preparing for our mission trip to Brazil and anticipating the birth of our next nephew...this season will fly by!

For those of you at all curious about how our homeschooling for preschool is going you should know that it's going AMAZINGLY well. I co-teach with two of the most awesome women who happen to be close friends of mine. Our kiddos were all born around the same time and are really close to each other. As moms we experienced entering motherhood for the first time together, figuring out sleep habits of newborns together, shared the frustration of potty training woes and of taking little one's pipe away together...so why not enter the domain of homeschooling together as well? God has truly blessed me with two amazing friends to go through this new journey with.

We started last Fall and decided to go through the alphabet with the kids one letter at a time. With each letter we did letter recognition (upper/lowercase), letter sound and letter structure. It seems like it's taken a long time to get here but we finally finished the alphabet last week with the letter Z! Yay! When the 2nd semester started we decided we wanted to focus more on different skills so we added daily calendar time, patterns, number counting/recognition, learning stations & weekly thematic units. I think it's safe to say that everyone had a lot of fun during our first year of preschool! There is no greater joy than seeing your children learn new skills. Being able to remember where they came from and see where they are now and know you had a role in their education is such a blessing and encouragement!

I wish I did a better job of capturing our journey this past year with photos so you could see the fun things they've done. I do have some pictures of the kids having fun learning I'll post soon, along with a list of fun activities we've done over the past year to help teach & reinforce the alphabet!

Ok, onto another brand new thing for our family. This year our church decided not to throw the gigantic Easter Egg hunt with hopes that the families of the church would host their own neighborhood hunt to get to know their neighbors. Let me just say God is amazing at answering prayers! The week before this new plan for the egg hunt was released Curtis and I had met with our Small Group where we are currently reading and going through a 4 week study on witnessing to & discipling others. This particular week the author highlighted the importance of building relationships with your neighbors & showing them the love of Christ. Well, Curtis and I left thinking, "how in the world can we do that? how would people feel being invited over to a complete strangers house "just to get to know them?"" I prayed that God would give us some idea as to how to get the ball rolling with just meeting our neighbors, let alone inviting them over. God answered that prayer a week later when we found out that JEFC wasn't hosting one but instead donating plastic eggs to those who wanted to throw their own neighborhood hunt! Amazing timing Lord!

On Monday of this week the boys and I walked up and down our street handing out invitations to our neighbors. We plan on having a chocolate-filled egg hunt in our back yard this Saturday morning. The boys are really into it too. When choosing our candy at the store Owen insisted on telling anyone else within ear shot that "we invited our neighbors over for our very own Easter Egg hunt, even a firefighter is going to come!" So now we're just praying for a good turn out and dry/warmer weather!

There are other things I would like to post updates on but alas nap time is over and little boys are once again stirring. Hopefully I can get another post with those updates up soon. Bye!