Happy New Year

Here's a quick update on our family.

McKenna started Wylie Preparatory Academy on Monday. She and I both love it. Homeschooling was fun, but a lot of stress and work for the teacher (me). McKenna has matured and really grown in math and language arts, which were areas that she was struggling in. We are excited about the new school and she has already made some new friends. Kenna's also playing basketball with LP Sports. She has shown a lot of improvement in her skills and is on an awesome team this year. They are currently undefeated and coached by me :)!

Jensen is still in public school and is excelling in every subject. He loves to read and is currently reading the fourth Harry Potter novel. We are very fortunate to have a neighborhood full of boys his age, so he and Kenna spend a lot of time playing outside with neighborhood friends. If Jensen's not outside, he's either playing Rock Band on the wii or building with Legos in his room. He also likes to ride his razor scooter...off steps and curbs.

So that's a little taste of what's been going on over here. I'll post pictures and more details soon.

Fifth Grade

The notebooks just keep getting thicker and the boy keeps getting taller! Jensen is almost as tall as me now, yet I can still beat him at arm wrestling. He's gonna need to eat some meat and pump a little iron to beat his "mumma"! I love that he still calls me that. :) Even though he's a smart kid, he did need some help with his homework today. Unfortunately, I had to pull out my teaching manual that I'm using for McKenna to look up how to mark spelling errors when proofreading. Apparently he didn't HEAR the instructions in class and it was very unclear on the worksheet. So now, he seems to think he'll make a 100 in Language Arts! Having a mom that's a teacher does have its advantages.

Congratulations Kristin, Craig and William!

Meet Creighton August Kelly. He was born on Wednesday, August 26th and weighed in at 5 pounds, 11 ounces! He's a tiny, beautiful, little peanut and McKenna is madly in love with him! It's been a while since our family has been around an infant so it took some encouragement to get Jarrod to hold Creighton. McKenna would have held him FOREVER and is already asking to go see him again.

Congratulations sweet friends! We love you guys and are so happy for you!

First Week of School

Over the past few years we have been prayerfully considering education options for McKenna. This last school year we realized we needed to make a change. Although she was not considered "at risk", she was struggling with reading and math. She was also already worried about TAKS tests which begins in 3rd grade. We were thinking that private school would be the best solution, but with the change in the economy we did not feel that we could make the financial commitment. So, I started researching homeschooling options and curriculum and we made the decision to home school McKenna.

Right now, the plan is to home school for ONE year to get McKenna back on track and then send her back to public school. At some point we are still considering sending both Jensen and McKenna to private school. A lot of that depends on where they would like to be and finances. For now, Jensen LOVES and is doing extremely well in public school. He has been really sweet about considering staying home with us to home school; however, he loves getting to school early, writing in his agenda and watching the morning announcements on Cowboy TV. He also didn't want to miss some of the projects that they will be doing in 5th grade.

This will definitely be an interesting year. We've had a great first week and I am anxious to see what both of the kids accomplish this year! Both are extremely organized and love to learn.

Our first day of home school. We got a ton done. After lunch, we went to the library. We even watched a video about Washington D.C. AFTER school was over. McKenna didn't want the school day to end!

She's very proud of her school desk and classroom! Our office room has been converted into a classroom with a bulletin board, school calendar and white board.

McKenna working on her cover for her science notebook. She also helped me glue feathers on cut-outs of chicks and mother hens for an English project. They turned out really cute!

Since McKenna starts tennis after Labor Day, I decided to give her a kayaking lesson on Friday to make up for missing "Physical Education". It was a great way to end our first week of homeschooling. She even had her camera and took bird and scenery pictures. Thanks Nana for meeting us at the boat ramp to document our outing AND for starting Kenna early for Piano lessons!

The Egret we silently stalked finally got irritated and flew off.