I have a “small” praise to share with all you faithful readers today. (very faithful readers if you are still checking this after months of inactivity!) It's about three inches in size right now, but hopefully in the next several months it will continue to grow another 17 or so inches...


Yep, we are expecting our third little one in mid-December!!

Here's some early signs of the peanut:

Not the most detailed pic, but this was the baby about a month ago...at just over 10 weeks.

— Heartbeat at almost 10 weeks
— Heartbeat at almost 14 weeks

Everything looks good at this point. We'll have an ultrasound next month to check out the baby and find out what kind we're having (horse, cat, monkey, etc).

Aside from that, life goes on. Our summer is busy and filling up fast and the garden will hopefully go in this weekend. HoneyBee is reading like a little bookworm, and Little Chimp is a little sandbox fiend. DH stays quite busy at work with their busiest mulch season yet, despite the economy, and I'm trying to hold the house together. I haven't done much sewing at all, but that may have to change soon as my body grows and my wardrobe can't keep up during these warmer months.

Saturday we went to the library and picked up a bunch of new books. That afternoon, we sat down to read some of them. I let the HoneyBee do as much of the reading as she could, which was significantly more than I was expecting! By the last book, she was getting a bit tired of it and so I just read the book...until the last page at which point I skipped a line that said something like, “Maybe next time you can come too.” (A book about a trip to France.) I started to close the book, but before I could, she told me I hadn't read everything and pointed out the line I missed. Caught!! So much for skipping around to avoid parts I don't like or get through books faster when I'm in a hurry!
The HoneyBee's reading skills have really jumped in the last month. I think a lot of it is due to the musical we are doing with a local homeschool co-op. She *loves* to just sit and read through all the lines in the musical over and over and sing all the songs. In doing so, she's taught herself a whole bunch of words from the script, with very little help from me. Her math skills are improving too: more and more simple problems can be done without the help of fingers.

During school time this morning, we got a lot accomplished. We started with a math activity, moved into word building, and that segued unintentionally into handwriting. (Little Chimp had his white board out playing on it and so HoneyBee got hers too and started writing down the words we were learning...well, learning is a relative term: she already knew most of the words I did.) Anyway, she started writing down some of the words and then made some of her own words and wrote those down too. That morphed into the HoneyBee composing an entire “poem” on her own. I had her write it down on real paper so we could save it, and then she went onto compose another one! Here's the results (She wrote the one on the right first):

A few quotes from the day to remember:
HoneyBee: “In my brain, the imagination part sometimes gets mixed up with the remembering part.”

Little Chimp: “No me love potatoes” — how the Little Chimp lets us know he doesn't like something. Unfortunately, more often than not, the “no” gets lost before we actually hear him leading to confusion for more than a little while.

Little Chimp: “Super-hero!” — the Little Chimp really loves to wear overalls lately. Partly, I think, because he loves to pull up the snaps down both legs (there for ease in diaper changing) and run across the room while yelling this. So if you ever want to be a super hero, all you need is a pair of overalls in your size that has snaps up the legs.

Last night the HoneyBee and I went for a walk down to meet a friend who was picking her up for Venture Club. On the way down the driveway, we were looking at the sky and noticed a single, very bright star in the sky in front of us. Since my astronomy knowledge is limited to the big and little dippers, I had no idea what it was. In discussion on the way to the church, another boy in the van suggested it was probably Venus.
I decided to do a little fact-checking this morning and recalled a program I found several months ago: a FREE open-source program! That works on Macs as well as PCs!! Stellarium is an awesome program that allows you to set your location and then see all the stars in the sky in your area at any time of day or night. It labels the stars and the constellations and has a variety of options. I opened it up, changed the time to tonight just after 6pm and saw the bright star Sirius. Then I realized that we were “looking” south. So I changed the view so we could “look” west, and, lo and behold, there was a very bright Venus in the middle of the screen! I think that's the first time I've ever seen another planet and been absolutely sure of it. We also found out that Venus is the tail of one of the fish in the the constellation Pisces.
Since this program doesn't require an internet connection, we can even take the laptop with us and do some star-sighting from other locations this summer...a whole lot easier and more fun that the National Geographic? star chart my parents had when I was little. I don't know if I ever figured that thing out.