Friday Free-For-All ~ Reading Until Dawn

Good-bye Summer, it's been nice playing with you.

Hello fall!
Hello cool, crisp mornings.  Hello pumpkin spice scented candles and fall decorations.  Hello beautiful colors and entire days spent outside.  Hello open windows and happy hearts.

Rainy and Zeke track back in on Monday.  It is a bitter sweet thing.  While I am going to enjoy the normal routine of life and the days of only 3 littles to mother for a few hours a day, I am going to miss leisurely mornings and multiple-kid-problem-solving play and late night fun.  But that's the good thing about year-round schools, you get to do it all over again in just a few short weeks!

We have a massive hole in our backyard right now.  I can't blame it on anything other than the kids being in their own world a few days ago, which lead to brilliant ideas and plans for the dirt patch, which lead to shovels and digging and dirt baths and dirt in hair and ears and diapers...and eventually, yes, I did give some of them Jude a bath!

We have entered the sweetest ever season with Areyna.  I'd been trying to get her to read the chapter book that her Uncle Andrew and Aunt Dana gave her for her birthday, A Cricket In Time Square, but naturally it wasn't going to happen because it was a mom idea;)  Well wouldn't you know, she began reading it "undercover", literally, at night with her little bed light.  The more she read, the more she got into the book and characters, until she was staying up way into the night.  She finally finished the book last week and was dying to read MORE.  You better believe I jumped on the momentum and found some books for just a few cents on Amazon.  Rainy was literally waiting on the front driveway for them to arrive in the mail:-)  In the meantime our friend, Bonnie, brought over an armful of her kids old books for Rainy to read while she waited.  She is probably 3/4 into Charlotte's Web and is still going strong!  I am ecstatic!

Along the same vein, the other kids have been noticing Areyna following along and highlighting in her Bible during family devotions at nighttime.  They keep asking for a Bible and wanting to know what page we are on so that they can follow along too.  Since I am a responsible mother I told them that one day, when they were older and more responsible and mature we'd purchase a Bible for each of them and teach them how to take care of it and keep the pages nice and crisp...JUST KIDDING!  I found a good deal of some children's study Bibles that they can grow into and ordered them right away.  You would have thought I gave them the moon as we passed them out.  Their eyes were big and their thank you's have been numerous.  So naturally, we did have a lesson on how to care for their Bibles, (ie. keeping up with them at church and not bringing them outside and leaving them in the rain:), but went right into how to mark them up!  Bibles are not meant to sit neatly on a shelf.  They are weapons and are gonna get dirty, and colorful:)

Here's to many more years of coloring in Bibles and reading under the covers until dawn.

Happy Friday ya'll!