Monday, January 30, 2012

New Photo Challenge for 2012

Whew! Talk about a slim blogging month! Just today did it seem like things were really back to "normal." It took me a while to reorient myself and everything around here after we got back from our trip, and then I got sick and didn't get too much accomplished for a few days. I feel like I've just been getting the bare minimum done, but today finally felt like a typical Johnson household day. Our school went much better, I actually exercised, showered, and dressed and went out of the house, I took some pictures, the girls had cheerleading practice, I cooked dinner, we had a family game night, and I'm blogging! See - normal!
   
Last year, I gave myself a photo challenge: to take a picture of the girls together every month. I enjoyed it (or at least the results of it), so this year I've given myself another challenge: to take pictures with the girls. I'm rarely in a picture, so I plan to remedy that this year! Here are the rules I set for myself: we don't all have to be in the same picture, but I have to get a picture of both Andy and myself with both girls (together or separate). Today I realized that tomorrow is the last day of January (already?!), so I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures - nothing stupendous - just trying to prove with pictures that our family consists of more than two girls - a mommy and a daddy actually live here too! (I'm going to have to work on the self-portrait thing - only a couple of them ended up with our faces in them!)


Monday, January 23, 2012

Our Road Trip - by the numbers

What a way to start out 2012!! I've been home a little over a week and still don't feel like I'm quite back to a normal routine. We had a fantastic time that we wouldn't trade for anything but were more than ready to return home! Here's a recap of our road trip - by the numbers:

19 days
2,196 miles driven
4 "extra" Christmas celebrations  
9 states (if you count DC) passed through
48 family and friends visited
386 pages read by Emma Lee
1 audio book listened to
$14.35 spent on tolls 
6 movies watched in the van
1 emergency use-the-bathroom-on-the-side-of-the-what-we-thought-was-a-private-road-only-to-have-a-bus-pull-up-and-unload-its-passengers-right-behind-us-stop 
3 (miraculously not more!!?) Are we there yets?
6 historical museums/memorials visited
0 snow flakes seen
1 wondrous feat pulled off by a persistent friend
10 kids meals consumed 
1 Coast Guard graduation ceremony attended
2 rides through the Hershey Factory (because one time is just not enough)
1 extremely missed and incredibly awesome daddy/husband to return home to
Countless memories made with my two precious girls!

Road Trip Pictures
Graduation Pictures

Monday, January 2, 2012

School Recap: December

We did school right up to the Friday before Christmas and focused mainly on getting ahead in our "bookwork" since we're planning on some interesting on-the-road school in January. My little perfectionist missed her first spelling word (noise) on one of her spelling tests, but I was proud of her for not taking it too hard. She also learned a valuable lesson about slowing down and checking her work! The girls are both moving right along in all their subjects, and I'm still loving teaching them! I'm pretty sure they are geniuses, but I might be just a tad biased! Here's a video of Emma Lee explaining how to classify a sentence:


We did find a little extra time to do a few fun activities this month. We visited a local museum that we hadn't been to before for their Festival  of Trees and had fun checking out a few others things there as well.
They loved all the pretty trees decorated in different themes and from different countries.

Kerri wanted to eat the stuff on the baking tree!

Very interested in the toy tree.

I thought this was a creative tree topper for the fishing tree.

We made a few ornaments of our own while we were there

and checked out their map/globe room.

Emma Lee's favorite country right now is India, so she found it on the globe.
We also saw a little animal show. This parrot, Georgia, was their favorite!
They also got a chance to shop for each other in the Secret Shoppe they had set up there (unfortunately, their gifts didn't remain a secret for even a full day!). They loved the experience though!

We also had a couple of cookie and gingerbread house decorating days with some friends.



The girls did a little sewing, and made these cute little trees.

They took their work very seriously

and were so proud of their finished products.


(and as these pictures prove - we don't always get dressed or fix our hair before school...just another perk)

School will start back for us on January 5th. We'll be on the road visiting some very important places!