We added a beautiful new baby girl to our family. Her name is Aidalyn Janice Olson; I call her Aida. She was born August 17, 2011. She was delivered in the comfort of my home after just 1 and 1/2 hours of labor. Sometime I will elaborate on this amazing birth experience, but for now here are some overdue pics.
And some more cute pics taken when she was 2 weeks old.
I will post some more recent pics later. Actually, I just realized that I need to take some pictures first. Poor child #5, the more kids I have, the less pictures I have. I want to do better. Anyway, Aida is now almost 6 months old. She rolls over, sits up, and is very interested in toys, keys, anything she can grab and put in her mouth. She is a happy baby and she laughs sometimes. Mostly for Alexia. She is the only one who can consistently get her to laugh. Aida is so much fun and we love her so much.
Oliver is now 3 years old as of October. His most recent accomplishment was becoming potty trained. It took a really long time, but as of this week, I can finally say he is accident free. He always forgets to put his underwear and pants back on when he is finished, and it usually takes a few minutes for me to realize that he has gone to the bathroom, and needs help putting them back on. He never tells me, I have to find him that way. A few weeks ago he even escaped our house and went to visit the neighbors without pants and underwear! Good times! He is so darn cute, but he is a mastermind at figuring anything out and it has been a full time job around here to keep him in the house. One of our doors has 3 locks on it and he has still managed to escape out of that door. He mastered the alphabet and counting to twenty about 6 months ago. (Except he says eleventeen) I discovered this right after Aida was born. I was reading him a story and he started pointing to all the letters and telling me what they were. I could not believe it! He wasn't even three yet at the time. Since then he has also learned most of the sounds for each letter. Maybe this is normal, but I don't remember any of my other children knowing the alphabet that young. He loves Aida and is very sweet to her and loves getting her to smile. He is such a sweetheart!
Elena and Alexia are both in a MAP(multi-age programming) class at school and loving it. They go 3 times a week. The other 2 days are spent doing projects, reading a ton and doing math. We are also doing a group one day a week called Joyful Daughters. It is similar to Princess Academy, but we tailored it more to fit our needs. We have been focusing on homemaking skills, service, and principles of finding joy in being a daughter of God. I mostly started this group for me. I knew that I have not modeled joy very well. Being a mother has felt extremely mundane to me most times and I wanted to change that for myself and my daughters. It has been such a growing experience, and I can honestly say that this focus has indeed brought much more joy to all of us in our home. I am so excited for them and feel that they are being prepared to be mothers and wives and all of the other roles they will play in their lives. Elena will be 12 this year and Alexia will be 10. They are such a great help to me, with the younger kids and with house work.
McKay is attending American Leadership Academy part time and taking an intense class called Key of Liberty from a homeschool mother in our area. Some of the things they are doing in the class is memorizing the Declaration of Independence, rewriting the Constitution in their own words, and studying the forefathers of America. He also made the ALA basketball team this year and he has been having so much fun. Basketball is his passion. The season has now ended but he has even more drive to practice and become better. He also has been learning drums and guitar, and is picking up both very quickly. He still spends some time with the piano as well. He has now passed up both Clarence and I in height, which is great for basketball. He will be 15 this year! My how time flies. I can not believe I am the mother of a 15 year old. I should mention that he still finds time to help a lot around the house and he's a great babysitter.
Clarence had a really busy year last year. He found a new hobby- chopping firewood and boy did he get a lot of it. McKay and Clarence spent all spring and part of summer chopping and stacking, and we have heated our home this winter exclusively with our wood stove.
Before pics-
After pics-
After all that work, he decided to get a better wood stove that would be more efficient because the one we had burned through the wood way too quickly. After that project was over he spent the remainder of the summer and fall doing various concrete jobs for friends. He was so busy, we hardly ever saw him. Now he has changed his hours at work so he is home a lot more and we are enjoying spending time with him. Aida has him wrapped around her little finger. He rocks her to sleep almost every night and she is definitely daddy's princess.
Besides obviously being busy with family, I have had an amazing last few years. Before Aida was born I spent the previous school year teaching youth. It was a blast! I went to a training from a group called LEMI (Leadership Education Mentoring Institute) and I learned their system for teaching a class called Thomas Jefferson Youth Certification. I then taught the class and helped teach a Shakespeare class. It was so amazing! My personal education has been greatly enriched. As a result of teaching these two classes, I spent an average of 20 hours a week studying. Along with the youth in the class I wrote 6 persuasive essays, 6 mini research papers, and a final research project. I also read several Shakespeare plays, biographies and other classical works. When I knew I needed a mentor to further my education, I thought that meant going to college. But God had a different plan for me. I had no idea that my mentors would be in the form of LEMI, friends and family who mentored me in writing, and the youth that I was supposedly teaching. I ended up learning much more from them than I think they learned from me. I took a little break from teaching when Aida was born, and now I am in the process of starting a business based on the final paper I wrote in my class. Things are very exciting!
These are some of the things we have been busy with. Thanks for taking the time to read this extremely long post, or just looking at the pictures.
