Painting pumpkins

Most people probably know this about me already but I absolutely LOVE pumpkins! There is something about them that just fills me with happiness. To celebrate it finally being fall I decided to get out some paint and with my extremely limited painting skills, paint some happiness (aka watch you tube videos on painting pumpkins because I have no idea what I'm doing).

I looked out the window and what did I see?

Elijah sleeping 'neath the pecan tree.

Violins

Fun day!

Wednesdays are turning out to be one of our fun days this school year. We start off our day with violin lessons for the two older kids which is so much fun! Then we drive to the library to get books for the week. Then we get to have a picnic lunch with dad in the park by his work. I have totally been missing Jacob since he went back to work so it is nice to go meet him for lunch for a little while. I remember when we lived in Tucson, Jacob got to come home for lunch every day because we lived super close to his work. That was the best ever! Here we live about 25 minutes from his work so even is going in to visit him for lunch isn't super easy. Today was a lot of fun though. I'm hoping to make this an every Wednesday tradition! And the cool thing about homeschooling is that we can do that and the kids can get the rest of their school work done in the car while we are driving! I love it!

Oh what a year!

Well I seem to have fallen off the face of the blogging earth this year, and with good reason. Our life has been CRAZY! Being a mom of three kids is hard, lots of fun and totally rewarding, but totally hard too. This year it was made harder by Jacob's job. He had to leave our family and go over seas for 3 1/2 months. We have been through a lot of separations with his work and ask of them have been hard but none of them were as hard as this last one. Though this last one I struggled pretty badly with the dreaded "D-word." DEPRESSION. I had never gone through anything so hard in my entire life. Jacob's wonderful parents invited my family to come live with them for the remainder of o our time apart even though they already had another family (Jacobs brother) staying with them at the time. I packed up my kids and left. We stayed with them for about three weeks and then with my parents for two and then with his parents again for another two weeks before coming home and getting ready for Jacob to come home. It's crazy how instantly right it feels to have him home after having him gone for so long. Being apart for so long and so often has definitely taught us to cherish our marriage. After he came home, Jacob was able to take quite a but of leave and we loved having him home! It was so hard on everyone when the time came for him to go back to work! We are now two weeks into that and trying to come up with a new normal. Last week was extremely rough, but thankfully this week has gone a lot smoother. We are getting into a good homeschool routine and it's been awesome! Maybe now that things are getting settled again, I can start updating my blog again! (don't hold your breath though 😉)