Happy Easter!

Just a quick update to share pictures from this morning...


Egg hunting at home...
Egg hunting at church...
Aren't they cute...

Contrary to popular belief...I have not fallen off the face of the planet...

Things have been very busy lately and any down time I have had has been pure vegging :)

I am winding down to the end of my semester, April 26th is my last day of classes!! A few papers left to write, a few exams to take and all the while trying to keep up with the laundry, not happening!

By the way, how about them GATORS!!!

Did manage to watch that game...what a great game!

I have managed to almost finish making Elisabeth's Easter dress and a skirt for myself, and Daddy's socks.

I've got lots of pics to post and will do so soon. But gotta go spend time with the kids. Will update more later :)

Counting down to Casting on

Well, I'm all set for the Olympics...and the Knitting Olympics too! This is a picture of what I will be working on.

I decided to join team DPN, since I will be knitting a pair of socks on DPN (double pointed needles). I showed the picture of the socks I am knitting to Rebekah and the first thing she noticed was the map of Paris as the background to the photo...leave it to her :)

I will be casting on for these socks at 2pm local time, right between my two classes today. And I will have an hour of uniterrupted knitting time.

I am so excited that Mom will be here tonight!! So I should really go and start picking up some.

Hopefully I will post later today my progress on my Olympic socks.

My brand new knitting spot...

Well, it's not just my knitting spot, but our brand new sofa and loveseat :) The color on the left cushion of the loveseat is the most accurate in the picture.
Another view!

Elisabeth lounging!

Busy Bears

We have been busy here at the Bayer household.

My classes have been going well, my schedule this semester is turning out to be great. I am enjoying having my free hours on campus, I'm able to get most of my homework finished while I am sitting at Deja Brew, the coffee shop at Mitch's work (Target Copy). The only downside is that it is not helping my coffee addiction :) But that is a small price to pay to be able to work in relative peace without children and before 11pm.

This will be a busy week for me, I have a short essay due tomorrow (it is finished, I will just review it one more time before I print it tomorrow), a longer poetry analysis due on Thursday (both of these are in French), a test in my course on Adolescence, a take-home test in French Corrective Phonics due Thursday (this is pretty much completed, I just need to review it again, the teacher will also give us feedback on all the recordings we have had to do thus far), and a test in French Grammar and Composition on Friday. Oh yeah and I have a test in Man's Food next week. WHEW!!!

Writing all of that out makes it look really bad, it's not really as bad as it seems, well except that poetry analysis, I'm worried about that but I'll survive.

On the brighter side, I have gotten a lot of knitting done, I just haven't taken any pictures of it yet. And I have decided on my Knitting Olympics project...more details on that later.

I do have some pics of the kids on field day...our first day back with our homeschool co-op since before Christmas. It was a beautiful day as you can see from the sky shot above.

The kids had a blast...

I have some pictures from Becka's birthday to post but I will do that at another time...I also have some from our trip to the Jacksonville Zoo.


More later :)

Olympic Knit-along

I've decided to participate in a knit-along I believe I can actually finish :)


The Yarn Harlot is hosting an Olympic Knit-Along...you choose your own project, which should be a challenge but which you must be able to complete during the Olympic games. We start the project with the opening ceremonies and finish by the closing ceremonies. I think it sounds like a lot of fun...now to decide on a project. I am planning on socks of some kind, because it normally takes me a long time to finish a pair, I often get distracted by another project halfway through. Plus I can take socks with me onto campus for knitting in-between classes.

I will post more later about other stuff :)

Field Trip!

Yesterday was our first day back with our homeschool co-op since before the holidays. We started the year with a field trip...that's the best way to start. We visited Devil's Millhopper, this is a huge sinkhole here in Gainesville, it is 500 feet wide and 120 feet deep. It was perfect weather, overcast and cool, I think is was in the mid 60s, but a bit humid because of impending storms that finally came through last night.

I got some great pics of the kids...
This is our whole group (minus 1 or 2), we are small with mostly younger kids.

My 2 mid-way down. We were not able to go all the way to the bottom walkway because there was about a half foot of water covering the bridge/walkway.

Visiting the sinkhole is tricky because you go down all the stairs to the bottom, I think there are around 130 steps descending into the sinkhole; then you have to climb back up all those stairs. So the kids go bouncing down the stairs and on the way back up, usually before the first landing they start complaining they are tired. Well, Elisabeth did her usual complaining but Joseph climbed all the stairs and then did the entire 1/2 mile perimeter trail and not once did he say he was tired, I was so proud of him.

Elisabeth told me over and over how much fun she had. I asked her to write a short paragraph about our trip when we got home. This is what she wrote:

"My Trip to Devil's Millhopper (in very big letters across the top of the page)

I went to Devil's Millhopper with homeschool group and saw all my friends. There is a new girl. I had lot's of fun! I saw bones and I found 3 leafs sweet gum and it's pod, swamp chestnut oak and saw palmetto. My favorite thing was the sink hole!"

I thought she did a great job! The only prompt I gave her was to write about what she saw on our trip.

I also finished Joseph's Tiger socks. I have some nice breaks in my day on campus that I am able to do some studying and knitting. He is a proud boy in his new socks. They have some room to grow and will be nice and warm when we go to Michigan in March.

My classes went very well this week. I think this is going to be a great semester. I think I am really going to enjoy my French poetry class and my grammar and composition class is going to be great for me to really practice on my writing in French. Corrective phonics is going to be a really easy class, we sit in the language lab on the computers and practice saying phrases to improve our pronunciation. The Adolescent will be interesting despite the teacher, she is a grad student who is probably younger than I am, not much past adolescence herself. Now I am not against grad students teaching classes, I really enjoyed my Latin teacher last semester who was a grad student and I hope to be such a teacher in a year or so. But teaching languages is much different than teaching the development of adolescents and how to work with them in a classroom. And this teacher teaches straight from the handouts of notes she gives us, boring, give me additional information, I can read the notes myself!

We have had some beautiful weather this week also. I have thoroughly enjoyed finding a bench on campus and sitting in the sun, watching the people walk by, I enjoy people watching, it can be quite amusing at times.

Today we took Maisey to the park with us and she found a pug friend to play with. She was such a good puppy. Maisey is about 40 pounds now and still growing, being German Shephard/Huskey mix I imagine she will gain at least 20 more pounds. But she was great with this little pug which was about the size of our cats. We had a great day.

Monday is a day off of school for me. I will enjoy the time off, but I'm ready to get these classes well underway.

Anyway, enjoy the rest of your weekend! I will :)