Brookelynne's 3!

Our beautiful little girl is 3 years old already. It seems like just yesterday she came into the world as a beautiful, precious baby, with precious little features and the most amazing little spirit. She's a bundle of fun and energy that is as smart, funny, adorable and lovable as she can be. We still can't believe she's three!

 

We had her checkup a couple weeks after her birthday and her stats are in!
Height is 39" which is in the 90th percentile and her Weight is 31 lbs which is in the 50th percentile.

She's growing like a weed, as is obvious by the height percentile she has, and stands taller than almost all of her friends (Her friend Logan who is 4 weeks older, is 3 inches taller :) But, he's kinda of like a giant. JK! He's precious too!) Anyway, she has no trouble keeping up with kids 8 months or even a year older than her, and loves learning anything she can.

She's talking in full sentences, and can pretty much say anything she wants to say.  She's also learning sign language and has already learned "Nice to meet you", "Where's Daddy?", "He's at work", "He's at home", "Excuse Me", several colors, several family members, as well as all the basics (please, thank you, sorry, eat, drink, etc). She's doing really well with it and doesn't take long to catch on to anything I try to teach her. She really enjoys it, and loves teaching it to Braxton too.

She's wearing 4T clothes, as all the 3T stuff is too short on her arms and legs. She's in size 10 shoes and loves getting new ones. She likes shiney ones, boots, tennis shoes, flip flops, pretty much any kind of shoe. Its pretty hilarious.

She's learned 6 or 8 Bible verses and is great at memorizing. She refuses to memorize phone numbers, as we have tried to teach her, lol. She doesn't seem to understand the concept of double numbers (Mitch's number has 33 in it and mine has 22, she will just say one of them and keep going.)

She loves playing pretend, doing puzzles and snuggling with her Mama! What a blessing she is! We're so thankful for her!

 Brookelynne at 2 1/4

 2  1/2

 2 3/4 years old

Brookelynne is 3 years old!

Abbi, Abbi, Go, GO, GO! Cheerleading Competition time!

This year, Tricia coached Abbi's cheerleading team again, and of course, I would NOT miss competition for anything! :) Anna, Braxton, Davis and Brookelynne were right there and ready to cheer her on, just a few rows from the stage, along with her Daddy, Nana and me!

She did a great job and they won 1st place for their division! GO Coach Tricia and GO ABBI! :)

Here's a couple shots of my sweet girl with her favorite Abbi! :) Seriously, how cute are they!?!?!?

Good Old Fashioned Fun at the Low Country Boil

 Once again this year we had a Low Country Boil at the Ellis's house. And once again, it was a great time had by all. The kids loved playing on the trampoline, slide and swings. Especially the rope swing. They tried it with Mama and then Brookelynne wanted to do it alone, so we let her. And, she was great at it! She absolutely LOVED it, and kept getting back in line to do it again and again. Mitch got to spend an hour or so playing vollyball, defending our class against the Jones's class. :)

Here are some of my favorite shots from the day!

 Brooke and Mama on the rope swing together

 Braxton and Mama swinging!

 Brookelynne on the rope swing and Braxton playing with the football

 How. Stinking. Cute. Are. They.????? :)

 These two are our 'model shots' :) Brooke in the grass, and Brax with his GQ look. haha

 Sweet family photo by the water :)

 I'm so thankful for a young couple's department who cares about investing in young couples and realizes low stress, family fun is a great way to get to know everyone!

Roadtrip to Tennessee and safetly home again.

It's been two years since we went up to Tennessee and spent a weekend with my cousins Kelley, Glen, Rebecca and Lane. In that time, my sweet sweet Aunt Betty, and Uncle Alvin, as well as my cousins John, De, Christian and Hunter have all moved up there too. We had hoped to all go up there as a family, but Mitch was unable to join us, but I went ahead and tagged along with my Mom, Josh, Amy and Amy's parents and went anyway. We left on Thursday night, and drove all night to get there. Its a 10 hour drive, so we laid the children's car seats back and rolled on down the road.


We arrived around 7 am, and were greeted by Aunt Betty and Uncle Alvin with a nice hot breakfast waiting for us. Mr Larry, Josh and Amy went upstairs and got some rest. I slept the last 2 hours and tried to rest on the couch when we arrived, but alas, my children would not allow it! ha! We enjoyed the day just laying around the house, went and drove around the property and then got ready to head to Nashville to visit the Grand Ole Opry.

These are some pictures from the property (above) and some fun ones I took of Hunter and Christian, as well as B&B at Aunt Betty's house (below)

The Grand Ole Opry was fun, but Brax man had an accident and ended up pants-less for most of the night (drive me nuts, he does!). When we left there, we stopped for dinner at a Logan's Road House and had a very nice meal, before the late and long drive back to the house.

Saturday morning we all met up and went to the pumpkin patch. The kids were dressed for cold weather that really never came, but it made for super cute pictures :) They had pumpkins, a petting zoo, a huge slide, corn maze and little train. The kids had a great time!

Braxton, Christian, Hunter and Brookelynne

Kelley and Lane

After the pumpkin patch we went home for naps and then had a fantastic dinner with everyone there (except Rebecca, silly girl had to work!) Uncle Alvin had smoked the meat all day and it was just fantastic. Aunt Betty made the rest of the dinner (with a little help. here and there from the rest of the ladies at the house). And they had a Birthday cake for Josh and Brookelynne as well, which was nice, since it was Josh's birthday and Brooke was spending her birthday away from Daddy.

Sunday morning, all the Starlings and Freemans made it to church (except Uncle Alvin who had to get on the road back to FL) and Mom, me and kids joined them. It was a very nice service, in a fairly large church. We really enjoyed it. After that we had lunch at the house and just relaxed at the house for the rest of the afternoon. Around 4, I finally got to lay eyes on my sweet Becca, who had been working all weekend! We had a good time hanging out and catching up while the kiddos napped with Gabba.

Monday we all went to the National Park and saw the waterfalls and park. It was so pretty! Here are some of the shots I got of sweet family in beautiful scenery!

Then we all went to lunch at the local steakhouse and had a great time eating together and then singing "Happy Birthday" to my sweet beautiful birthday girl! :)

After lunch we visited the Amish, and made some quick decisions to go to Nashville for dinner. Aunt Betty and Mom offered to keep the kids, so I was able to go without them, which was such a blessing. I'm so grateful to have a chance to be an adult, and not just a "mommy" on the trip. This trip to Nashville was different than the Friday night, we went to this awesome restaurant/bar that has line dancing and tables and it was great! We had a fantastic time. Here are some pictures of our night!

B is for...

Last week we did our first week of "school". After all the work I had done compiling curriculum I was very excited to get started. First thing we did was introduce ourselves to the big B, and the Little b, as well as our "B" Bible verse.

Our verse for the week was Matthew 5:9, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God ". So in addition to memorizing our verse, we talked about what it meant to be a peace maker. We talked about being kind, helping our friends, giving things up instead of fighting and loving each other.

Then we started work with the B word of the day, butterfly. We matched butterflies of all different colors with the uppercase and lowercase wings. We counted butterflies and matched them with the right number. We worked on writing the letter B, both upper and lowercase, as well as writing all our numbers.

Lastly, we finished off the morning with our handprint butterflies. When I saw this craft, I just knew we had to do it.. My children absolutely love anything with stamp pads, so this was perfect.

Just do 2 handprints of each hand, cut around the handprints and glue them to the body of the butterfly. Add the letter B for the kids to trace, as well as some eyes and antennas. Ta-Da!

The next day, we worked on B is for ballerina. We started with a review of butterflies, with some size sorting exercises. I have to admit that I was extremely impressed when Braxton did this perfectly. (Brookelynne did too, but I expected that). Then we moved on to our awesome ballerina-themed activities.

We did a ballerina number puzzle, some ballerina writing activities (some pre-writing activities for Braxton, with just simple line tracing and some more difficult letter tracing for Brookelynne. ). They both really enjoyed those, since they love using markers, and I place all of their writing activities in a dry erase folder so we can do them over and over without wasting paper.

We followed that up with some ballerina counting, and a ballerina game.

The rest of our weeks activities will be included in another post. (if I ever find the time! Ha!)

Pearson Preschool... The background information.

I absolutely hate that I haven't posted recently, but I just get so busy with the "every day things" that the extraordinary never seems to happen, and the everyday things seem to common to post about. That being said, there are a lot of changes coming for the Pearsons in the latter half of this year, and one of the most exciting ones is our new homeschooling curriculum!!

I've never done any intentional teaching with Brookelynne, but she's learned to recognize and say all her letters and numbers. But in the last few years, Mitch and I have gone back and forth deciding whether or not homeschooling was for us. There was no question that sooner or later I would have to try, and since there is no baby Pearson number three quite yet, this will be my only real chance to teach two without a third around, so we are starting now!

I started doing research several months ago, looking into different curriculums, researching different teaching philosophies, and deciding on how I wanted this school year to go. Anyone here knows me, knows that getting ready for school is my absolute favorite thing to do. Needless to say, I might have gotten carried away. :) and after hours upon hours upon hours, I have researched, downloaded and organizedI have over 4,000 different resources to use with B and B.

The basic premise of Pearson preschool this year is to cover the same material for both kids, in progressive steps. Meaning this, Braxton will be learning his letters, recognizing them and saying them along with their sounds, while Brookelynne is learning to write her letters and putting the sounds together to form words. Braxton will be learning to count to 10, and recognizing those numbers, while Brookelynne is learning to count to 100 and learning to write and add her numbers.

Therefore I needed a lot of curriculum to keep them entertained and on track and I think I have it figured out. I visited 30 or more sites (blogs, publishers, teaching sites, etc.) and found several great resources with packets set up by letter and or number. Even more exciting has been finding those same resources with a Bible verse theme for each week. Unfortunately, I didn't feel comfortable with using any set curriculum from one site. (they either didn't incorporate enough for Brookelynne or it was over Braxton's head to where it wouldn't be very helpful for him) So I have put several different curriculums together and will be doing a ton of fun and exciting things in the coming year so stay tuned for updates and pictures of all that we are learning here!