Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from our family to yours! I hope you had a great time enjoying food, family, football, food, fun and fellowship!

I do enjoy this holiday and month. I love all the reflecting and spirit of thankfulness. I have been posting on my Facebook status each day my blessings and things I am thankful for. I have so very many things to be thankful for! Many of which are in this picture! I am so humbled and honored to be the wife and mommy to this crew! Yes, some days are hard, but I wouldn't trade it for the world and I am one blessed gal!

I am also thankful for this sweet, blogging community and my followers. Thank YOU for following along this journey! I hope your Thanksgiving was great too!

By the way Teaching My Blessings is now on Facebook! Feel free to click on the "like" button on the sidebar on the right to follow along. :) I am also now on G+ if you use that too! Hope to see you there!

Reorgized Home Management Guide

Hello Friends,
Well what do I do when my family is sick and then all finally fall fast asleep?

 Reorganize my Home Management Guide and blog! 

I know I am crazy!?! I really should have been sleeping last night and I should be napping right now while my boys nap! Which is such a rarity at my house anymore! But instead, I blog! So, let me tell you about an awesome blog I follow called:

 
At Organizing Homelife Ginny just finished a series called 31 Days of Home Management Binder Printables that I loved! I already have a home management guide (that I will call HMG for short) that I use and enjoy. But I was so excited when I saw that Ginny was having this awesome series in October. At the beginning of the month I was so intrigued by all of her printables and wanted to head straight to my printer, then I decided to wait until the end of the series to print the ones I needed and thought I would use. Last night I printed her calendar(front to back) so it opens nicely in my binder, the babysitting notes page, her annual bill schedule, section dividers, and the household projects printable. I liked seeing what she includes in her binder and what works well for her. I just thought I would share this awesome resource just in case any of you need it too. You can click on the button above to hop over to her site.

So what does this have to do with teaching my blessings? Well, to teach them well, I also must be organized in managing our home. I consider both jobs of Mommy and Home Manager my full time jobs. This resource helps me and I hope it does you too! Do any of you have a HMG too? Do share with me what works for you.

Happy Home Managing!
Trina

Halloween 2012- Not So Great!

Halloween 2012 was not our best our Halloween yet, to say the least! The stomach bug hit our family this week and it hit us hard! On Monday night, CA got sick at 10:45pm. He was sick all night long. My hubby and I took shifts through the night to sit with him while he was sick. Then on Tuesday, he was still not feeling well all day. My sweet hubby took the day off to be home with us and help me. He knew that with a nursing baby, I would need help! Oh how I am so thankful for this man! Thankfully, I was able to take JP to his preschool Fall festival where I was able to take this snapshot of these cuties! They had a fun trunk or treat, a hayride,a bounce house, and other fun festivities. I didn't get to stay as long as I had hoped as I needed to get Gatorade for CA. :)

Then just when I thought we were in the clear and doing ok, CA got sick again at dinner on Tuesday night. Which meant no Bible study for this mama on Wednesday morning. I do love my ladies Bible study! I love the fellowship, studying God's word, and everything about it! So bummer for Mommy, although I am so ever grateful to be a SAHM when my babies are sick! There is just something about knowing them so well and being with them to give them the comfort and TLC they need when they are sick! There were numerous times during the past 48 hours that I was able to see the explosion coming and react fast. Sorry, a little too much information, I suppose, but mostly mommies are reading this anyways! :)

Today we just hung out at home and snuggled and played. CA slept a lot! I could tell he still wasn't feeling well. Then later in the afternoon, I thought we were doing ok and then around 3:30pm I saw that look in JP's eyes and said, "Go fast, to the bathroom!" Where he then got sick too! Poor baby! Then my sweet hubby texted me to say he wasn't feeling well either! So on Halloween night we put a sign on the front door that read, "Stomach Bug in Progress. Sorry Trick or Treaters!" I didn't want my sick family to have to hear the doorbell all night.

So all in all 3 out of the 5 of us have the stomach bug/virus! I am praying that this mama and sweet baby boy don't get it next.

Through all of this God has shown me a few blessings:
-I am so blessed to be home with my boys!
-I am blessed to have a loving husband and Daddy who took a day off to help us.
-We were blessed with costumes for Halloween as a birthday present and hand me downs, so next extra cost was lost at the expense of not using them tonight. :) Those costumes can be costly!!
-I am blessed with family and friends who texted, called, or messaged me to check on us!

I do hope all of you had a wonderful Halloween! Hope you and yours are healthy!

Virtual Book Club- Amy Krouse Rosenthal

As you may remember we are participating in a Virtual Book Club for Kids this year where many awesome bloggers host a blog hop each month. You can choose a book by the featured author of the month, then do an activity related to the book and then blog all about it.  This month's author is Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

Here are a few of her books:

I was only familiar with one of Amy Krouse Rosenthal's books: Duck! Rabbit! I quickly adored her writing and illustrations. She is a witty author who likes to put a fun spin on topics in her books. We really enjoyed reading so many of her books that we checked out from the library. I tried to think of an activity to correlate and just kept coming up empty until I saw this awesome post titled 10 Extension Activities for Spoon at Reading Confetti. I immediately felt inspired by all of these awesome ideas. Thanks, Lori!


"Meet Spoon.  He’s always been a happy little utensil.  But lately, he feels like life as a spoon just isn’t cutting it.  He thinks Fork, Knife, and The Chopsticks all have it so much better than him.  But do they?  And what do they think about Spoon?  A book for all ages, Spoon serves as a gentle reminder to celebrate what makes us each special."

First I took out all of the silverware out of the trays and showed the boys how to sort the silverware.Thankfully, they both help with this project in the kitchen, but it was fun to pull out both sets and allow them to sort them all. We are blessed to have two sets of silverware, one that is real silver as a gift from my husband's grandmother. :)

It is not uncommon to find at least one boy in costume at our house. :)

Next, we created spoon families with plastic cutlery, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, and markers. The boys really enjoyed this activity!

JP had the idea to act out the story with our silverware. I did not think of this idea and I loved that he did! His creativity amazes me many days. I tried videoing him and then uploading it here but it isn't working. Bummer! Just imagine him acting out the book!

Check out all the other amazing ideas for Amy Krouse Rosenthal's books here:

 

Pumpkin Patch!

I LOVE Fall! I love so many things about this season: the colors, the decorations, the leaves changing colors, the cooler crisp weather(well eventually in TX!), pumpkin spice lattes, wearing a sweater (ok, again eventually I'll do this), and a pumpkin patch! Each year we try to attend a pumpkin patch together as a family.This year we were able to go on a week day as the Daddy had a Monday off. We were so grateful and took the opportunity to make it a fun, family day! I had heard awesome things about this pumpkin patch in our area and I really wanted to check it out. I'm so glad we did. We all really enjoyed it! The boys loved all of the character cut outs! I took a ton of pictures, but didn't want to bombard you with them all, so here is a snapshot of our day.

 So grateful for days like these to enjoy God's biggest blessing to me: my precious family!

What is your favorite thing about Fall?!  Thanks for reading!
Trina

L and Yellow Muffin Tin Meal

The boys love muffin tin meals! And I love to make them! What is a muffin tin meal you might ask?!? It is a simple  and fun way to serve food to kids.The small size of the muffin cups make perfect portion sizes for little mouths. 

This week we focused on the color yellow and the letter L. I tried to think of yellow and L foods and came up empty, so I improvised and added magnets to the boys' tins. JP didn't care for it and took them off immediately and I laughed. Oh well, I tried. :)

This muffin tin meal consists of: cut up stick cheese, a peanut butter and honey sandwich, apple slices, carrots, and pretzels. 
 

Nursery Rhymes Theme and Scissor Skill Update

We worked on nursery rhymes recently and really enjoyed it. I love aligning our preschool work at home with what JP is learning at his preschool 2 days a week. We read many nursery rhymes from library books and books we own. I was able to use amazing, free printables from Beth @ Living Life Intentionally. Thanks, Beth! We love your stuff!

Here the boys are working on a Baa Baa Black Sheep colors printable.

 

I love when JP is concentrating his little tongue comes out! So cute! 

CA has been working very hard on his scissor skills.  We used brown paper sacks, construction paper, and cutting printables from Cheerios and Lattes to help him. I saw BIG improvement in a sort amount of time with him! Yea!

How was your week? Thanks for reading!
Trina