Rainy Sick Days

We unfortunately have some weak lungs in our house.  Josh inherited his Daddy's asthmatic lungs and I fear David has as well.

Back in November Josh experienced his third bout of pneumonia and David his first... at only 3 months old :(

Last week Sunday Josh started running a low grade fever and had a suspicious cough by Monday morning and if you have any experience with lung issues you know that means starting up his nebulizer every 4 hours (for AT LEAST a week) UGH!!

Enter one of the many blessings I mentioned in Reasons for our Decision, not having to worry about missing too much school.  If he had been attending a traditional school he would have missed this entire week since you need to be fever free for 24 hours before returning and his fever was low but persistent all week.

The privilege of homeschooling allowed us to continue with our usual "school" routine.  I know, I know I'm the mean Mom who makes her kids do school stuff when they're sick but these are kids that act like everything's fine even when they have pneumonia and they're running a fever of 102.  (Beside the fact that at this age we are just doing a lot of read-alouds and a couple worksheets... that's it.)

To top it off we've had some rainy days in our parts which means no outdoor play.  (For those living in snow right now this is NOT a complaint, just a simple statement! ;)

My boys usually spend a good part of their day out in the backyard; pretending to be captain of a ship (their swing set) as they battle their enemy/shark (our yellow lab, Daisy), play basketball or soccer and/or ride their bikes and scooters.

With the cool/wet air outside I've had to keep them in so we ended up doing a lot of different crafts and indoor activities this week (we've needed to do crafts for awhile since we really haven't done any since Christmas).

 In the beginning of the week I received a board that I ordered (one I'm going to use to pin up some of their crafts) so I told the boys that we could make doors that have mail slots with the box it came in and they could deliver mail to each room.  They had a lot of fun being mail men :)

                                                             Nathan checking his mail :)

One of the crafts we did was make penguins out of paper plates (thank you, pinterest!)  Here are a couple shots of the boys coloring their penguins and the finished products below.

Josh discovered where I was getting my craft ideas from and saw this polar bear craft pinned on my board and thought it would be fun!  (We don't have black paint so we used brown for his face and claws and as an added bonus used some cotton balls for snow :)

 This one is because we are currently observing caterpillars.  (Another idea from pinterest but the link is currently not working... you can find it on their site if you search "Very Hungry Caterpillar".)

Finally, I sat down with the boys and compiled a list of things that they would like to do/learn in the year 2013.  This is what they came up with...

These are just some of the many activities we did this week.  We also read a Magic Tree House book each day (I bought 36 of the series through eBay and thought Josh would like them but I did NOT anticipate that he'd want to sit and listen to a story in its entirety every time we picked one up! We have already read through 10 of the books and we've owned them less than a month.)

Oh yes, and baby brother is now rolling all over the place... he started out on that quilt in the bottom right corner.  Fun times ahead!

All of these crafts will soon appear in our "school room" that I will blog about soon :)