31 October 2017

Halloween!!! Rose Pink was Little Red Riding Hood, Nut Brown was a giraffe, Bobo was a ninja, and Rosebud was a pumpkin.  Rose Pink came up with Rosebud's costume idea, and we bought a pumpkin shirt and chalked her hair green.  Rose Pink came up with her own costume and did all the shopping for it too.  Bobo found a black shirt at the thrift store that he really wanted because of the nifty Reebok logo on it, but it was too big.  So we bought one that fit and I made a logo out of red cotton and glued it on.  With some other embellishments that he designed himself, he was ready and super excited to be a ninja!

The giraffe costume for Nut Brown took the most effort.  I thought it turned out pretty well.  He made the face himself and helped me glue all the spots on to the yellow clothes.  I actually made him legs to carry in his hands so he'd be a four-legged giraffe, but that got old quickly when we were trick or treating!



I was a snowman (Rose Pink made my nose for me!) and Mr. Brown was a caped wolf-man.  He's always wanted wolf ears and this was the year that he acquired his own set.

We trunk-or-treated at the church, and then went out in the subdivision next to us on Halloween.  It was so fun to be out - Halloween is our favorite holiday because a) costumes!!! and b) community sharing and good feelings!

27 October 2017

Last week Mr. Brown took Nut Brown and Rose Pink up to Michigan to work at the Winter Clothing Distribution and I stayed home with Bobo and Rosebud.  We drove up to see my sister in Tallahassee, and went to the beach, and did a bunch of fun things together.  I really enjoyed the time off. :)  Mr. Brown and the older kids had a really good time back in Michigan, seeing old friends and working hard at one of our favorite projects.

A charity called "Feed the Children" set up a project downtown called "Orlando Cares For Puerto Rico", where they provided food and packing materials and volunteers packed individual meals to be sent to Puerto Rico.  It went on for weeks, and we went down several times to help them work towards their goal of 4.4 million meals.  The Sunday after Mr. Brown returned from Michigan turned out to be the last day, and so we decided to go work one more two-hour shift.  Well, we ended up staying five hours, until they called it at 9 pm.  They announced that we'd made our goal, but based on the numbers they'd been giving out previously, Mr. Brown and I think they were probably rounding up... but they would only have been short a few thousand, so close enough!

When we first arrived, we were assigned to a table with two guys who'd been there already for three hours.  They thought that we would be too slow, but we showed them in about five minutes that they were too slow for us!  After they left, we had a couple other people offer to jump in at our table, including a lady with family in Puerto Rico who had come to do what she could to help.  It was a pretty rocking night- lots of hard work and laughter and dancing and hundreds of meals packed.  One of the volunteers who was working on collecting the packed boxes told us that our table was the most productive of the night.  The Puerto Rican lady had not expected to work so hard - she commented a couple times at the beginning how fast we were - but I told her we knew there were hungry people waiting on this food and the more we packed, the better.  We had a really good time working together and felt like we got to share the love of God with our coworkers as well as with Puerto Rico.


The other coworker, who was named Emily, asked me randomly out of the blue if our kids were homeschooled.  I said, "Yes, how could you tell?" and she said, "Because they're so happy."

20 October 2017

 Several months ago, Mr. Brown invited Nut Brown and Rose Pink to invent some creatures and write up some field research on them.  See below.

18 October 2017

Mr. Brown and Rose Pink and Nut Brown are out of town and I started my first morning without him by killing an enormous roach in the kids' room.  I smacked it, and it vanished (and the head came off the fly swatter).  Ugh.  I think I squeaked and said something, Oh no! It disappeared!  and Bobo said calmly, "That's because roaches can teleport."  Which seems to be true sometimes but is a truly frightening idea.

But I gritted my teeth and found it and killed it with a sandal and then Bobo calmly went and got the dustpan and disposed of it.  He was much more laidback with the whole process than I was.

17 October 2017

More Star Wars artwork from Nut Brown.

16 October 2017

This morning I arrived at work and found that there were frog prints in the dew on the window.  The size of the prints makes me think the frog is about the size of my hand.  Two weeks ago, we found a frog in the bathroom at home (early in the morning, when Spencer was out of town) that was about three inches long.  I want to know how it got in!  Nut Brown trapped it and took it outside - after he'd released it and re-caught it a couple times.  There is so much more life here in Florida!

15 October 2017

Rosebud has reached the speech explosion part of verbal development.  She is willing to try all sorts of words, and surprises me with words when I don't expect it.  She was fussing at me the other night while helping with dishes, and finally said, "pun!" so I handed her the sponge and she was satisfied.  'Cookie' and 'candy' were also early entrants in her vocabulary.

13 October 2017

Bobo has this funny fascination with dental floss!  He will steal all the containers that he can find and hide them in his treasure box.  The other night he brought me two containers when he came for me to floss his teeth.  When we were done, I told him to run put them away, and when he came back to read scriptures with me, he still had them in his hand.  I said, "Go put those up, buddy!" and he said, "You're not supposed to see them!"  He's such a funny guy.


He also is very extremely verbal.  He has a huge vocabulary, and he has so much to say.  I am surprised often by how fluent he is.  He's such a sweet, sweet boy.  This move to Florida has been really hard on him - he's very lonely.

10 October 2017

Yesterday was a federal holiday, so Mr. Brown suggested that we go to the beach for the first time.  We drove over to Jetty Beach in Port Canaveral and spent a very relaxing three hours playing the water and in the sand and eating sandy snacks.  It was a lot of fun.  It felt like time slowed way down and the three hours was very peaceful.  A nice advantage of homeschooling is that we can go to the beach randomly during the week, when it's much less crowded. 


Rosebud is definitely a water baby- she would squirm to get down when I carried her further out in the surf, because she wasn't getting enough water splashed in her face.  Once she was knocked out of my grasp as we were walking towards shore, and tumbled underwater a couple feet in front of me.  She looked up at me from under the water as I rushed to grab her, and when I got her back up, she just wanted to walk back out into the waves again.  Loves the water, doesn't mind the salt!

7 October 2017

A comic based on actual events, Produced by Rose Pink and Nut Brown.  I love the panel where Nut Brown burps and Rose Pink says, "Ahem!"

5 October 2017

We were invited to a pre-session brunch on Sunday morning at a friend's house, and Rose Pink and I decided to make breakfast casserole muffins - bread, sausage and cheese with beaten eggs and milk poured over it and baked.  She made a batch on Saturday afternoon, by herself.  We ended up eating those for dinner (yum) so I asked Nut Brown to make a second batch for the next morning, and he did.  In spite of greasing the muffin tins very well, it took forever to get them clean.  I spent more time scrubbing the tins than we spent making and baking them muffins!!  And I whined about it big time to Rose Pink, who thought it was a little bit funny that I was complaining so much.  So when the second batch had cooled and I'd wrapped up the muffins and put them in the fridge, I tiptoed into Rose Pink's room and told her that there was NO WAY I was going to wash those two pans tonight.  She whispered back that I had to and I said absolutely not, and I left them to 'soak'.  The next morning I washed one of the two, and then made two more pans of regular muffins also for the brunch.  That evening, Rose Pink told me that as a favor she would wash the muffin pans!  She didn't realize I hadn't washed the last breakfast casserole muffin pan but when I pointed this out to her, she gamely agreed to wash it.  It took her thirty minutes, and probably an equal amount of complaining.  Okay, less complaining than me because she is more awesome.  She and I then agreed that we were never making breakfast casserole muffins again - next time it will be a 9 x 13 pan.

2 October 2017

Mr. Brown went down to Ft. Myers this weekend as part of a cleanup crew to help with hurricane damage.  We missed him, especially because it was conference weekend!  We did have a good time watching conference and learning.  So great to hear the kids beginning to connect with what the speakers are saying.  After Tad R. Callister's talk about the Book of Mormon, Nut Brown actually turned to me and said, "I really liked that talk.  It explained everything really well."  He also made us all laugh with a remark during Jean B. Bingham's talk.  She said, "What do we do when faced with problems?  Do we turn to the Internet, or look up a how-to book?"  Nut Brown exclained, "Yes, we look in a how-to book!  It's called the Book of Mormon!"