August is here! A peek at the Allen's home life...

I wanted to start giving my readers monthly updates just so you get a glimpse of the behind the blog scene at my house! It's so easy to blog and make everything appear like you have it all together, something I can't claim for myself!




Summer is a busy time for our family as my husband owns his own lawn care company. We have a feast in the summer, and a famine in the winter owning the company, but we enjoy being entrepenaurs, and have a vision for building a company for our sons, so year after year we stick with it! Before we started our lawn care company, my husband owned his own cabinet shop for about 3 years. Sean is excellent at doing woodworking, but financially that wasn't the best business for us to own.







We also normally help my Mother in law out a lot with a large garden that she grows. This year I haven't been helping out as much, as I was spending time with my Mom, and now that she is gone I'm just trying to cope. The corn is coming on, the green beans we probably neglected and are gone, the carrots need done, and before we know it there will be sweet potatoes to do. Yummy! As we add more children to our family it becomes harder to get down to her house and help garden, but it is so nice to have fresh and natural produce! It has been an huge blessing during the winter months when money is tight also.


Yesterday we started school and it went well! There were the usual issues of keeping little ones busy while you are trying to work with the actual student, but we made it through without too many tears! Mosiah is in first grade, and Israel is in pre-school. I was amazed over how many things Israel already knows though, just from being the second child! He is elated to be doing his workbook. We are using Christian Liberty Press Pre-school curriculum (watch for a review and giveaway of it to come later this month!). I just love the program! I saw it at a homeschool curriculum and was impressed with it. My goal for pre-school curriculum is to find something that doesn't have the usual silly looking graphics on the pages. I had used Rod and Staff, but I can tell from now on I will be using Christian Liberty Press. I just love how it is laid out! We are doing a Charlotte Mason approach for our school, and I just love being able to plan out what we do and not be tied down to a textbook!


We are trying to get our house ready to put on the market to sell. We are so close to being done, but I'm getting stressed trying to get the last few things done on the house. Sean came home tonight and said that several guys from church are coming over friday night to help paint the garage, the last big project that we have left! I cried when he told me. We are so blessed to have a good church family that is so supportive of each other!


Wherever we move I'm assuming it will be smaller than our house right now. I've been trying to downsize and purge our house. I have a garage full of stuff to get rid of, but it still seems like you can't tell that looking at our house. *sigh* One thing I did get rid of was our heavy glass plates and bowls. With a six and four year old putting away dishes, and a two year old wanting to start helping put away the dishes they were just to heavy. I have a set of Corelle dishes but it only has four plates and bowls. I'm planning on getting more from the CSN store. I really like that they have a set that actually comes glass cups instead of mugs. While the white corelle is nothing fancy to look at, it is so nice to have something that is light weight and it doesn't chip or break easily!


I'm sure the whole month of August will be kept busy homeschooling, doing blog reviews for the fantastic back to homeschool bash on the blog this month, working on the business (I have lot's of ideas for new products and new fabrics for skirts!) and a myriad of other things. Of course the usual cooking, cleaning, laundry and nursing my sweet baby is always ever present!


I'm curious how many homeschoolers have already started school for the year? If you haven't started yet, when do you plan to?