Habitat House

Eric was asked about a month ago to be the project director for a Habitat for Humanity build that our church was sponsoring. He agreed and has been organizing volunteers, permits and food for the 5 week build. They will work each Saturday and Sunday from 8am-5pm for the next 5 weeks. They started this past weekend and got a lot done. They are on schedule and things are going well. Well, except for the fact that Eric shot himself with a nailgun in his finger. It's just swollen and oozing "guts". That's what Eric says. He's going for a tetnus shot this week!

The build is special to all of us members at Harpeth Hills because the homeowner is a member of the congregation and a wonderful lady. Her name is Alice and she has a young daughter, Leslie. Alice cleans the building at church and attends there with her daughter. She is a great lady and is so nice.

Here are some pictures from the weekend. This is Alice. She worked on the build the entire weekend.

This is Leslie. The group that put the floor down also put a Bible in a metal casing and attached it to the footers in the crawlspace so that Alice and Leslie could always be "walking on the truth".

This is Alice and Leslie.

Everybody is just standing around in this picture because it was lunchtime.

This is a picture looking down the street toward the build site.

This is a picture of the street sign for the road. It's one of my "creative" pictures.

This is a picture looking down the road from the driveway of the build site.

Here is the same picture, just black and white. Pretty, huh?

I'll be taking pictures of the progress each weekend. I'm planning to make a photo book for Alice when everything is done. I'll post more pics each weekend.

Grace's Classroom

While I was at Grace's Halloween party I took some pictures of her classroom. It is packed full of stuff, mostly made by the students. It's a little bit of visual overload for me, but I guess that's what a kindergarten classroom is supposed to be like.

This is a big graph of each kid and how many letters are in their names. It is hung on the back of a door. This is hung from the ceiling. It is a label for the listening center. It has pictures of the students in the center and the label is written by a student. She has one hung from the ceiling for each center.

This is the sign hung for the Home Living center.

This is the sign for the Puppet center. Grace is the little girl on the left in the picture.

This is the pocket chart where they assign which students will go to each center.

This is the book center. All of the books are in separate tubs labeled with what type of books they are.

This just a picture of a wall. The alphabet letters were made by the kids. Each child was assigned a specific letter. Grace was given the letter "H". They had to bring about small items that started with that letter to glue to the letter. Grace drew a million little bitty hearts for us to cut out. The birthday cakes were water colored by the students. There is one for each month and the children who have a birthday that month are on the correct cake.

Each morning during their "morning meeting" time, they write the Daily News. Then they are hung from a clothesline in the room for the entire week. Each day she takes a different student to help with the Daily News. They get to write some of the words and tell something to put on the news.

This is a bulletin board with spider web art on it. Each one has a label on it of the student's name that they wrote themselves. The boarder around the board has a picture of each child with their painted hand print. Then she gave them dot painters and let each one decorate the boarder around their name and picture.

This is a picture of the front of the class. It shows their calendar board and at the time she had the projection screen down showing a slide show of pictures she had taken. Ms. Heim uses a digital camera and takes tons of pictures of the kids.

There was a lot more I could have taken pictures of, but I had to get back to the party. :)

Halloween Night

By the time Halloween actually came around my girls had already trick-or-treated twice! I sat out all of the candy that they got from the first two times on our porch for the trick-or-treaters that would be coming to our house. There is no way we need 5 pounds of candy in our house. Anyway, we took the girls trick-or-treating around our block with Reesi, Joni and the neighbors. They each filled a large mixing bowl with candy when we got home!

Lyla is wearing the same costume that she wore last year! We even bought a full-priced costume from Target that she picked out but I guess we'll save that one for next year, or I'll put it on Craigslist! Grace was Tinkerbell, of course. They both had fun.

Beautiful

This is the best part of our little bitty yard. This tree is in front of our house and it turns a beautiful color of red. To bad it only lasts for a few weeks out of the whole year.

Halloween at The City

Every year the City of Franklin invites the employee's children to trick or treat through the offices at city hall. I think this was our 4th Halloween to trick or treat at Eric's office. It was short and sweet but the girls enjoyed it. None of them had their full costume on though. It was a wild afternoon and we couldn't find all of the pieces when it came time to leave. Tinkerbell was missing her wings, the kitty cat was missing her ears and the tiger was missing her tail. Thank goodness it didn't cause any meltdowns!

A Surprise Package

When we got home Friday there was a box on the front porch from Mimi and Papoo. It was full of crafty stuff for the girls. I brought it inside and sat it on the kitchen table to open it. The girls were like a pack of dogs trying to eat out of the same bowl. I had to lift Lyla and Reesi off of the table and force them all to stand back until I had everything out of the box. They couldn't get to it fast enough. They had a blast going through everything. It's still on my table tonight (Sunday). They keep going to back to several times a day to make another picture.

Kindergarten Halloween Party

I went to Grace's Halloween party on Friday. It was pretty simple. They had a couple of games, a craft and a very nutritious snack (ha). Grace has cheetos in her teeth as fangs in the picture below.

Grace seems to love school. She says Mrs. Heim is the best teacher in the world. She's learning a lot about reading. She's starting to read and spell out words on her own. I love to try to read what she has written. In the past, she wouldn't try to spell words on her own, she wanted me to spell them for her. Now, she does it on her own. She's getting better and I usually figure out what it is supposed to be. For example. She wrote...."Hpe Hlwe" for happy halloween. Then on another page she wrote "krsmmits" for christmas and "presit" for present. Her favorite thing to do is color and draw pictures and do crafts. She makes so many pictures for me I don't know what to do with all of them. I recently found an old 3 ring binder and started punching holes in them and putting them in the binder b/c I can't fit them on on the fridge. Grace thought that was a great idea because I wasn't throwing them away.