It's good to be back...

I think this is the longest I have ever gone withOUT writing a blog post here at Brighton Park. That is a good indicator of how busy my second run through graduate school is keeping me, in addition to my usual duties of mother to five, wife to one, caretaker of 21 animals!

Mainly, this blog post has me sitting here knowing I am...

So Blessed.

I am. I am so blessed, so lucky, so fortunate. I have a home, food to eat, a wonderful husband and 5 sweet kids. I live in a country where education for women is not a luxury and where I am free to live, work, play and worship!

We have been lots of places since I posted last...

We took the twins to a Phoenix Coyotes Hockey game; they had a blast!

                                       Timothy, left and Sean, right, standing with Mr. Darcy

Three days later, Mr. Darcy took me to the George Strait concert. The tickets, which were second row on the floor, were in my stocking on Christmas morning. We had a wonderful date night.  Mr. Darcy was a celebrity there as two couples in our section in addition to our refreshment vendor in our section are all clients of his. In all we had 8 people seek us out to shake our hands, didn't pay for a drink all evening, and left with Suns game tickets courtesy of another very grateful client of his. The woman sitting next to me asked if he was famous. I said "to me, he sure is". (smile).

At the concert:

 

                                                                                     George

 Martina McBride
I am loving the new camera that Mr. Darcy got me last fall. Takes the best pictures...Of course, George is always an easy subject.












We also celebrated a wonderful evening this Past Thursday, when our eldest daughter, Audrey, celebrated her First Reconciliation. I am so proud of her. She loves church class and has such a good and caring heart. The years are going so fast. Just yesterday she was a baby; today she is my "big girl".

After they do their confession and say their prayers of penance, an adult vests them in their white garment. Audrey chose her dad for this honor and it was so heartwarming to see him do this for her and then her throw her arms around him. The boys stayed home with the baby and Miss Donna, but Charlotte, the 5 yr old, came to celebrate with her sister. Here she is waiting for us to finish taking pictures.

One of my friends from RCIA when I became Catholic came to celebrate with our family. He was so kind to take lots of pictures for us... doesn't Mr. Darcy just look handsome as ever?

and one more of our special girl, learning about the Lord, embracing her faith and making us proud every single day...

We received very happy news this week....my niece, Randee, is getting married this summer! We had been planning another trip back to IL to see my family (our last was 2010) this year anyway and now we have a wonderful reason to go and get to see everyone. Here is a picture of Randee and Brooke from my last trip home... looking at this I can't believe how little Brooke was...she is almost 2 years old now!

In our homeschool we have been BU-SY! Audrey is really getting into her theme unit on Egypt.

I am blessed to have kids who LOVE reading and who view going to the library as the "best outing ever". I am blessed that our home is not quite a 10 minute drive from one of the nicest libraries in our state. It has certainly come in handy with my Graduate School paper research...ah...

Graduate School.

My history class is a graduate level seminar class on Ancient civilizations and more specifically, how they are portrayed in cinema....it had an unbelievable work load of forum posting and paper writing and  has dropped down this week to 9 people; but I persevere. Apparently half the battle IS just showing up. I'm trying to work each weekend on the research for my end of the term paper (King Arthur from a Roman Perspective)....The plus side was several of the books I needed were either carried by our library or available via ILL (Inter-library loan). The bad side, about 6 of the sources I really need to make my paper fly are not, so Mr. Darcy and I got to give another $150 to amazon.com this week. Lovely. That makes the total for books I have had to purchase for this one class over $400.  Funny, how it doesn't say anything about that in the catalog description OR syllabus. LOL.

This week in our homeschool we will study St. Valentine as we do every year and continue our current course of studies. The boys graduated Kindergarten math and have both moved to 1st grade math books. I am so proud of them.

I appreciated so much all the emails and tweets about missing the blog posts this past 11 days while I was busy being mother, wife and student. It was nice to know you all missed me! This week I have a guest post planned, a review post and will continue my SLP series...and I do have a recipe post I am very anxious to share as well! It is good to be back!

Blessings to you all,

This post is linked up to the following: The homeschool Mother's Journal at The Homeschool Chick and the week in review over at Weird,Unsocialized Homeschoolers,