Lots of Changes

I can't believe it's been almost two months since I've written a blog post.  We have had some pretty crazy things going on at our house that have taken away a lot of my free time.

Elliott is still in public school, but we have already talked to his current teacher about the fact that we are homeschooling next year.  She even said that while she thinks most kids benefit greatly from public school, she agrees that homeschool might be best for Elliott, because their school is too small to offer him the extra stuff that he needs.  I've found all of our materials that we plan on starting him with for third grade now.  We are sticking with a plan that is fairly close to public school for the most part, for while we transition.  In fact, we are using the exact same handwriting, language arts, and math curriculum choices that his school uses.  We'll be using a different curriculum that is also mainstream and found in a lot of public schools for Social Studies, but are using a Christian based alternative for Health and Science.  Because Elliott works so fast, and learns things quickly, I also have A LOT of supplemental things planned, including books and workbooks that go much more in depth in a small section of every subject (human anatomy for science and health, Colonial America for social studies, a variety of classic books for language arts, and extra word problems and brain teasers for math).  Elliott is really excited, and has actually already started working on some of the stuff, even though we don't officially start until he's out of school. :) 

We just agreed to purchase some land in the same town we currently live in.  We've talked about moving for quite a while, and have been working on saving money for a move, plus working on paying off debt.  With the price of this land, we decided we should just go ahead and go for it, and buy it while it's available, so that's what we did. :) We close on it in May.  We will be putting a house on it after we get this one paid off, so most likely in 2 years.  We're planning a large garden for over there this year and next year, though, so we will still be using it, just not as much.

We have recently completely changed our eating habits.  We haven't ever really had terrible eating habits, but they were certainly not as good as they should have been.  Even still, we have room to improve, but necessity has forced us to remove artificial dyes and high fructose corn syrup, and I have to say, it's going really well.  We've also switched to organic on anything that is readily available to us that way, and are working on switching even more stuff.  Right now, we are checking around to see where the best place is to get meat locally.  Living in the middle of nowhere has some positives, like more organic fresh produce that is grown locally. But it's also harder to find organic stuff that isn't priced extremely high in grocery stores.  Plus the growing season is short here, so farmers markets are only open for a relatively short time frame each year.  We're definitely fans of Amazon subscribe and save for snack foods, bulk flour (I make all of our bread products from scratch now), and a few other things that are cheaper that way. :)