Swimsoup

Gymnastics

Lucy has been asking for a while if she could take gymnastics. I heard about a good, affordable local place that is directly across the street from the Aliso Viejo library (perfect for homeschooling!). Today she took the free trial class and loved it. I think it'll be a weekly thing now! A testament to how much she wanted to do it was that she wore this outfit without complaining--and even wanted to keep it on afterward to show Jon. :)

"Jon" 3:16

Nate got a new pen tonight from AWANA and was excited to write some stuff with it. This is what he gave me, written from memory. For any words he didn't know how to spell, he wrote the first letter and then an arrow to complete the word. So cute.



Jon 3:16
For God so loved the world
that he gave his only begotooon
son that w--> b--> in
him shall not p--> but
have entral life!

To: mom

In which I have a pity party

I thought I would never get too busy to blog. Alas, it has happened! Things with homeschooling, preschooling, working, housekeeping, laundry doing, cooking, and ministry participating have seemed to take over. I told Mama the other day that, in these past few weeks, I get literally 0 minutes to myself each day. Nap time, which used to be reserved for some relaxing, has been completely filled with editing work. Evenings after the children go to bed are now for homeschool prep for the next day, lunch packing, and more proofing work.

However, today I finished a huge editing project that work threw my way (30 hours of work!), and now I feel like a new woman. I actually relaxed for a bit during nap time today and even did a little crafting.

My boss knows they've been giving me too much work lately, and she and I have talked about it. They just hired another full-time, in-house proofreader (they already have one), so that will take a lot of the burden off of me. My boss also asked if I would transition to mostly working on special projects with her (yes!), which will also ease some of the day-to-day stress.

Edited to add pictures of today's crafting completion:

Lucy's first day of preschool

Lucy had her first day of 2-days-a-week preschool today. She was nervous. She cried at drop-off but I think had a good time overall. I'm trying to keep my bad comments to myself regarding her attitude.

OK I'm back. With a few hours removed from the bad attitude, I can now write some more comments. :) This evening, Lucy told me the following about her day:

- she painted on a big piece of paper (not just tiny) and got lots of paint on her hands
- she made a friend named Kara (I wonder if her name is actually Kiera) and played with her on the playground, pretending to make cakes and using a sequin Lucy found as a candle
- she played dress-ups with Kara, and there were two purple dresses with sparkles
- it was pretty crowded on the playground
- she swung on the swing all by herself

I think she loved it and am hopeful she won't cry at drop-off on Tuesday.

Second time's a charm

I am proud to announce that Levi is now potty trained. Woo hooooo!!! We started (again) on Monday, with barely any success. Tuesday was only marginally better (still pretty bad). But on Wednesday, something clicked. I think it was because I let him play around the house with only a shirt on; the different feeling of having no underwear or diaper made him notice what was going on, and he ended up going to the bathroom about every 3 minutes for over an hour. That certainly was enough practice. He had only one accident on Thursday and no accidents on Friday (well, no wet accidents anyway). Poor boy's system still needs to kick into gear for the "other" kind of practice (is that TMI? Sorry). Yay Levi!

Reflections on the week

This was a great first week of homeschooling. I love the prep/planning but can see that I might get burnt out after a few months, so we'll see what I end up tweaking. Nate loves the work so far--mostly because there is nothing too hard yet. I foresee some problems arising when we get into more difficult work (in math, for example), because he gets very frustrated if he doesn't understand something right away.



The other children have stayed happily occupied (for the most part) during any times I've been working with Nate. It helps that the work goes by so fast! Today, the day I had the most planned (I filled 8 of those workbox boxes), still took less than 2 hours--and that even included his Friday chore as one of the boxes. Today Levi and Lucy got a little impatient during school time, having exhausted the coloring activity I provided and knowing we were going swimming afterward, but overall I am so happy with how everything is going.



The more I think about it, the more thrilled I am with our homeschooling setup!

One down

Today was our first day of homeschooling, and it went very well. In fact, it went very quickly--maybe too quickly for Nate's liking. I hadn't planned too much since I wanted to ease into the new routine, but even what I had planned didn't take as long as I thought it would. Nate ended up doing two lessons from his math book, the first lesson in the English/grammar book, read one chapter from the fiction book he's reading, and completed one worksheet I created on vowels and consonants. Tomorrow I'm also adding a couple of things from other subjects (we are going to make a flower/leaf press for science; begin talking about liberty and freedom before doing some U.S. history; and start learning about the instrument groups in the orchestra for music). Yay for an easy start!

Vanilla