tonyandkirsten.org

I’ll admit it.  I’m a pack rat.  It is hard for me to get rid of useful things.  This includes toys.  Unless they are completely broken or totally annoying, my tendency is to hang on to them.

The result is a larger-than-average amount of toys.   Grandparents and other friends and relatives have been pretty generous with us so we haven’t even bought most of them.  We also end up with more toys than some families have because we have toys to please both girls and boys.  And since we’re not sure if if we done having kids, we’re hanging on to younger kid toys even as Kai outgrows them.

In our old house, most of our toys fit in the closet.  I had high shelves on which to place things that weren’t currently in use, but no clear system for rotating through them.  The kids could see them, so they would randomly ask for them, and I would just make them put something else up if they took something down.  A lot of toys were on low shelves in the closet, meaning the kids had access to a lot of stuff and got bored of it.

When we moved into our new house a year ago, I decided it was finally time to implement a better system.  Each family’s space and toys are different, but here’s what works for us (maybe it will give you an idea too!):

After deciding on certain toys that would always be out (for us this was the kitchen and play food, some dinosaurs and toy cars, musical instruments, pretend tools, the train set, our stuffed animals, and a few miscellaneous items), I divided everything else into four groups.  One thing that was nice for me at the time was I did this just after moving when everything had been in boxes or bins anyway, so there was no feeling from the kids of “3/4 of our toys just disappeared!”

I tried to have at least one toy (or set of toys) from a couple different categories in each of the four groups.  Each rotation group has a different set of blocks (yes, we really have four different sets of blocks!), a “preschool play” toy (these include a farm set, a set of baby doll stuff, a doctor set and a set of little people toys), a “large vehicle” (like a toddler-sized train and a little people dump truck and fire truck), and a set of “small pretend” toys that can be used in our doll house (my little ponies, tiny ponies and princesses, the actual doll house set, and our barbie dolls). There are also a few miscellaneous toys in each set.

We store the toys that are not currently in use in our porch.

A lot of the toys for each rotation group are in one of three large tubs:

The fourth large tub holds baby toys (I like to have them close by for guests). In this picture the doll house is in the porch because Madeline said she would rather have the baby doll bed set up for the whole time the baby doll rotation is out, and there is not space for both things!

The “small pretend” sets each have their own bin on this shelving unit on the other side of the porch, along with some of the other items that don’t fit in the large bins.

The kids are really good about not just heading out to the porch and taking stuff that is not currently “in rotation.”   We do end up on occasion rotating the “small pretend” sets separately from everything else, and I also try and be really nice about letting guests get out stuff that isn’t currently out as long as they help put it back when they are done.

We started out rotating once a week and that was almost too often.  It didn’t seem that the kids had gotten their full “play” out of a group of toys in that period of time.  Once every two to three weeks is pretty ideal for my kids.  I’ve been pretty lazy about it lately though, and I think it has been about once a month or whenever Madeline bugs me enough about it. 

When I originally made the groups of toys I made a “master list” of what was in each rotation group, and numbered them one through four.  We originally were just rotating through the groups in numerical order, but this somehow got messed up at one point and now we do something like 1-3-2-4…or something like that.  Somehow Madeline keeps track of what we have or haven’t had out recently, and she usually helps me figure out what is supposed to be out next!

When it’s time to rotate, the kids have to first thoroughly clean up the play room so that everything that is supposed to get put away gets put away together (I do keep a small box for “spare parts” so when something is found that belongs in another rotation, I have a quick place to toss it).  Once everything is put away, we take the outgoing rotation toys and pile them on the couch, then empty the contents of a new bin on the shelves.  After the empty bin is filled with the old toys and brought to the porch, Mama gets some time to relax (or get work done, or write a blog post) while the kids play with the toys they haven’t seen for a few weeks or months!

We’ll probably revisit what is in each rotation group after Christmas this year.  We already have a few more toys we’ve gotten in the past year that haven’t made it into a rotation group, and I’m sure we’ll get more this Christmas.

We’ve been on “summer vacation” from homeschooling for about three weeks now.  Madeline is so thrilled to be on break.  She was so ready for it!  Little does she realize she is learning almost as much, if not more, now than she was during the last couple months of school when we were kind of slacking a bit! *insert maniacal laugh here*

By the time we covered a few more phonics rules via the book “Phonics Pathways”, Madeline was more excited about practicing and improving her reading skills by reading books.  Conveniently, there are a lot of summer reading incentive programs out there to encourage kids to read for the summer.  The prospect of free books from Half-Price Books (every week!), as well as other rewards turns out to be a real motivator for Madeline.  We diligently keep track of her minutes spent reading each day, and the titles of the books she reads.  She has been reading both stuff that is “easy” for her (phonics readers that mainly have three – letter short vowel words plus some basic sight words), and stuff that is harder, like “Frog and Toad”.  The harder books she does need help with.  But I am constantly surprised at the words she manages to sound out either on her own or with quick reminders of various phonics principles.

In addition to reading 15 minutes per day, at least five days per week, Madeline has started using the “Reading Eggs” website again.  Back well over a year ago, Madeline was using this  before we really did much “real” reading instruction.  She got through the part about letter sounds just fine back then, but got stuck when the site started teaching real reading skills.  Reading Eggs is a subscription site, but, lucky for us, they offered past customers a three month free subscription over this summer.  Our account on Reading Eggs actually saved Madeline’s place where she left off in the Spring of 2009.  She gained a lot of confidence by doing some easy lessons that were review of what she learned months ago, and is progressing into harder lessons now.  Many days she asks to have some time to work on this in the afternoon.  So she is practicing reading skills twice a day most days…and is super excited about it!!!

We’re trying to sneak in some math review here and there by playing math games…and we’re raising monarch caterpillars (they are actually pupa now since they have formed their chrysalises)…which makes for an incredible science lesson.

Besides all that learning, the kids are also doing a weekly “sports sampler” class, eight days of swimming lessons, and Madeline will have a three day art class next month.  And we’re just having lots of fun and enjoying NOT feeling obligated to do school every morning!

Today, these were the faces of homeschooling in the Gold House:

There should also be a picture of a Kindergartener with a frustrated look on her face, but I figured she might be even more unhappy with me if I took a picture of her in that state.

I usually try and stay positive in my homeschooling week-in-review posts.  Sure, I note what didn’t go so well, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the fact that we have some bad days.  Sometimes more than one of them in the same week.

This is going to be a short school week for us as it is — we took the day off on Monday since Tony had a work holiday for President’s Day and my mom also stopped by for a couple of hours.  And we had our co-op on Wednesday.  That left Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for school.

Tuesday started off okay with Bible reading and reading about Abraham Lincoln (a belated choice of reading material for President’s Day).  Then Madeline really struggled with her attitude while we were working on phonics.  I thought maybe the problem was the materials I was using — we were trying out a book from the library to see if it might work well in tandem with Explode the Code.  We never got any other school work done after that.

Fast forward to today.  I decided we would return to Explode the Code.  So, after Bible reading and a book about China (which Madeline acted much more bored about than usual) we pulled out the ETC workbooks, which Madeline has for the most part enjoyed the last two weeks.  Not so much today.  I think it took us over an hour to get through some material that should have taken about 15 minutes.  It wasn’t even a new concept — just reinforcing words we’ve already been working on.  But attitude is everything and hers was just not helpful today.  Luckily, she pulled through it and we did move on to working on Math for the first time this week.

Meanwhile, Kai did a bunch of screaming, as you can see in his picture above.  He did take a nap in the middle of our school time this morning (thank God for that!), but was still crabby whether in my arms or playing on the floor when he woke up again.  Erik, on the other hand, was making things difficult in his own way.  He wasn’t too interested in Tot School or participating with Madeline and I today.  For the most part he just played.  But he is supposed to be working on using the potty without needing “company”.  He says he needs help, but really the “helper” just sits and talks with him.  I did talk him into going to the potty a couple times without me needing to sit next to him the whole time.  But getting him to put his pants back on was another story.   As much as I didn’t want to take my focus off Madeline while she was having such a hard time, I had to spend time training Erik in what completing the process of using the potty means — a.k.a putting one’s clothes back on afterwords.

We finally made it through our morning of school.  The kids played sweetly together while I made lunch and then after lunch, including a nice tea party and playing house (for some reason Erik’s “house” was in the bathroom, and they were having a slumber party):

(I meant to post this on Monday, but didn’t get to it…it’s still a lot of fun!)

Here was the scene out my front door last Monday (October 12th):

And here’s the kids having a snowball fight that afternoon in the back yard (pics look a bit funny since I took them through the screen door):

One week later…we were back to beautiful Fall weather.  Here’s the kids playing baseball in the backyard this past Sunday:

And here’s Kai enjoying the warm, sunny fall weather on the deck:

And on Monday (exactly one week after the snow), Madeline had some time outside in the afternoon to draw (and play) while the boys were sleeping:

Madeline would like you to know how to make Covia!  Here’s the recipe. She says that Erik told her what was in it.

You’ll need:

2 apples

1 lb of strawberries (or less is fine)

2 drops of food coloring (or 4 drops if you want two different colors)

Optional: 3 spoonfuls of brown sugar and a few dashes of cinnamon.  Those were mommy’s additions

Chop up the apples and strawberries.  Put them in a pan.  Drop in two drops of food coloring. Use two different colors if you want to.  Mommy thinks you might like it with some sugar and cinnamon too.  Bake it in the oven for 15 minutes.  Mommy thinks 350 degrees is hot enough.

Here’s our Covia! before it went in to the oven.  There are two pans because one pan had cinnamon and sugar and one pan didn’t:

Madeline also says. “It was really delicious when we ate it.  Also really yummy and messy. It is very blue because I added a lot of blue food coloring.  More than two drops.  When it cooks, it makes it into blue Covia!  The one with sugar and cinnamon is very liquidy after cooking but the other one was pretty dry”

[We started hearing Erik say "Covia!" a few weeks ago, having absolutely no idea what he was talking about.  One day Madeline came up to us and told us that she found out was Covia! was and Erik told her.   They have been begging me to actually make it for days, so this was our fun family activity last night.]

Conventional wisdom strikes again…kids can amuse themselves for hours (or minutes anyway, in the case of a toddler) with things you might otherwise throw away:

Madeline spent a long time with five or six empty pop boxes, figuring out how she could glue them together and make them stick in various configurations to be part of a “city” she wanted to create.  Then here’s Erik with a good-old-fashioned oatmeal-container drum, entertaining Kai while I cook:

When I checked the weather forecast on Sunday night as I was writing my menu, I think it said that Tuesday’s high was supposed to be about 70 degrees.  We went to Aldi on Tuesday morning and it felt warm, but not hot.  So in the afternoon as Madeline and I discussed plans for today (Wednesday, the day that was supposed to be 90+ degrees), I was pretty surprised when I looked at weather.com and discovered the temperature at 4:15pm was 93 degrees and climbing.

My plans for the rest of the afternoon and early evening went out the door at that point.  I had been pondering a quick trip to the corner store to buy some canned beans for the soup I had planned for dinner (I thought I had the equivalent of two cans of black beans cooked in the freezer but only one package was left…the disadvantage of cooking your own beans is that if you haven’t planned in advance, you are out of luck!).  Instead, I put swimsuits on the kids and we hooked up the sprinkler in the front yard!

After a good couple of hours playing outside in the sprinkler, I morphed my “black bean soup and quesidillas” meal into a nice, cool “build your own taco salad” meal using some small bags of already-cooked ground beef and ground turkey I had in my freezer.

Since Tony was gone at a meeting, we rounded out our special afternoon/evening with the kids having their taco salads and lemonade at the little table in the living room while watching Erik’s pick of a “Train! Train! Train Show!”, followed up by ice cream for dessert…and a bath before bed to wash off all the dirt accumulated from playing outside in the wet lawn.

It’s going to be another hot day today…I’m looking forward to getting out the sprinkler again (and maybe the kiddie pool too).

Many people have been noting how similar Kai looks to how Erik looked as a baby, so I thought I would find some pictures where we could make a direct comparison.

Here’s Erik at 4 days old:

And here’s Kai wearing the same shirt, laying on the same couch, at 3 days old:

They definitely look very similar!  Though it is a little bit harder to tell in the pictures, Kai’s skin tone, hair and eye color are all darker than Erik’s are.  Erik’s skin tone is very fair like mine, while Kai (and Madeline) take more after Tony in that category.  Madeline was born with dark brown eyes, Erik’s were light blue from birth (and stayed blue!), and so far Kai has more of a dark gray-blue color to his eyes.  His seem to be more of a “baby” color that will change to something else as he gets older.  Perhaps his eyes will be hazel like mine?

Kai also seems very similar in temperament to what Erik was like as a baby.  Just like Erik, Kai seems very easy going and is a good eater and sleeper.  We haven’t had any problems with nursing, and as soon as my milk came in, he was sleeping about three hours at a time at night and easily going back to sleep between feedings (unlike Madeline, who liked to be awake and screaming between feedings in the middle of the night as a newborn).

Madeline and Erik seem to be adjusting pretty well to having Kai join our family.  We haven’t had any obvious jealousy issues thus far, though I can see that we will probably have some patience issues once Tony is back at work and there is only one grown-up here to help the kids.  I think it might take them some time to get used to the fact that there will be times during the day when it will be 10 or 15 minutes or more before I can get something for them or help them with something because I am feeding the baby.  Madeline obviously went through this once before when Erik was a baby, but since then she has gotten used to mommy almost always being available to her within a minute or two to respond to her requests.

Besides the logistical challenges of learning how to get out of the house and go places with three kids in tow, I think our biggest challenge once it is just the kids and I here will be finding a good schedule that work with a newborn, a toddler and a preschooler.  We had a pretty good schedule going for the first couple months of the fall, but then as I got further along in the pregnancy, the holidays hit, and so on…well, the schedule pretty much went out the window! For the six weeks or so before Kai was born, we were pretty much just trying to get through each day with a minimum of disaster and without me going completely crazy from exhaustion. That meant extra TV and computer time many days, and just more “entertainment” for the kids in general rather than purposeful use of time.

I’m sure we’ll still have some days like that in the weeks ahead, especially on days following nights when Kai does decide he needs to eat all night long (and every baby has those nights, even the “good sleepers”).   But overall I think a bit of structure will make our lives easier and more productive in the long run (though it might hurt a bit getting there!).  Tony is home with us for another week or so, until he starts his new job on Monday the 23rd.  Then the adventure of having three kids at home with me really begins!

This past weekend, Tony was gone at a conference for work.  And lucky for the rest of us staying back home, we all got sick! While I had pondered planning lots of adventures for us over the weekend while Daddy had his own adventure in Boston, I had settled on some fun activities that would mostly keep us home.

I didn’t expect, however, that we would be staying inside the entire weekend! I realized Saturday morning that Madeline wasn’t quite acting like herself – and sure enough, she had a low-grade fever.   Erik had already had a cold for a few days and was generally coughing and sneezing a lot.   We canceled our plans to attend our small group and declared it “Pajama Day” at the Hill house.  Here’s the kids having fun in their jammies:

I had already planned a “slumber party”-style evening for the three of us: watching Madeline’s new Tinkerbell DVD while eating popcorn and mini pizzas and drinking hot cocoa in the living room.  So, those plans fit perfectly with the theme for the day.

As Sunday morning rolled around, I had high hopes that Madeline would be feeling well enough to go to church.  But, she was still not feeling 100% and not quite acting like herself (i.e. choosing to curl up on the couch under a blanket rather than eat pancakes, her favorite breakfast food!).  So we stayed home from church too. I also realized on Sunday morning that it was finally time to turn the heat on.  Yes, we made it until November 9th without it! I saw the kids choosing to have their fun under a warm blanket and thought that maybe the kids would enjoy the house a little warmer than the 60 degrees it was at with no heat (notice Madeline carefully studying the Target toy catalog, pen in hand!):

By afternoon Madeline was ready for some craft projects, so we made a paper chain to count the days until Thanksgiving (we’ll add loops soon to count to Christmas), and a “Thankful tree” with things we are thankful for written on each leaf. (Pictures courtesy of Madeline!)

We ventured out briefly on Sunday night to get another movie to watch.  By late afternoon it was clear that the kids were mostly feeling better…but now I was the one sick with a cold! I had hoped that we could play at the McDonald’s play land or something fun like that on Sunday night, but all I could handle was curling up at home and watching another movie.

It was a fun weekend at home just the three of us, but we were very excited to pick up Tony on Monday morning!

This morning marked the completion of our first full 24 hour period of only using cloth diapers.  Yea! We started Erik in his first few cloth diapers on Thursday afternoon and evening.  Due to lack of supplies (the rest of everything I purchased didn’t arrive until yesterday afternoon) and plans to be out of town from Friday night through Saturday afternoon, I was only able to do a few cloth diapers each day from Friday through Sunday.  But on Monday I started the day with all six prefolds clean, and by early evening I had washed all my new supplies and could even put Erik in cloth overnight.

When I first got my prefolds, I tried the “easy” way of using them and just folded it in thirds and stuck it in the waterproof cover.  Apparently this works for a lot of people, but somehow it didn’t work for us.  Every time we did it, Erik leaked badly – some of this may have been not changing him soon enough, but I don’t think that was the whole problem.  I instead started using the slightly more complicated method of wrapping the prefold more into a diaper shape around Erik and using a “snappi” to fasten it before putting the diaper cover on him.  I don’t think we’ve had any leaks since I started doing this, and it only takes a bit longer.

However, I think it would be rare that he would last more than a couple hours with the prefold/cover combo, so I knew it wouldn’t work overnight without some kind of insert or doubler to increase absorbancy.  I had read that a lot of people who do prefolds during the day like using a pocket diaper with stuffed with lots of absorbancy for overnight.  We did a “fuzzi buns” diaper with two full inserts overnight last night, and it seemed just about perfect.  However, I know this means I will need a couple more inserts or doublers, since I only have three total right now and I am aiming to have enough to do laundry once every two days or so.  The pocket diapers are so easy to use that if I find a good deal on some, I might get a couple more for babysitters or others to use — since I wouldn’t expect the average person to be able to figure out the prefold/snappi/cover combo without having seen it done before.

I managed to avoid changing my first poopy cloth diaper until Monday afternoon. With only using cloth part time over from Thursday through Sunday, I just lucked out that all Erik’s dirty diapers were disposables during that time.  Even though Tony hasn’t had a chance to install a sprayer yet, dunking the offending diaper in the toilet wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The smell wasn’t much worse than when changing a diaper in general.  Don’t get me wrong — the diaper sprayer will be really nice — but I can survive without it until we get one.

Right now, especially once I can get on the routine of only doing diaper laundry every-other-day, I am not thinking the laundry will be much of an issue.  I did lots of laundry the past several days with prepping my new purchases and trying to get the most out of the few supplies I had while I was waiting for the rest to arrive.  I am finding it’s almost easier to know I have some laundry to do every day.  I think I might try doing a load of laundry every weekday morning and just alternating between loads of diapers and loads of clothes or towels/bedding.