tonyandkirsten.org

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.

A couple of scenes from yesterday:

Thursday morning we went to play in the gym at a nearby park and recreation center.  They have a free weekly “family fun time” for parents and kids to come and play in the gym with balls, ride-on toys, small climbing equipment, and so on.  Usually it’s mostly moms with their toddlers and preschoolers, along with a few elementary-age homeschool kids here and there.  But, since yesterday was a “no school” day for the public schools, and there was also a special program happening in the park building for Latino families, the gym was teeming with kids of all ages.

I saw another mom I know from church, so we stood at the side of the gym and chatted while our kids played.  I looked up from my chatting to see Erik across the gym, standing under a regulation-height basketball hoop with his toddler-size bouncy ball, getting ready to aim for a shot. He must have seen the big kids shooting baskets and decided to try it for himself. Erik tried to make a basket a couple of times (with the ball of course getting nowhere near the basket), then ran off to try something else.  It was really one of those “kodak moments” I wish I could have whipped out my camera quickly enough to catch.  Erik could not have enjoyed himself more for the hour and a half or so that we were at the gym.  It was like little boy heaven for him to have such a big space to run and play with balls and riding toys. Madeline’s highlight, on the other hand, was playing with another little girl her age she knows from church. She was quite disappointed when our friends from church left after we had only been there a short time. Eventually she managed to have a good time just running around and playing, but she would definitely pick pretending and playing with another little girl over running around any day.

After we arrived home, had lunch, and Erik went to take his nap, Madeline declared that it was Suzy Pig’s birthday. Suzy Pig is currently her favorite stuffed animal, and during the past few days Madeline has often been “taking care of” Suzy by making sure she has “food” any time Madeline is eating and giving Suzy pretend baths. So, now Madeline needed my help to throw a great birthday party for Suzy.    I managed to convince Madeline to wait until after Erik’s nap to get ready for the party, so we could use Erik’s nap time for some preschool activities and a few chores that seem to work better while Erik is out of the way.  But it took a lot of convincing.

As soon as Erik woke up, Madeline sprung into action.  She declared that we absolutely must clean the house (“for real!”) if we were going to have a proper party for Suzy.  Madeline insisted that I help her sweep the floor and pick up the toys. And she wanted to wipe off the floor under the table and clean the mirrors and glass too.  Sweet! Finally I had a daughter who was motivated to help out with chores! We really did work on getting the house clean for quite a while.  Once she gets started with it, Madeline always loves cleaning the floor-length mirror and the other glass that’s at her height, like the doors to the foyer and the lower cabinets in the built-in buffet.  This time, Erik also got into the act.  He followed Madeline around for a surprisingly long time, his own dry rag in hand, “cleaning” right behind Madeline.  I actually got a lot done in the kitchen with catching up on dishes and preparing dinner while the kids took fingerprints off the glass.

We never actually got around to having Suzy’s birthday yesterday.  We got a few Madeline-sanctioned decorations put up…like fake flower leis that fit perfectly around lamp shades and play bead neclaces hanging from window locks.  But, soon Tony arrived home from work and the play shifted toward running around the house playing tag with Daddy while I finished the dinner preparations. So, I would guess that an elaborate pretend birthday party for a small stuffed pig is ahead in my near future.

Now, if I can just capitalize on this idea of needing to clean the house for an Important Pretend Party (and we can have those parties a little more often), we might actually have a clean house a lot more frequently!

Would anyone care to guess how many items we have checked out from the Minneapolis Public Library system in the past year? Last fall our library system introduced a feature that allows users to track what they’ve checked out when they log into their accounts.  I checked today, and my history tracks back just a couple days more than a year…

…And including the almost 30 items we checked out today, we checked out 645 items! It seems like a lot, but it’s only an average of 12 per week.  While we don’t make it to the library every week, our check out receipt usually lists 15-20 items, so I guess that all adds up.   I would estimate that maybe 25% of those items were books for me, music CDs, movies, or educational computer games.  That means we read close to 500 children’s books from the library in the past year or so.

Many times we just find books off the shelves, looking for topics or titles that sound good or books from authors we know we enjoy.  I’ve also used a few other sources to find great books to read.  The book lists from Sonlight’s preschool curriculums and The “Before Five in A Row” and the “Five in a Row” series of books have many great titles.  Several websites also compile lists of favorite children’s books:

New York Public Library’s “100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know”

“The 100 Best Children’s Books” at Parenthood.com

Kidsreads.com “Classic Picture Books” list and “New Faves for Ages 3-8” list.

While I haven’t used them very much yet (so many books, so little time!), there are also several sources on the web to find lists of award-winning children’s litereature.  For example, this Children’s Book Awards page lists the most recent few years of winners of several different awards with convenient links to the books on amazon.com, while this page at the Scholastic website provides a basic list of winners of three of the most well-known awards through the years.  The Database of Award Winning Children’s Literature can be used to search through award lists to find books meeting various criteria.

Happy reading!