Some long awaited music

Friday turned out to be a pretty good day as far as the scheduling thing went.

We did chores, then had a learning time before it was time to take D to the bus. After the bus, I needed some stuff from another store, so we stopped by there, then did lunch and some free time. After free time, we started some music time. It seems like it's been a while since we've done an actual music time. For music time, we finally got out the paper plate things we had made and did some different beats for those, then we practiced some of the songs that the older kids will be singing in church in a couple of weeks. We only had about a half hour until the bus was coming after we finished music time, so I let W and H color for a bit.

Unfortunately, I got sick around that time and threw up after we got back from the bus, so the rest of the day wasn't happening. I think we did still read a couple of books though. But then we had a weekend full of sick kids after that, even for W's birthday on Sunday.

And today I kept B home from school because he threw up in the night last night, so I'm thinking a good portion of today will probably be a bit shot. Hopefully we'll still get some of the stuff in though.

We be jammin'

So there's one thing about my scheduling that I've wanted to make sure I could do, and that's to be a little bit flexible. If I wanted to have us do something a little different, I didn't want to be so obsessive about the schedule that I wouldn't let us do something a little spontaneous. So far I think I've succeeded with that.

It really did seem different today having both B and D away at school. It's a little bittersweet. I have to admit that I really did like the quiet, especially when both H and A were taking naps at the same time, so W was the only one awake. Talk about a change. But at the same time, I know that it's not going to be very long before my house is always quiet because they've grown up and moved on, probably before I'm ready for it. And I'm sure that when the time comes, I'll worry about whether or not I've done enough to prepare them for what lies in store, if I've taught them enough or let them experience enough. That's part of the reason I decided to do this schedule. I wanted to be able to look back and know that at least I tried and did my best.

The morning went pretty fast between the time we dropped B off at the bus stop and it was time to take D to the bus. I had been hoping to be able to do our adventure walk down to the park again for a bit, but breakfast and chores and those things ended up taking up most of the time. We did get to do a bit of our adventure walk while we were taking D to the bus stop though. It's really not far at all to take him to the bus stop, but we walked a little further and played a bit.

After we dropped D off, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I only had 3 kids with me and go to the store. It's amazing how much easier it is to take 3 kids to the store than to take 5. Most of the time I wait until my husband is home from work and either send him with a list or leave him with the kids while I go. The former seems to be what happens more often lately, which is actually pretty nice, since neither of us like to go shopping. So my husband is pretty nice to be willing to do it for me, even after a long and hard day at work.

H and A slept through our afternoon bit of learning time, but that meant that W got to take more time having fun with it. Quite often for our learning time, we'll either do flash cards with letters or numbers on them or we'll go visit www.starfall.com and he'll do the letter blocks or other activities there. He was even singing one of their songs while he was taking a bath before bed tonight, so that was fun.

While H and A were asleep, I took the opportunity to do a one-on-one activity with W. We made strawberry jam together. Not really a big thing, but he seemed to have a good time putting strawberries in the blender and helping me pour the ingredients into their bowls. He also did a pretty good job of stirring when it needed to be stirred. He was pretty excited to be able to tell D that we made some jam, since we were almost out of some and it's D's favorite.

After B and D got home from school, we did our story time and then they had some free play before dinner and baths. It's amazing how much fun it can be sometimes to have my kids sitting around me while I'm reading a book to them, especially when they really get into the story and react at different parts. Simple joys.

So with all that I did, I also did a few loads of laundry, fixed my vacuum cleaner, and unclogged the kids' bathroom toilet by taking the toilet off and using the toilet auger to be able to get the 5 big blocks out of there that H had managed to flush down it. The latter there would have been a lot more impressive if I hadn't managed to crack the tank in the process (it's a long story, but we'll just say I was tightening a bolt and thought I had a lot more time before I had to start to worry about that than I actually did).

I love being a mom.

Not yet

Today was D's first real day of school, so adjustments will be starting. But today wasn't a normal day, since we left the house for a couple of hours to go visiting teaching after we dropped D off at the bus stop and watched it drive away.

We made taking D to the bus today as part of our adventure walk, so we did get that in. We also had a good learning time and a good story time. But the day was broken up by the 3 trips to the bus stop. It will be interesting to figure out the adjustments when we have a regular day, which should be tomorrow.

First day of school

So with the first day of school being today, we did have to do things a little differently from normal, although it really didn't throw things off too much. The first adjustment was pretty early though. Instead of getting up, eating breakfast, getting dressed, then doing chores, we got up, got dressed, walked B to the bus stop, then came home and ate breakfast and then did chores.

We did our adventure walk to the park today. D said he killed 300 werewolves on the way there. W just killed a few zombies. They're silly boys.

We did our learning time after the adventure walk, then took some time to make some sugar cookies before lunch. I had been promising the kids that we'd make cookies for a few days now, so we finally took the time to do it.

After free time it was time to take D over to the school for his kindergarten orientation. When we got back from that, we made frosting for our cookies, frosted them, then walked back over to the bus stop to pick up B after school.

The nice thing with when we typically do reading/story time is that it comes during the time the older kids would be doing their homework. And their homework usually consists of reading for 20 minutes. So they just do what they would have done anyway.

Wednesday will be a bigger adjustment, having D leave for school in the middle of the day, so we'll see how it goes after then.

Last day before school

It seems so strange that school is already starting on Tuesday, so I have to adjust the schedule a bit. But that's okay.

You may be wondering why there's no post for Friday. Yeah, Friday didn't work out so well. We actually spent a bit more time than usual cleaning since we had family staying overnight that night. And D got up and ate breakfast, then fell back asleep on the couch until noon. I figured if he was actually sleeping, he probably needed it, so I let him sleep. We did manage to get in a story time at least, so that was something.

Since today was the last day before school starts, I decided that we'd have another outing day and try to make it a pretty fun last day of summer break for them. We decided to go to the local fish and game nature center. There are some nice paths to walk and ponds and gardens. The kids really like the ponds, especially the viewing windows where they can see the fish in the water from the side and watch the fish swimming past them. And there are some pretty big fish in there, so it's fun to see. I do think their favorite part was when we walked by the river and they got to see a snake. Yes, D tried stepping on its tail to make it have to stay there so he could really see it, but it took off pretty fast. Those things can really move. W was a bit upset because he didn't get to see it and wanted us to go find it.

Our outing took more time than I thought it would, so by the time we got home and had some free play, it was time to go over to the school for their meet the teacher night. The day went pretty fast and it will be interesting to see how we end up working things out when school is in session.

Coloring themselves

It took a bit to get started this morning. It was another of those mornings where they just really didn't want to do their chores, so they'd get distracted cleaning up their toys by starting to play with them, so it took probably 2 hours for them to actually get everything cleaned up.

On today's adventure walk, they decided that we were hunting for thieves who would use robotic bees to look for things to steal. They would find little notes and information along the way, especially at any houses in our neighborhood that are up for sell, that would give tips on how to trap the thieves. And of course, they all had to take turns telling me what the notes said. Kids have really good imaginations sometimes.

I got an email today that talked about how a three year-old, almost four year-old (the age W is right now) can begin to understand that those lines and markings in books and papers actually form words and numbers. I'm thinking they're being conservative on their estimations, since when we do learning time, W is pretty good at knowing almost all his letters and can recognize numbers up to 100 already, although sometimes he needs some help remembering that 91 is ninety-one, not nine-one. And I really kind of assume that my kids are about average intellectually, so it's not some amazing thing that he can do that. B did teach himself how to read before he started Kindergarten though. But D still doesn't know quite all of the letters and he starts Kindergarten next week. So kids all develop and learn at different rates.

For art time today, I took some construction plan paper (I don't know if there's a formal term for it...they're just big sheets of paper that are about 3 feet long and 2 feet wide) and had each of the kids lie on them while I traced the outlines of their bodies and then let them color them. They all kept wanting me to come see how they colored theirs, and they all did things differently. Although if they saw something someone else was doing that they thought was pretty cool, they'd do that too. After D put 8 pairs of eyes on himself, the rest of them decided that maybe theirs needed eyes too. It was pretty funny. H keeps taking his picture and lying down by it. He thinks it's pretty cool to have a picture as big as he is. Since B and D are both a bit too long for the paper, they both bent their legs and came up with pictures that look like they're jumping. I was going to just let their legs be cut off, but they wanted to have their whole bodies on there, and that's what we came up with.

So another slow start, but an ultimately successful day.

Zoo day!

It's sad for me to realize that today was the last Wednesday Outing Day before my kids are back in school. This summer has gone by so quickly, especially these last few weeks. I've loved having all my kids around and am going to miss them while they're away at school. But at the same time, it's nice that they'll be back in school. There are times when they've been teasing their siblings or something along those lines that have made me wish they could have been at school then. It's just nice that more often than not, I've been glad to have them around.

So anyway, as you can tell from the title, we went to the zoo for our outing day. We go often enough to the zoo that we bought a zoo pass. Even with half of our kids being young enough to get in free, it still ends up saving us money to buy the zoo pass. And having it, we're more likely to go spend a day at the zoo and getting out to do something than if we didn't have it. My kids love going to the zoo, even though they've seen all the animals before. And since H is only 2, he's really fun to take. He gets so excited to see each kind of animal and tells all the people around him what he's seeing.

After we finished seeing all the animals at the zoo, we had a picnic on the big lawn area they have across the parking lot. Just simple sandwiches, chips, and string cheese, but the kids all said that was actually their favorite part of our outing. They got to play hide and seek tag around the trees and just had a good time. Yes, you read that right. Hide and seek tag. The seeker would have to tag the people after they were found to determine who was the next seeker. It was fun to watch them play.

After a little bit of free play time when we got home, we had a game time and then a longer story time. I always think it's a good thing when my kids want us to read more, so I'm willing to keep reading and not cut it short. I know I love reading and hope they'll develop that same love as they get older.

National cupcake day

Usually on Tuesdays we have music day, but since it was National Cupcake Day, we decided to make and decorate some cupcakes to celebrate. Hey, any excuse for a cupcake, right? Usually I'm pretty obsessive about the way things get done, especially when they have the potential to get pretty messy, but I decided to let the kids do most of the work themselves, from turning on the oven to filling the cupcake cups. They actually seemed to have a good time doing it, but they did have me help them fill the cups. And the bonus was that we got to eat the rewards of our work after.

Other than switching from music to cupcakes, it was a pretty typical day. B was especially good in the morning and did all his chores before I could have a chance to remind him to do them.

So it's all still going well. :)

Cardboard boxes and duct tape

This week started out pretty good. We had a typical Monday with an adventure walk (hunting ghosts and mud monsters this time), game time, story time, and of course, art time.

We made a cardboard box house for art time. We broke down a bunch of cardboard boxes that we had, picked a wall in our house, and started building a cardboard house by it. We taped the boxes together for walls and taped them to the wall and then used another box for the roof. Since we used diaper boxes, we did them with the picture side in so the kids could use their crayons after it was set up and decorate the outside walls. They seemed to have a good time building it, and it was a nice change from just coloring pictures. Of course, they had as much or more fun destroying it after it was all built and have since used the boxes as stair sleds.

One nice thing lately is that the kids seem to be getting the hang of this routine and will do their morning chores before I even need to ask them to do them. Sometimes it will still take them a while, and sometimes there's still some grumbling about it, but they're getting used to and anticipating the things they need to do.

I only wish I had started this earlier in the summer, since school starts for the 2 oldest next week. That will mean an adjustment in the daily schedule, but might make it easier in some ways, since I won't have to try to cater things to both the older and the younger kids.

Week 2, Day 4

Thursday started out pretty well. We cleaned up and then went on another adventure walk. My kids choose interesting subjects to search for when we go on these walks. This time, we were chasing after the zombies who stole all our food. Along the way, B would find more information on how to defeat them, such as hitting them with chicken wings. And they actually wanted to walk further than I thought they would, so it wasn't as fast as an adventure as I thought.

We had our usual learning time and lunch and all that fun stuff. For art time, we colored the back side of some plates and glued them together with unpopped popcorn kernels inside to make something we can use for our next music time. They seemed to have a good time with that, but B and D both got themselves put into time out for quite a while after they played with the glue gun in the less than 30 seconds I had gone to get another glue stick. B had squirted some out onto the paper I had below it to catch the drippings and D decided that it would be fun to put the paper with the big glob of hot glue on H's leg, burning him. And some skin came off with the glue when I pulled that off. And it didn't help that H had a fever of close to 103 at the time, either.

We did get in a bit of a story time after the hot glue incident, but not very long. And that incident kind of messed up the rest of the day, which was almost over anyway.

Oh, and my parents are in town right now, so I won't be doing a post for Friday, since we won't really be sticking to the schedule on Friday.

Week 2, Day 3

There continues to be a bit of grumbling occasionally, but once we get into activities, the kids seem to have fun.

We cheated a little and went to the play group at the park instead of doing music time. I just keep thinking that it won't be long before it will really get too cold to spend a lot of time outside, so we might as well take advantage of it while we can. Plus, they got the added bonus of being able to socialize and play with other kids. That's something they actually don't get to do a whole lot. I remember when I was growing up and all the kids were home during the summer, so there were always a lot of kids to play with. But times have changed. With more women working and not staying home with their kids, there aren't a lot of kids out playing. My kids' best friends are usually at day care instead of home to have someone to go play with. I think that's a little bit sad, and one aspect of the whole women's lib movement that is more of a drawback. But that's just my opinion.

At game time, we played UNO. Most of my kids are younger than the recommended age for that, but they really seem to understand how to play it. And I figure, if nothing else, they are more familiar with numbers and patterns as they play. They have a good time playing it, especially when they beat Mom.

So overall, I'd say we had another fairly successful day.

Week 2, Day 2

Tuesday was one of those days where sometimes everything went smoothly, sometimes it didn't.

We switched outing day to Tuesday so we could go to the last free movie of this summer at the local theater. They were showing Madagascar 2 and the kids have wanted to see that and hadn't yet, so we went. They all really liked the movie and it was fun, despite W's whining through parts of it and H's not wanting to sit still (not uncommon for a 2 year-old). And of course, A fell asleep right before we left, woke up when we got there, and fell back asleep when it was time to go. While they were all mostly good, it would have been nice to have had an extra pair of hands there to help occasionally. But it wasn't bad.

One part where it didn't work out so well was when it took them an hour to clean up their toys after free time. I need to figure out a way to get them to do that faster. Since they were B's toys, I would have had the rest of us move on to game time while he cleaned up, but everyone else was playing with them too, so it wouldn't have been fair to not let him play when everyone else helped make the mess. Any suggestions on that one would be nice. It was just one of those situations where some of my tricks, like playing songs and having them try to get everything done before the song ends, wouldn't have really worked.

They all enjoyed story time again, although there was a bit of a hassle getting to it. When I told them to go pick out some books while I was working on getting a first part of dinner started, somehow they decided that it meant, "go find the baby oil and squirt it at each other, on the walls, and on the floor." That made for a very cranky mom, let me tell you. But once it was all cleaned up (and they still have oil in their hair, despite several washings), we had a fairly decent story time. And they were better at cleaning up the books after it was over.

It was a day where I was very glad when bedtime came around, although there was a nice accident at bedtime when H tried climbing on D's bed from B's bed and fell and scraped up his back nicely. I'm hoping Wednesday goes better.

Week 2, Day 1

Today was another day where sometimes everything went smoothly and sometimes there was a bit of rebellion. But we worked through it and the rebellion would be short-lived.

We went on another adventure walk today, this time combining W's and D's wishes. We went on our way to find Pirate Island and to help the pirates fight off the bears that were overtaking the place. Pirate Island was a small park that is at the end of a neighboring subdivision, although the subdivisions are connected. So not only did the kids get to have a bit of fun, we got the added bonus of getting a bit of exercise with the close to 2 mile round trip walk.

It was art day again today, but with the longer walk, time was a bit shorter than usual, so they once again just colored in their notebooks. I was doing some laundry, so I took the opportunity to fold and put some away while they were coloring. That was also how I spent their free play time and the time when they were cleaning up the books after story time. With 5 kids in the family, we can end up with a lot of laundry sometimes. That's why I end up doing laundry 3 days out of the week usually. Sometimes it's more often than that.

I really think the kids are doing well so far with this whole scheduling thing. Already they seem to not want to watch as much TV, even when they can during free time. They'd rather get out their toys and play. And the piles and piles of books they wanted me to read today were fun to see, even though we didn't get through all of them. It makes me feel a little bad that I wasn't more dedicated to doing this earlier.

End of the first full week

After a shaky start, today hasn't turned out too bad. When I finally got the kids to come downstairs to actually do stuff, they seemed to have fun.

After chores in the morning, we do a learning time. Usually I try to help the younger kids learn their letters and numbers, and I did start with that. We didn't do that for very long today though, and went on to learning about cats and spiders (they picked what we learned about today). Since I have boys, they were more interested in the spiders. And then thought it was pretty cool and funny when they went into the bathroom after and there was a spider climbing up the wall.

We had music time today and pulled out different things we could make instruments out of: a metal plant holder, empty milk cartons with some unpopped popcorn kernels, a 2-liter bottle filled partway with water, and some spoons. After we made a lot of noise with those, I pulled out our seldom-used guitar and showed them how each string plays a different note and how you can change the pitch of the notes by pushing on the strings. They really had a lot of fun strumming on it and all wanted their turn strumming with the pick. They did get a little impatient waiting their turn and would get a little mad fighting over that, but for the most part they were very cooperative.

I think for the most part, it's been a very successful first week. I haven't been as lazy as I was before and my kids seem to get into less trouble and fight less when we're doing these things. Sure, they still get in trouble occasionally, and they still fight, but it's less often than before. Or maybe I'm just more patient with them. In either case, I'd say it's a good thing.

Since their dad is working late tonight, we're going to have a movie night after dinner with popcorn and maybe chocolate milkshakes. I think they're excited to play with Mom.

Thursday's day

Yesterday seemed to work out pretty well. Some things took longer than they should have, but that's okay. We didn't get to do the normal schedule, since I had to take my youngest in for her well child check-up, but that actually just made the day go faster.

Since it was Thursday, that meant it was art day. They still just colored and had a good time doing it. I spent most of art time printing out coloring pages for them to do. They kept wanting more and more. And then of course, they wanted to put their colored pictures up on the wall. By themselves. With thumbtacks. Lots of thumbtacks.

They seem to really enjoy story time lately. They'll have us read together for an hour and a half usually. And lately they always want to start with "Wacky Wednesday" by Dr. Seuss. They like finding all the wacky things in the pictures.

And today so far isn't going as well. The kids are rebelling a bit, and sometimes I just don't feel like fighting them. Really, they're just doing things a little slower than usual, so it's not too bad. They did actually clean up their toys (and have probably made a mess with them again already) and made their beds and did all that part that I asked them to. They've just been avoiding coming down when I've called them to move on to the next item. I think I'll just blame it on the fact that we're into our second day of rain here, and that always seems to affect their moods. Hopefully it will get better though, especially since their dad is working late tonight.

Another day

So on Tuesday my kids ended up basically having a free day because I wasn't feeling well. They still had a few things they had to do, but for the rest of the day they were able to just play. It's a good thing they can entertain themselves pretty well.

Yesterday ended up being a good day, despite the fact that it took the kids twice as long to do their cleaning as it should have. I guess they liked cleaning up toys, since they dumped out a couple of their toy containers after they had cleaned up almost all their toys. Silly kids.

Since it was Wednesday, it was out outing day. We went to the park for our outing. Well, two parks, actually. Our church has a play group on Wednesday mornings at a park in one of the subdivisions, so we showed up at the end of that. They have a wooden step/walkway thing at the park there, and it was missing one of the wood planks. The boys made sure they showed me that it was missing, but apparently H forgot about it, since a few minutes later, he was walking across the walkway and stepped right into the hole where the plank should have been, hitting his chin on the way down. He's got a nice scraped-up chin now. After the short time at the play group, the boys wanted to go to the park that had teeter totters, but they were redoing their bark chips in it, so they had taken the teeter totters down. I decided to take them to the park by where the kids had taken their swimming lessons. They had a good time playing on all the equipment and with some of the other kids there. The park there has a toy that I don't think I've ever seen at another park. It's a long almost boat-like toy with benches on either end, and they can rock it and make it slide back and forth. They spent most of their time playing on that one.

Later in the day, we had our game time, story time, and we did a music time, since we had missed it the day before when I wasn't feeling well. I was just going to skip music time, but B really wanted us to do it, so we did. This time, we just put on different kinds of music and danced. Sometimes I'd have the kids clap to the beat and sometimes we'd all grab hands and spin in circles.

It was another fun day.

First Real Day

So today was the first day where I tried to actually follow the schedule. I do have to admit that no, I still haven't done the white board with the schedule so the kids know what's coming up. I really do want to get it up, but I hesitate to bring the white board in, since it's got the pen holder thingy on the bottom (what is that thing called anyway?) and I'm sure that if it's up on the wall in our house, I'm going to constantly be running into it and giving myself bruises.

I actually felt like I was coming closer to being a supermom today though. I still had to deal with kids who didn't necessarily want to do what we were doing, but when they got into it, they had a good time. Just for an example of what I did today, I did 4 loads of laundry, we straightened the house, we went on a giant troll hunt, we colored pictures and built houses out of Jenga blocks, and we had story time. Throw in mealtimes and a couple of snack times and a few other little things, and you have my day. It was a fun day though.

The giant troll hunt was our outdoor activity this morning. Basically, we took the dog on a walk and I let the kids each pick a direction when we'd get to a new street and had them choose what we were going to go find. They picked a giant troll. He lived in a volcano. Along the way, we had to go through the mosquito forest and had to find our magic wands and had to avoid turning into trolls ourselves. Our goal in finding the giant troll was to find out if he was a mean troll and we'd have to fight and defeat him or if he was a nice troll who was going to give us Otter Pops. The volcano ended up being back at our house. Hopefully it won't burn up with all that lava. And of course, the giant troll ended up being very nice and even set out a blanket for us to eat our Otter Pops out on the grass in the front. W keeps asking if we can go on another adventure. This time he wants it to be a pirate adventure.

So again I feel good about the day and am really glad I've decided to do this. I've already made a few adjustments to my original schedule, but I knew I'd end up doing that as I tried things. Hopefully more things will work than don't.