Another outing

As I thought would happen, Tuesday was kind of a bust. Yes, I did read them a few stories, but mostly they played with toys and things during the day. And they did get in some time on starfall, learning letters.

Wednesday went much better though. I switched things around a little bit though. After we took B to the bus and then had breakfast and did chores, we did story time. I figured that D is supposed to have at least 20 minutes a day of reading for school anyway, so it was a good time to do it and help him be ready for more later in the day. I wanted to do it earlier, especially when I knew that we wouldn't have much time after school with D having soccer practice.

We drove D to school instead of having him ride the bus, just because the ride to school is a really, really long one as they pick up all the kindergarten kids who ride the bus. And I didn't want him to be on the bus and then revert to his diarrhea of the day before and not be able to get to a bathroom. After we dropped D off at the bus, we stopped by a bookstore to look for a cd I wanted to get, but they didn't have it there. Then we went on our weekly outing.

This time we basically just took a drive over to the lake. They have a visitor's center at the lake since it's also a wild animal preserve, but we decided not to go in since we hadn't really come prepared with a stroller for the baby. Instead, we parked near the boat launch and then walked down to their docks to look at the water. It had a nice film of algae in it, so I was glad we weren't planning on swimming that day. We watched a couple of fish jump for bugs and looked at some birds that were hanging out in the water. I think next time we'll be a little more prepared and bring the stroller with us so we can check out the visitor's center.

After we left the lake, we went for a bit of a drive past some orchards and then around the one edge of the lake. H's favorite part was when we passed by a field that had a bunch of goats in it. He really wanted to see more goats.

After the drive, we came home for some lunch and they had a free play time for a bit. I let the kids color for a bit after some free play before it was time to go pick up the older kids from the bus. The older kids surprised us by getting home earlier than they had been, so they were almost home by the time we were starting to leave. But we went for a little walk as they got home so B's friend could ask his grandpa if he could come over and play. That one caused a bit of panic for his friend's grandpa, since his friend got off on his stop and is supposed to get off on the next stop. But after a bit of a tongue-lashing about not going places without checking in first, B's friend was able to come play until we had to leave for soccer practice.

It's amazing how quickly the day goes sometimes when the older kids are in school. It seems sometimes as though we've barely taken them to the bus to go to school, when it's suddenly time to pick them up. And they're all growing up too fast.