First Day of Kindergarten

Last week, my baby girl started school. For the first time ever. In her entire life.
Sure, she went to speech therapy all last year. But those sessions were only 45 minutes each, and the therapist had to pry her off my leg almost every time.
She's also been to Vacation Bible School twice, which is a week-long half a day program. The first time, she cried so badly when she glimpsed me walking by that her teacher told me never to walk by her class again. Her second time at VBS, I was her group leader.
And okay, she does go to Sunday School for 90 minutes every week. Even so, a few weeks ago, her Sunday School teacher had to come fetch me because she wouldn't quit crying. Luckily, her big brother is in the same class as her, so he's been assigned to stay by her at all times.

It was the only time that she actually wanted to stick with her brother.
I was afraid that she would have a hard time letting go on her first day. Instead, it was me left standing there all teary-eyed.

What in the world? I had sent two other kids off to school with nary a tear. Why was this time different?

And no, it was not my emotional time of the month, as the husband puts it.
Mommy, I had fun at school today! I colored and cut out an apple by myself! I talked to my teacher, too. I'm a big girl now!

Hail Patriot Day

Early this morning, my boy and his troop went to raise the flag at our neighborhood school.
That's one of the best things I like about the Boy Scouts of America, that they teach patriotism and love of country. As opposed to the fundraising, which I despise. I also adore their uniforms.
My boy was not even born when 9-11 happened. But he and his troop are the hope that sprang from it's ashes. We will not forget.

First Day of Homeschool

Here's how it went. The kids woke up at 10 am. An hour later, my oldest was sitting nicely at the table doing her math worksheets. My son was upside down on the couch chanting,"I don't wanna do homeschool, I don't wanna do homeschool..."

I actually caved in and gave him the choice of going back to public school or homeschooling. Just tell me, which one do you want to do?

None of them.

Good to know it's not just me.

So I had do school his way. He chose a book to read to me. He chose when to end math. As I read about nomads in ancient history, he walked around like a caveman devouring the toy food set. When he "depleted" all the food, he dumped the food somewhere else and devoured it all over again.

As we talked about amphibians and the life cycle of a frog, he leap-frogged and ribbetted around the living room.

Instead of writing a story in his journal, he ended writing all the titles of his favorite cartoons. They include Ice Age 1, Ice Age 2, Ice Age 3, Madagascar 1, Madagascar 2, Spiderman, Transformers, just to name a few. Then he drew pictures from each cartoon. He spent a good long time working on it.

He really enjoyed spelling time, only because he loved making up crazy sentences with each word. Such as, the baby made poopoo on the rug.

I spent less than an hour doing one-on-one with my daughter. The rest of the day was devoted to my boy. Finally, I had to get ready for work (the first day of which naturally has to fall on the first day of homeschool) and called it quits.

To my surprise and eventual annoyance, my boy kept coming around and asking,"Can we do more?" When the husband came home and asked how everything went, my son replied,"Homeschool was fun! I liked homeschool."

Yeah, I'll bet he did.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a puppet show about nouns and verbs. Will someone please shoot me.

Summer I Hardly Knew Ye

Summer is over. I figured it out last night as I was busy cleaning out a year's worth of paper crap in our file. You know, the file that supposedly has all the report cards, school notices, and let's not forget the bane of homeschooling - records and logs. People see the nice flat surface of the file, which is the only clean flat area in the room besides the floor, and just start piling stuff on it. Then they pile more stuff on it. It's like a black hole in our house.

Who am I kidding - every cabinet, closet, and shelf is a black hole in our house.

In the process of cleaning the file out, I found a 7 inch stack of unopened mail (so that's where our bills went!), a rebate check that we've been scouring for, 3 library books that were due a month ago, and a partridge in a pear tree.

I've put off the cleaning for the whole summer, just like I've put off everything else over the summer, but since school for the older two officially starts on Monday, I gave myself the "4 children with no epidural" pep talk and dove in. It's actually pretty good for a chronic procrastinator like me to start a whole 4 days before the deadline. Anal-retentive about cleaning and organization, I ain't. In our household, that would amount to insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Next on my organizing list is the bookshelf. You know, the bookshelf that supposedly has the kids' school books lined up nice and neatly so that they can just grab the right one and get to work themselves while I'm wiping the baby's poo off the floor. Except right now it's a big mess. We're using a swim floatie and baby powder as bookends. I'd love to post a picture of it, but unfortunately I can't find my camera. The last place I saw it was on the bookshelf.

When summer first started, I thought, yay, I finally have time to do all the things I need to do and had been putting off. Among the items on the list was revamping this blog. You can see how that went. I was very happy, however, to scratch off "drag all children to the swimming pool daily." Almost off the list is potty-training my youngest, which is otherwise known as "letting your child pee and poo all over himself and the carpet until the neighbors can smell it." Who wants to come over?

Only 4 more days till the end of summer. Who cares if it doesn't technically end until September 22. For all intents and purposes, it's gone. Sigh.

Note: It is 5 days later. School has begun. The bookshelf looks the same.