Week 3 - Tuesday, 8/21

It's Bug's birthday today!  My baby has crossed from single into double digits.  This has hit me harder than I was expecting.  I'm accustomed to the "they grow so fast, treasure these times" comments, but never really appreciated them until I gave my daughter a hug on her last night as a single digit kid.  I choked up and blinked back a few tears.  I'm not usually this way at birthdays.  I love watching my daughters grow, seeing the people they are becoming through God's love and gifts of the Spirit.  I have never pined for the days of stinky diapers, projectile vomiting, and sleepless nights.  I have never wished to once again strap on my Baby Bjorn and hop on the treadmill, walking for hours at a time because it was the only way my colicky Bug would stop crying between 6 and 11 every night.  And yet, last night, seeing her long limbs spread across the bed, I did suddenly and painfully miss the tiny thing that was no longer than my forearm.  How did an entire decade go by so fast?

We have quite a few fun birthday traditions in our house.  The first is that the birthday girl gets to spend her last night of her age snuggled up with Daddy watching a movie of her choice.  This came about when Bug was still little and, being adverse to all change, didn't want to change her age and would cry the night before her birthday.  My husband came up with the movie night as a way to distract her and start the birthday fun early.  Last night Bug and Daddy watched The Princess Diaries.  He threw out a few different options, but he lives in a world of princesses and took her request good naturedly.

Our other traditions all occur on the day of and they start first thing in the morning when the birthday girl comes down to the kitchen to find a new outfit and her presents laid out on the table for her.  This comes from my parents, who would do the same for me, minus the new outfit, but with a fresh coffee cake.  I loved having a magical start to my birthdays and made sure that we would give the girls  great mornings on their special days.  Bug loved her new outfit and all the gifts from her sisters, Nana and Dzia-Dzia (pronouned Ja-Ja - Polish for Grandpa), and Daddy and me.

In our house, birthdays do not exempt you from school, so as soon as breakfast was done and Daddy was off to work, we were headed down to the school room.  Bear was in a silly mood and didn't want to do her reading today.  I told her that she had to and so she read her entire Time4Learning story in a whisper.  During this time Bug and Boo finished up Lesson 3 in their A Reason for Handwriting workbooks, copying out their verses and coloring in the pictures.  I really like this program because it gives a perfect amount of work to do each day, and they have a presentable finished project at the end of each lesson/week.  The fact that they are copying out Bible verses is a terrific bonus.  I laminate the final pieces and we use them for place mats at dinner on Sundays.  Everyone takes a turn reading their verse and showing the picture.

After her computer time, Bear moved to graphing in math and then her Reading Street program.  The book this week was Plaidypus Lost, by Susan Stevens Crummel.  I love the word play in the title.  The toy is made from an old plaid shirt, so it's not a platypus, but a plaidypus.  Makes me smile just to write that.  :o)  I also find the story to be very true to life, as I have done my fair share of returning to stores, parks, and libraries to find the lost lovey.  I did it enough times that I had to make the rule that loveys never leave the house, even for car rides.  If you bring a toy somewhere it had better be one you won't mind losing. 

By 11:30 Bear had completed her drawing of the plaidypus at the beginning of the story and the  plaida-polka-stripe-a-pus at the end, she was done for the day and I could turn my full attention to the older two.  Bug had a math review, and with a reminder to not let it take more than an hour, she went right to work.  Boo was continuing a lesson on story problems and breezed through her workbook and review assignments.  Bug completed her review at the same time that Boo was wrapping up hers and so I let Boo have some play time while I corrected Bug's math and we reworked problems that she had missed.  She had ten multi-step story problems and she made mistakes on six of them because she didn't answer the final question.  She would solve for a part of it, but would then move on without realizing that there was more work to be done.  She is usually spot on with math and when I asked her what had happened she told me that she was trying to work quickly and kept worrying that she was taking too long on each problem so she didn't reread or double check her work.  It was a reminder to me that I need to just let go of my time issues and let her work at the pace that suits her best.  That's a huge benefit to being homeschooled, and yet I lose sight of that and get focused on the clock again and again.



After math I decided that we should break for lunch.  It looks like this will be our routine on days when we have mornings at home.  The big girls can usually get all their independent work and math done before lunch time, leaving reading and history for the afternoon.  Bug wanted to go to In&Out for her birthday lunch, and took advantage of a new policy that I instituted on Bear's birthday: Birthday girl gets both fries and a milkshake.  Boo looked on with an expression that let me know where we are headed in a month for her birthday lunch.  :o)  Bug took advantage of her lunch break and spoke to Grandma, Papa, Nana, Dzia-Dzia, and Aunti Em (I kid you not - that is what she likes to be called).  Then, while Bug watched a bit of a Harry Potter movie and enjoyed her shake, I got online and on the phone to work out gymnastics and tumbling classes for the girls and their best friends.  It makes life much easier if I can schedule them for things with their friends as there will be a second mom to help should a kid get sick, or I have a headache and can't drive, and vice-verse.  We worked out a way for all six girls to be in classes that take place in the same building at the same time.  I'm so thrilled that we managed to pull that off!  :o)

After lunch Bug took her reader, Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry, and disappeared into her room.  Boo chose to sit at her desk and read her book, Sing Down the Moon by Scott O'Dell, filling in the answers to the comprehension questions as she came to them.  Bear laid on the floor by the play kitchen and babbled to herself.  I tried to figure out what she was going on about, but she was so quiet her words were difficult to understand and I wasn't about to break the spell by asking what she was doing.  It was a very quiet hour and I managed to get in a load of laundry and write this post up to this very point. (I just put that in because I always wonder when people find the time to blog.)

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And it turns out that was all the time I had to blog this week! There was dinner at a pizza place on Bug's birthday, lots of school work, babysitting my littlest niece, prepping for the Water Bash Sleepover on Friday night, staying up 'til 2am, a pool party on Saturday, pulling together presents for my husband's birthday, dinner out to celebrate, church, lunch with family to celebrate my husband's birthday along with Bug's on Sunday, and another pool party. I'm exhausted and am going to wrap up this post as is. Maybe I'll come back and add more later...

Linking up to the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.