I knew we had officially moved to kindergarten-land, and away from Ree's nice sheltered past, when she showed me an ad for the shoes she wants. A girl in her class has them, and Ree loves them. And they were on sale for $59.99. There is nothing particularly special about them other than being cute. No magical powers. They cannot be used for any sports or Antarctic treks. They are just sneakers. They are $60 sneakers for a (now!) six-year-old. Thank goodness Ree has at least a basic understanding of money and is okay with not getting them (for now).
Kindergarten is definitely influencing the things she says, both the topics of discussion as well as the delivery. She now must gush over things while proclaiming disgust at others. One of my favorite comments of the week was, "Don't you just love Blu-Rays? The quality is just so much better." True, definitely, but most likely not an original thought.
When Ree was younger my thought regarding food was always, "I will get as much good stuff in as I can, while I can." The first two years of her life were filled with whole grains and organic produce. She began her love affair with junk food the summer before she turned three, and last year she proclaimed herself a "junkfoodatarian." Going to kindergarten and eating lunch at school is taking the love to a whole new level. On the second or third night of school she asked what she was going to have for dessert the next thing, and which point I gently reminded her we didn't eat dessert with lunch every single day. (Yes, I still have a monster sweet tooth. And, yes, mothers are allowed to be complete hypocrites.)
Among other things, Ree has discovered Cheetos, and she is in love. (And I have to admit, if I am going for a completely chemical-laden product, Cheetos are pretty high on the list. But I managed to hide this from her for a long time.) Incidentally, Natalia has also discovered Cheetos and is in love. The differences between the oldest and youngest children...
Friday, August 24, 2012
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Last Weekend
A friend asked how my weekend was. The question caught me off guard, and I had no response. I am happy to say that after some pondering, I managed to figure out where at least some of the time went. This is taken from my response to her.
Last weekend was good. Lazy, but good. On Saturday morning, Jeff and Ree ran errands. While they were gone, I attacked Mt. Laundry and did puzzles with Leon and Michael at the dining room table while attempting to wrangle Natalia away. Jeff and Ree got back a little after ten ("morning" in our house is defined as about 6-9am). Jeff then took the three big kids to my parents' house where they could play while he watched soccer. While they were gone, Natalia and I took a long walk in search of yard sales. The yard sales were all over long before we arrived, but we did scout out a park not too far from our neighborhood that just opened. We will definitely have to go back and play. When we got back to the house, I took a shower while Natalia dutifully trashed the bathroom. She also found every bath toy in the house and launched them into the shower. (I really need to teach her to shout, "Incoming!" or something. After the first few hits, I got much more adept at hearing the shower curtain rustle and dodging the flying boats.) Jeff brought the big kids home, and then he took off for a soccer clinic around 12:30. I fed 'em all lunch, and we all went down for naps. I actually got to sleep for over an hour. Crazy! We have been trying a lot of new recipes lately, and for dinner, I managed to find an awesome recipe for stir-fried chicken and broccoli. I let the kids play outside after dinner, and I felt horrible when I realized I had no idea when I last took them outside to play. It's been a LONG time.
Sunday morning Ree and I went to the grocery store to pick up stuff on sale this week and to a party store to get stuff for her birthday party. (She is having a luau-themed party with a small group of friends from preschool and kindergarten. I am very excited about her birthday cake. We shall see if my version even remotely resembles that.) Jeff left for soccer again at noon. Although the kids tend to be too wired to nap on Mommy Days, they managed to take naps again on Sunday. Even Ree slept, and I managed to work out while the house was quiet. I tried another new recipe for dinner, and it was not that great. (I seem to be having one great experience and one "eh" experience a weekend with new recipes.) It stormed all afternoon, so playing outside after dinner was not an option. So, instead of getting exercise and fresh air, I took the kids to Dunkin' Donuts for dessert. (I had planned on taking them for ice cream, but Michael always picks donuts over ice cream, and in the scheme of things, donuts are much cheaper and probably less sugar since they are each only allowed to eat one. At least that is what I tell myself while licking the icing crumbs off my fingers.) Sunday night I actually remembered it was a school night (I've been having trouble with that on Sunday), and I got the kids AND me to bed on time.
Monday was my super mommy errand day. I took Leon, Michael, and Natalia to Dollar Tree, the library, a hippie grocery store, and to Walmart, and was back home by a little after noon. It was all good except Walmart which was, well, Walmart. But that is to be expected, I suppose. After that it was time to make lunch for the kids, pick up Ree from the bus, and hide and work since I work a half day from home on Monday. And another week of life began...
Last weekend was good. Lazy, but good. On Saturday morning, Jeff and Ree ran errands. While they were gone, I attacked Mt. Laundry and did puzzles with Leon and Michael at the dining room table while attempting to wrangle Natalia away. Jeff and Ree got back a little after ten ("morning" in our house is defined as about 6-9am). Jeff then took the three big kids to my parents' house where they could play while he watched soccer. While they were gone, Natalia and I took a long walk in search of yard sales. The yard sales were all over long before we arrived, but we did scout out a park not too far from our neighborhood that just opened. We will definitely have to go back and play. When we got back to the house, I took a shower while Natalia dutifully trashed the bathroom. She also found every bath toy in the house and launched them into the shower. (I really need to teach her to shout, "Incoming!" or something. After the first few hits, I got much more adept at hearing the shower curtain rustle and dodging the flying boats.) Jeff brought the big kids home, and then he took off for a soccer clinic around 12:30. I fed 'em all lunch, and we all went down for naps. I actually got to sleep for over an hour. Crazy! We have been trying a lot of new recipes lately, and for dinner, I managed to find an awesome recipe for stir-fried chicken and broccoli. I let the kids play outside after dinner, and I felt horrible when I realized I had no idea when I last took them outside to play. It's been a LONG time.
Sunday morning Ree and I went to the grocery store to pick up stuff on sale this week and to a party store to get stuff for her birthday party. (She is having a luau-themed party with a small group of friends from preschool and kindergarten. I am very excited about her birthday cake. We shall see if my version even remotely resembles that.) Jeff left for soccer again at noon. Although the kids tend to be too wired to nap on Mommy Days, they managed to take naps again on Sunday. Even Ree slept, and I managed to work out while the house was quiet. I tried another new recipe for dinner, and it was not that great. (I seem to be having one great experience and one "eh" experience a weekend with new recipes.) It stormed all afternoon, so playing outside after dinner was not an option. So, instead of getting exercise and fresh air, I took the kids to Dunkin' Donuts for dessert. (I had planned on taking them for ice cream, but Michael always picks donuts over ice cream, and in the scheme of things, donuts are much cheaper and probably less sugar since they are each only allowed to eat one. At least that is what I tell myself while licking the icing crumbs off my fingers.) Sunday night I actually remembered it was a school night (I've been having trouble with that on Sunday), and I got the kids AND me to bed on time.
Monday was my super mommy errand day. I took Leon, Michael, and Natalia to Dollar Tree, the library, a hippie grocery store, and to Walmart, and was back home by a little after noon. It was all good except Walmart which was, well, Walmart. But that is to be expected, I suppose. After that it was time to make lunch for the kids, pick up Ree from the bus, and hide and work since I work a half day from home on Monday. And another week of life began...
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Kindergarten
Ree is already on her fourth week of kindergarten, and she is still loving it. She pretty much likes everything about it, and this is the happiest I have seen her in a long, long time. (Not that she was unhappy before; she is just glowing now.) We are going to enjoy this enchantment while it lasts!
On the other hand, the rest of us are still adjusting. We are suddenly having to get another person out the door by 6:55 each morning. And the silly school district insists on having school five days a week, which just does not work with our family's previously established slacker four-day work week. I am typically a morning person, and until Ree started kindergarten, I could count on one hand the number of times I had overslept in my life. I've already overslept twice on kindergarten days, and both times were due to me sleeping right through my alarm. Granted it's not the loudest (I use my cell phone on vibrate on a flat surface so as not to disturb Natalia if she is within a city block of the alarm), but it normally wakes me every day. I even woke up the same way when Leon and Michael were newborns. And I know I was tired then!
But there are some benefits to the new schedule too. I have to make Ree's lunch at night, and consequently I am making my lunch at night instead of scrambling to grab containers of leftovers in the morning. And because we are planning for her lunches, we actually have a lot more lunch food and fruit in the house, which we are all benefiting from. Never knowing when Natalia will wake up (and insist on being held until I peel her off me as I walk out the door), I get ready for work before I get Ree up. That gives me time to sit down and eat breakfast at the table with her each day. I haven't eaten a weekday breakfast at the table since college.
I drop Ree off at the bus on my way to work. On mornings when we have extra time, she actually chooses to head to the bus early rather than play. We then get some time to just talk and watch the sunrise and the cars go by. And that is a wonderful way to start the day. It even almost makes up for the early mornings.
On the other hand, the rest of us are still adjusting. We are suddenly having to get another person out the door by 6:55 each morning. And the silly school district insists on having school five days a week, which just does not work with our family's previously established slacker four-day work week. I am typically a morning person, and until Ree started kindergarten, I could count on one hand the number of times I had overslept in my life. I've already overslept twice on kindergarten days, and both times were due to me sleeping right through my alarm. Granted it's not the loudest (I use my cell phone on vibrate on a flat surface so as not to disturb Natalia if she is within a city block of the alarm), but it normally wakes me every day. I even woke up the same way when Leon and Michael were newborns. And I know I was tired then!
But there are some benefits to the new schedule too. I have to make Ree's lunch at night, and consequently I am making my lunch at night instead of scrambling to grab containers of leftovers in the morning. And because we are planning for her lunches, we actually have a lot more lunch food and fruit in the house, which we are all benefiting from. Never knowing when Natalia will wake up (and insist on being held until I peel her off me as I walk out the door), I get ready for work before I get Ree up. That gives me time to sit down and eat breakfast at the table with her each day. I haven't eaten a weekday breakfast at the table since college.
I drop Ree off at the bus on my way to work. On mornings when we have extra time, she actually chooses to head to the bus early rather than play. We then get some time to just talk and watch the sunrise and the cars go by. And that is a wonderful way to start the day. It even almost makes up for the early mornings.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Catching My Breath
I can't believe I really just went almost a month without posting. That's so unlike me, but the last month has been busy. Not remotely exciting, but busy. Ree started kindergarten (well, I suppose that is exciting!) and we've mostly just been juggling things trying not to slip too far behind in everything.
Things have been off-kilter at our house for awhile. We just cannot find our groove. Things started getting weird last October. They got a little worse in November with vacation, Disney World, the boys' birthday, a wedding, and Thanksgiving all crammed into a week. We didn't expect December to be any different, and it wasn't. January and early February are also crazy in our house as we celebrate three birthdays and the kids love Valentine's Day. But we really thought we'd find our groove after that. Only we didn't.
By February I was an anger ball, and by April I was barely holding on to my sanity. The summer we had, all seven weeks of it, was a complete blur, especially when you factor in swimming lessons, vacation, and the death of our air conditioner. We squeezed in a few trips to the beach, but it felt just like that. Like we somehow took a shoehorn and squeezed them in to the few minutes we could find. They were okay, but not exactly relaxing.
So now we are trying to reclaim our sanity. I started by switching preschools for the boys. The preschool Ree went to was a wonderful place and very affordable, but it's a parent-run coop employing two teachers and no other staff, and there is a substantial work requirement for the parents. We had planned for Leon and Michael to go there, and I was president of the board for the upcoming year, so extracting ourselves was a little difficult. But when our first choice for an alternative preschool happened to have two openings for three-year-old boys on the days we wanted, we knew it was meant to be. And the boys are very excited about attending St. Mark Montessori Preschool next year, and each refer to it as "MY preschool," as compared to Ree's preschool.
The other thing we did was finally boot Natalia out of our bedroom. She has her own bed, but most nights I would wake up between 11 and 11:30 to find her climbing up into our bed with her blanket and sometimes a stuffed animal or two. Her sleeping with us was fine when she was little and cuddly, but she is now all knees and elbows and head butts. The challenge was figuring out where to put her. We have six people and two dogs in a three-bedroom house, and she refuses to sleep in a crib or really stay in her bed. She is also a fan of eating toys with small parts and has been known to literally devour a book, eating the binding right off while ripping a few pages along the way. And so last Saturday became the great house Tetris.
We started by cleaning out the sunroom which previously held toys, the dogs, a dresser filled with craft supplies, and a work desk that was used more for storage that work since Leon long ago established that chairs and toddlers are not a winning combination.
We decided to make this Leon and Michael's room and we attempted to sell them on the fact that now at least they would be in the same room as all their toys. We did not realize that we would need to spend an hour and 45 minutes de-spidering the place (EWWWWW is all I will say about that) and another half hour removing black mold from the windows and walls, but I suppose that needed to be done anyway.
So this is the room now. We are a long way from a true "after" picture, but at least it's a start. (And conveniently, we have not yet had time to move anything on the walls, making it easy to see how spaces changed.)
Leon is most liking the new space. Michael hates change, and consequently hates it. But that's just how he is.
Moving them into the sunroom freed up their old bedroom. This is what it looked like before:
We made this into Natalia's room, and she is loving having her own space. I have still ended up sleeping in there for at least part of the night for two out of the three nights she's been there, but at least she's not climbing into our bed. So here is the tan room now.
Yes, Natalia has a futon, pendant lamp, and jungle print rug. What every toddler has, right? The futon gives me a place to sleep, the pendant lamp is up high enough that she can't yet remove the light bulb (I shudder at the though that someday she and Leon will learn to team up), and the rug needed a home. At the same time, it all kinda just fits her personality. And the rug coordinates well with her Dora bed.
These changes also led to changes in the master bedroom, living room, dining room, and garage, but being that those rooms are still complete disasters, I will wait to share pics. For now, we are working on catching our breath.
Things have been off-kilter at our house for awhile. We just cannot find our groove. Things started getting weird last October. They got a little worse in November with vacation, Disney World, the boys' birthday, a wedding, and Thanksgiving all crammed into a week. We didn't expect December to be any different, and it wasn't. January and early February are also crazy in our house as we celebrate three birthdays and the kids love Valentine's Day. But we really thought we'd find our groove after that. Only we didn't.
By February I was an anger ball, and by April I was barely holding on to my sanity. The summer we had, all seven weeks of it, was a complete blur, especially when you factor in swimming lessons, vacation, and the death of our air conditioner. We squeezed in a few trips to the beach, but it felt just like that. Like we somehow took a shoehorn and squeezed them in to the few minutes we could find. They were okay, but not exactly relaxing.
So now we are trying to reclaim our sanity. I started by switching preschools for the boys. The preschool Ree went to was a wonderful place and very affordable, but it's a parent-run coop employing two teachers and no other staff, and there is a substantial work requirement for the parents. We had planned for Leon and Michael to go there, and I was president of the board for the upcoming year, so extracting ourselves was a little difficult. But when our first choice for an alternative preschool happened to have two openings for three-year-old boys on the days we wanted, we knew it was meant to be. And the boys are very excited about attending St. Mark Montessori Preschool next year, and each refer to it as "MY preschool," as compared to Ree's preschool.
The other thing we did was finally boot Natalia out of our bedroom. She has her own bed, but most nights I would wake up between 11 and 11:30 to find her climbing up into our bed with her blanket and sometimes a stuffed animal or two. Her sleeping with us was fine when she was little and cuddly, but she is now all knees and elbows and head butts. The challenge was figuring out where to put her. We have six people and two dogs in a three-bedroom house, and she refuses to sleep in a crib or really stay in her bed. She is also a fan of eating toys with small parts and has been known to literally devour a book, eating the binding right off while ripping a few pages along the way. And so last Saturday became the great house Tetris.
We started by cleaning out the sunroom which previously held toys, the dogs, a dresser filled with craft supplies, and a work desk that was used more for storage that work since Leon long ago established that chairs and toddlers are not a winning combination.
The sunroom before:
So this is the room now. We are a long way from a true "after" picture, but at least it's a start. (And conveniently, we have not yet had time to move anything on the walls, making it easy to see how spaces changed.)
Leon is most liking the new space. Michael hates change, and consequently hates it. But that's just how he is.
Moving them into the sunroom freed up their old bedroom. This is what it looked like before:
We made this into Natalia's room, and she is loving having her own space. I have still ended up sleeping in there for at least part of the night for two out of the three nights she's been there, but at least she's not climbing into our bed. So here is the tan room now.
Yes, Natalia has a futon, pendant lamp, and jungle print rug. What every toddler has, right? The futon gives me a place to sleep, the pendant lamp is up high enough that she can't yet remove the light bulb (I shudder at the though that someday she and Leon will learn to team up), and the rug needed a home. At the same time, it all kinda just fits her personality. And the rug coordinates well with her Dora bed.
These changes also led to changes in the master bedroom, living room, dining room, and garage, but being that those rooms are still complete disasters, I will wait to share pics. For now, we are working on catching our breath.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)