Family Fun

- September 21, 2014

I think we've settled into a pretty good routine. After going just about crazy the first two weeks of school I got serious and calendared/scheduled out our lives. Just having it written down and organized helped me so much. Besides planning and executing homeschool activities every day for 1st and Kindergarten girls (plus the baby and the regular housework/meals, etc), the afternoons and evening are just a zoo. It's like a race to the finish but when bedtime comes we haven't finished everything yet. Cuh-razy. But life with six kids! I'm still overwhelmed most days, but I've learned to simplify and I'm picking my projects carefully.

Blissful moments

To help with the back-to-school adjustment, we decided to have a movie/TV fast for the month of September. It's not so hard during the week when we're all much too busy to think about tv time, but on the weekends we are TIRED and we just want to veg. But I'm so glad that we did this because instead of plopping on the couch for two hours (or more) on the weekend nights, we've read stories, played games, and gone to the beach! I confess, I'm missing BYU football right now. And there are a couple movies I've got on my short list to see. But I've also read a ton of books and that's been fabulous.

First embroidery project

One of our topics this month was ancient egypt. We made clay cartouches with the girls names spelled out in hieroglyphics. That was pretty fun. We also attempted a version of "Papyrus" made with parchment paper. It was their first time doing a paper-mache sort of project.

Egyptian cartouche

Making "papyrus"

I've been working on having an art project for the girls every week - at least one. I found a few fun resources from real art teachers with ideas. The website www.deepspacesparkle.com has been one of my favorite resources this year. I'm not following a set curriculum, but every week I browse her site for fun, age-appropriate activities that we can do together. The art projects we are doing aren't masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, but we are learning some great concepts, practicing with shapes and different materials, and really enjoying some quiet creative time. I have a composer of the month and we listen to that music quietly while we work. This month is Bach and on Friday the girls actually requested that I put the music on as they started working on their projects. We experimented with oil pastels by drawing fun, funky insects this week. Last week we made painted paper to use in future projects (think Eric Carle's artwork in books like "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?")

Friday is art day

This baby is growing up far too fast. She worked on three top teeth this month. She's perfected the art of climbing up and down stairs, and has even figured out how to turn around at the top to come back down (though she also likes to play at the top and that makes me nervous). She doesn't have a very solid sense of where the edge is yet. Just not old enough. On Friday she'll be 10 months old!

New skill

She's gotten more stubborn, including kicking and crying when I open the door to the car to put her in her carseat. She loves her stuffed puppy and happily goes down for naps as long as puppy is snuggled up in her arms. This picture makes me laugh because she rarely gets the opportunity to play with puppy outside of her crib. She lay on him for about 5 minutes just looking around and kicking her legs.