Our First Day of School!

Well, it's finally arrived.  I didn't quite feel as prepared as I had hoped, but the closet renovation was more or less done before we started today (Jesse and I did stay up late painting and reorganizing to get that part done).  And the playroom is now a lot closer to looking like a school room instead. 

Like I said, it's not all the way done.  I still have to make curtains for the room.... do you remember this fabric that I mentioned months ago?  Well, it's been sitting around my house waiting for me to get to work for months now.  Then there's the issue of our seating- we have an old church bench that needs to be cut down and some chairs that I've had forever (and when I say forever I mean before Diego and Eliana were around) that need to be refinished and put in there.  And then, while our original plan was for the closet just to have shelves like this.

We've since seen this and think that eventually the doors might be a great addition.  But this is a lot of extra work (and Jesse is in school too). So, I'm not thinking this part will be done anytime too soon. 

Right now, we've taken our coffee table (and the kids chairs that usually sit around it) from the living room and have placed them in there until the table and seating can be done.  When we get a few more things finished, I'll let you see the room.

But for now, here's pictures of the kids for their first day.  I saw a similar photo shoot from Living Creatively and thought this would be a great tradition to document their first day each year.  (Usually, I see photo ideas after the fact and then feel sad that I haven't documented that way from the beginning...ever been there?) But this year, I hope to have started a new tradition from the get-go!

Alrighty, Jesse's going to be home soon so that I can go to the PTR. This was something else I had planned to do before school started so I could be prepared, but a stinkin' water main broke and they decided the best place to store things so they wouldn't get wet was in their childcare area.  Which means they're not taking care of kids on Wednesdays right now.  Boo!  So, it's taken me until now to arrange my own childcare so I could make it down there.  I'll only have about 45 minutes before they close... hope that's enough!  Happy Monday!

Pwa!

Diego: Pwa! Pwa!

Me: What does Pwa mean?

Diego: Don't put salt on my head.

Me: Okay, I'll try not to.

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My kids have recently learned that "Woof" and "Ruff" are not the only things dogs say.  Apparently, they also say, "Barf!"
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Jesse: (to Eliana) Stop moving around, I'm not playing with you!

Diego: She's not playing, she's whining.
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My kids have been taking turns being sick for about two weeks now.  Whenever I take Eliana's temp she "reads" the thermometer and tells me: "twenty-four."

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When we began to discuss the fact that we were going to do school at home, Diego wanted to know if other kids were going to come to our house for school.  I told him that it would just be the kids in our family.  A few days later he told me: "Mami, you need to have 10 babies so that we can have lots of kids in our school."  I told him that as cool as the Duggars are, we are not the Duggars.

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Recently, when I ask Eliana what she wants for breakfast, her response is: "Pizza!" (Something tells me she will do just fine in college.)

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What are your kids funny sayings?

Now that it's cool again...

My house -that is, not outside. (I wish it were cool outside, then we wouldn't have been dying these past two weeks as we were waiting for our a/c to be fixed.) Anyway. Now, I've been trying to prepare my home and life to begin homeschooling Diego this fall. 

As many years as I taught in "real" classrooms (more on this later) and as many years as I was home-schooled myself, you'd think this thing would be a cinch.  But it's not.  Home-school curriculum has evolved tremendously in the 20+ years it's been since my mom started homeschooling us.  Back then, I think all anyone in the home-school community had heard of was Konos.  There are more options now.  A lot. More. Options.

But, I'd heard rave reviews about My Father's World, and after taking a good look at it and going to two of their sales rep's seminars, I was convinced (and excited to give it a whirl). For those of you who are counting, Diego just turned four and so technically isn't due to start school for another year. (Actually the state of Kansas doesn't require most students to be in school until 7. Crazy, huh?) But I've decided to give it a try this year because Diego knew his uppercase letters before he turned two and has always seemed to take a real interest in reading and this way if I mess up royally he's not ruined for life.

My Father's World is only supposed to take 1 to 1.5 hours at the Kindergarten level and I figure I should be able to handle that. We'll soon see.  In the mean time, I'm gathering books that I'll need throughout the school year (where did my copy of Ferdinand run off to?) and writing a few weeks of lesson plans (the state of Kansas requires a hard copy, so I might as well begin to write all I plan to do down) and work on our school calendar (there's only 28 weeks of lessons in this curriculum but Kansas doesn't have a set amount of days or hours for Kinder so I'm not too worried).

Things I am excited about:

• Lots of new books and lots of integrated science that is simple enough for even me to understand. (Science is my weakest area.)
• Weekly themes like: Sun- Jesus is the light of the world. (Just like the sun.) And Moon- I am the light of the world. (I should reflect Jesus' light just like the moon reflects the sun's light.) How cool is that?
• Being able to schedule school around our life events like: a new baby, holidays and Jesse's school breaks.
• Getting my playroom reorganized and turned into a school room.

Things I am nervous about:

• Getting my playroom reorganized and turned into a school room.
• Having enough time to teach on Wednesday which is filled with BSF and my job as director of  the Wednesday night kids outreach ministry.
• Making myself get up at a consistent time and back on a real schedule.

Okay, home-schooling veterans, your turn to sound off: What is your best piece of advice for home-schooling success?  Would love to hear from all of you! 

Cruel Summer Friday Favorites (and a Winner!)

Some of you may remember this song as a Bananarama song. Not me... to me it's an Ace of Base song. Either way, it's seemed appropriate this summer. (Especially the "leaving me here on my own" part.  I think maybe I ought to sing it to my absentee a/c guy.)

We spent a couple of weeks in June waiting for our a/c to be fixed (it needed a new a-coil) and almost two weeks ago, it broke down again (this time it's the compressor- which was fixed last year, too). This is a four year old unit, folks. (At least our a/c guy told us it was brand new when we bought it.) So out of the four years we've owned this unit, we've had serious trouble with it half of the summers we've owned it.

We're praying that it is fixed today. (Well, actually we were praying that it was fixed last week, but that didn't happen.) In the mean time, we've been floating around in record breaking heat temperatures (can we say 108 degrees?) from air conditioned home to air conditioned home of my family. Thank you, thank you! And as a result, my blog has been ignored. I finallly realized what I needed to do to be able to use my lap top at my parents' home today, so I've decided to share my dreams of coolness via my Etsy Treasury of the week.

Have a cool weekend, everyone!  And congrats to Emily @ Cottage Industrious, who won the vintage clothes pin bag!  (I'll get it to you next week when we get together.)

Laundry Day Friday Favorites (and a Giveaway!)

Laundry has taken a big portion of my life (and has taken on many forms throughout).  When I was 12, my "big chore" was to take care of the entire family's laundry... which I pretty much continued to have until I moved out and went to college.  At that point, laundry turned into a once a week or however long I could stretch it sort of a thing.  There was the summer I spent doing laundry at a washboard and hanging my clothes to dry (as part of a missions training experience) and then there was the summer that I tried doing laundry by hand in a sink and hanging it out to dry in a very dusty part of Mexico only to learn that a laundromat was going to be a necessity if I planned on wearing clean clothes.

Now, my laundry is relegated to Mondays and I try hard to get it all done that day, although often it takes at least another day to complete.  I no longer try to wash clothes by hand and I don't have a laundry line so everything that can goes into my dryer.  But recently, I've run across a new "laundry experience" that I hadn't tried yet: making laundry detergent.  I'd seen several recipes- even one that was peppermint but most of them required a castile soap (which didn't seem cost effective).  I mean, unless you're highly allergic to all laundry detergents on the market, why would you take the time to make your own soap if it was going to cost you more and take more of your time?  But then, my friend Ginny posted her own recipe with affordable ingredients and it didn't require boiling or anything terribly daunting.  It was an opportune time, as I was about to run out of detergent again, so I decided to go for it!

Now, I'm not trying to go extreme here- I really feel like I've already been there done that.  (I'm not planning on switching to cloth diapers either- I'll watch and observe my sister closely with that first, thank you!)  But I feel like the time it takes me to make (in my case about a month's supply of) detergent (5 minutes) takes quite a bit less time than loading my two kids into the car, driving to the store and buying some.  Okay, I did have to shop for the ingredients to begin with, but I've made it twice about 1.5x what her recipe calls for and I have enough for another 3 rounds- so I'm shopping for ingredients once every 5 months instead of once a month.  And the savings is worth it... and after trying it for some time, I can say my clothes are clean (even though they no longer smell of all the perfumes that I might find in the other detergent I used to buy).  So, try it out if you want, if not, enjoy some of my Friday Favorites from Etsy:

Oh yes, did I mention a giveaway?  Here it is:

Once upon a time before I started my current job, I sold vintage items on Etsy.  (One of these days, I hope to do it again.)  Here's one of the items I meant to sell there before I realized I couldn't continue with the Etsy shop at this point in my life.  It's too cute to continue to tuck away for "one of these days" so, I'm offering it to one of you!  Keep your clothespins in it so they're always close by for hanging your laundry.  Or if (like me) you dry your clothes in a dryer, keep those matchless socks in here until the others show up again!

Three ways to enter:
1. Comment and tell me your nightmare laundry experience - Mine involves melted lipstick in the dryer... I wish it had only happened once, but alas! I'm a slow learner.
2. Follow me (or if you already do, that's good enough for me, too) and then comment telling me you do.
3. Share this giveaway post on facebook and then leave another comment letting me know you did so.

The contest will end next Wednesday, July 28! Good luck, and Happy Weekend!

Hose 'em Down!

As much as I loved the sand pile when I was a kid, I feel dismayed that my kids love it, too. It's not that I don't want them to enjoy themselves, I just can't stand the sand that always seems to be tracked through the house afterwards.  Yesterday, after a total of 10 minutes of play in the hot, hot afternoon, they were done.  The clean-up takes longer than that! To top it all off, Diego had poured sand on Eliana's head. Again.  They looked like they had been swimming in sand.

So, we decided to do bath time a bit differently.  And we hosed them down outside.  No sand entered my house- yeah! Plus, they loved it! (Which means, I can probably look forward to more sand being dumped in Eliana's hair sometime in the near future. Oh well.)

Diego's 4th Birthday

Well, we had to reschedule Diego's birthday party because he was sick over the weekend, so I have no pictures to show you of that.  (He's feeling much better now!)  Since yesterday was his actual birthday, but his papi had school we played the day pretty low-key.

We ate Chocolate Chip Pancakes for breakfast and then let him decide where he wanted to eat lunch.  Micky D's... thank you very much!  We picked it up and took it to the park which was a foolish and hot decision... we laid on our picnic blanket in the sweltering heat of the shade and worried about what we were going to do when the kids were done eating and wanted to play.  Fortunately, his present... a roundhouse for his train track made them want to hurry back home and play with it before nap-time, to which we gladly agreed.

During nap-time, I made a cookie cake from a mix. You heard me right.  (I added M&M's because Diego loves rainbow cookies.) And then took a decorator's icing can (yep, it was pretty nasty... but I was going for low-key and easy) and decorated it. I ran out of icing right as I hit the y in birthday, which did not make me a happy camper and I suppose this may be yet another reason to hate that stuff out of a can because you cannot gauge well what amount you have left.

When everyone was up from nap, we met my parents and Elisabeth and Paul for dinner at Freddy's.  Always a treat!  And then we headed over to mom and dad's for cake and ice cream where we met up with Jesse who cut out of class early to join us.  Diego had a great time, which reminded me that things don't always have to be extravagantly planned in order to be fun.  That's right, simple things like getting burgers and heading home for cake and ice cream is plenty enough!  Maybe I'll remember this in years to come.  (But probably not.)

Okay, maybe there was ice cream at Freddy's too.

So thankful for this sweet boy!