Batches Business: January 2012

Shopping with Lily

My Lily has always been a sweet, fun girl, but lately it has been fun to see how she is growing up into a little girl - with so much more understanding, ideas, and capabilities. Her full-out smile and laugh always brings joy to my heart.

To demonstrate how fun it is to hang out with my almost-5-year-old, I thought I would share one of our recent "dates". A date is pretty much any time we take one of our children to do something one-on-one. My personal favorites are when we can just go sit at Starbucks and play a game or chat, but sometimes we need to accomplish errands simultaneously, so we take our latte and hot chocolate to go. On this occasion Lily and I were heading out to get some essentials from the grocery store.

Our nearby Baker's (for some reason they can't just accept the name Kroger) has perfect child-sized carts, actually big enough to fit a good amount of groceries in. I don't let my girls use those carts (anymore) unless there is a one-to-one parent ratio, so Lily was thrilled to be the main shopper.

Unless it was out of reach, she got to get it off the shelf, and she was extremely particular about the ordering of her groceries within the cart.

After obtaining the essentials, oh the joys of the self-scanner!

Lily especially loves swiping a credit card (wonder where she gets it?) and despite her shopping savvy cannot for the life of her understand why is is illegal for her to sign her name for my card...

Once paid for, you get to take all your groceries out of the store and load the car!

Oh, I love little people!

Then put the cart away...

(in case any mothers are panicking, I was standing in the middle of the parking lot blocking all cars...)

Then you get to unload all the groceries at home, while tripping over sisters and the family dog!

Did anyone guess what we were going to make with all those ingredients?

ABCs and 123s...

So far I have felt a little sheepish saying that we are "homeschooling," partially for a variety of reasons. I guess there is some hesitation on my part to commit to being one of those "homeschooling families" - like this:

However, over the summer I decided to start a kindergarten curriculum with Lily, who was showing signs of being ready to read. We really are enjoying what we've done so far, and I'm reminding myself to "un-school" even though I am loosely following the My Father's World curriculum, because we think that really the best thing for our girls right now is to have consistency at home, and to grow and learn at their own pace!

For the curious, our routine resembles this:

(all times are approximate, and the schedule may or may not be thrown out the window at any time due to tantrums, diaper issues, or if anything else goes wrong... ;-) )

8am Wake up

Get dressed

Eat Breakfast

Idyllic. This ALWAYS happens.

Oh yeah, here is reality.

Attempt at kitchen-clean up

9am Put Clara down for her morning nap, and do "school"

Phonics! "I hear a in cat and man"!

Making puppets.

Play-doh trees

Saturday- Dad's seed experiment...

Mama's favorite- a genetics lesson....

whenever attention spans are waning,

we move on to playing outside,

cooking, cleaning up the house

(or building a house out of blocks),

laundry (great practice sorting by color and owner!),

dress-up - etc.

11:30am lunch, reading

12:30/1pm: NAPS

And the rest is just usual day-to-day stuff, usually going to the library and errands work better after nap time or on our BSF or gymnastics days while we are already out. But I've found that keeping our mornings pretty much the same helps us all have a good day!

Lily is currently requesting to go to kindergarten at school next year, and she wants to ride the bus. I told her when we know where we'll be next year we'll look into it!

Fall - Weekly Fun Times

Wow, I am finally sitting down to upload some pictures... turns out there are about 600+ backlogged since October!

Fall of 2011 flew by - it seemed like if we weren't traveling, recovering from traveling or sick, we were preparing for the next trip! Still, we managed to create some fun routines at home, and we are glad to be back to doing them after all of our travel!

Often on our way to Lily's ballet/gymnastics class I take the girls to the park, to help the little girls get their wiggles/giggles out before they have to be patient and relatively still while we watch Lily dance and jump.

After 20 minutes in the chilly wind at the park they are happy to play indoor games for a few minutes!

On Thursday mornings we have Bible Study Fellowship - all four of us girls go to class and learn about the same part of the Bible! BSF is awesome in many ways, but for us as a nomadic family, it is particularly great because BSF is the same all over the world: classes are all studying the same passage, the same week, and almost always in English. Because of the consistency, we are planning to do BSF (if possible) in every new home-town. Already the girls (and I) are learning a lot, and we have not only attended class in Omaha, but also in Albuquerque, Dallas, and I even went in San Francisco!

I do find it a little challenging to get all of us out to West Omaha in time for 9:10am class (a 35 minute drive for us), so part of our weekly routine is to eat bagels at Breuggers out there first... so I just toss kids and clothes in the car, and we're off! We have lots of fun watching them make bagels and drinking coffee for a few minutes before hopping back into the car to get dressed and drive 5 minutes over to class - mostly on time!

Another big part of our weekly routine is LAUNDRY. It is definitely my least favorite task... so maybe that's why it always seems to be piling up. At any rate - between 2 adults, 2 toddlers, and now only 1 baby in cloth diapers, we tend to put our Washer-and-Dryer-Women to the test. Several times this fall I ended up packing up the whole crew to the laundromat while we waited for the repairman to fix out home machines!

The girls think coin-operated laundry is a blast! I do admit sometimes I love the efficiency of doing 10 loads at the same time (no exaggeration here, I'm serious. I counted.). But then the 25th of 55 minutes on the dryers hit and these cheerful helpers have more difficulty being cheerful...