School Days

I have a schedule that I TRY to map out a month in advance with Olivia’s pre-school lessons. My lesson plans are a hodge lodge of Pinterest sites and a Bible based curriculum for letter recognition. I’m not following in my husbands footsteps and I actually write my lesson plans down. Not store them in the old noggin :) Bahahaha!! Some of you will get that tasty little inside joke :)

I digress. I am kinda nervous that she might be a little behind when she goes to K in the fall (summer, who are we kidding here?) just because the others have had a whole year of strict learning time. But, we are going to do our best and say lots of prayers!! She catches on very, very quickly when I introduce new things. After we had mastered her name I decided we should buckle down on hand writing. So at the suggestion of a good friend, I ordered the book Handwriting Without Tears. Let me just say so far it’s been the absolute best thing I could of done for her! The way its presented in the book is sheer genius. Literally, hand writing without tears!! So far she can write on command F, E, D, P, B and R and thats only taken about 4 weeks! Tomorrow we will start with N. I found a great website for some work sheets for tracing when we work on fine motor skills and recently decided I would throw in some number and shape work sheets and kill 2 birds with 1 stone :) She’s gotta learn to write 1-10 before I send her off! And she can identify most of her shapes but can only draw circles.

I love my school days with her. As long as I keep things rolling along and don’t make her spend too much time on one thing she is perfectly content and happy to do her “work” and will have a semi-good attitude for about 3.5 hours :)


Below she was doing busy work by sorting all of her crayons by color :)

Sometimes we play UNO for our math lesson :)

Today I wrote all the letters she has learned thus far onto sheets of paper that I taped together to make one long sheet. I wrote each letter multiple times in a different color marker and she had to connect each letter with the color. She really liked this moving activity!! We will definitely be doing it again!

Here she is working hard at tracing those numbers. Those painted finger nails and that grip on her pencil...

Independence and Carousels

Last week Olivia and I spent Tuesday-Saturday in Birmingham helping Granddaddy and Nonie pack. Well, really I helped them purge and packed only a little! Olivia was a champ all week spending most of Tuesday, all of Wednesday and Friday entertaining her self among the boxes, playing the Nook or watching PBS. On Thursday though her sweet Grandaddy took her and spent the morning and part of the afternoon at the children’s museum there in Birmingham and Nelda and I got their kitchen and laundry room cleaned out and packed. Whew!!! And then we took her to the mall Friday evening to ride the carousel. We worked like maniacs for 4 days but had a blast doing it!!

I had to leave James and Audrey in the care of their father for the mornings and evenings and I prepared them as best I could. I bought all throw away dishes and utensils for breakfast and supper. Stocked them up on their favorite lunch and snack supplies along with zip lock bags to pack their lunches and snacks in. I even bought them an alarm clock. LOL!! They were beyond excited to get one and to use it and Jon said they were up and at ‘em every morning when it went off! They fixed their own breakfast (cereal of course) packed their lunches, got dressed and were ready to go by the time their daddy was. (I may or may not of scared them into submission by mentioning the fact that daddy wouldn’t mind making them go to school in their pajamas!) and I was so proud of them! Perhaps slightly wounded that they didn’t seem to miss me or anything but at the same time so proud that they are becoming so independent. It’s what we are striving for, right? :)

However, last night as I was putting them to bed I went to set their alarm clock and they both screamed “NO!!!!! Will you PLEASE come wake us up?!” James said “Yeah, that alarm clock is SO LOUD and made me jump every morning!” And Audrey said “Yeah and can you scratch our backs like you always do?” :) I will admit I was slightly relieved to know they aren’t completely independent of me yet! >>insert smiling heart eyes emoji here<<

I make no excuses

I will make absolutely no excuses or resolutions this time because that strategy NEVER GETS ME ANY WHERE. You know it and I know it.

Olivia and I have been hitting the books pretty hard lately trying to get her little self ready for the big K in August. 6 months from tomorrow (don’t even get me started on that pesky school calendar) our littlest one will strap on a book bag, grab a lunch box and walk the elementary hall for the first time as a student. Waaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

We have been working on hand writing which includes learning first, middle and last name, and a few weeks ago we started learning our frog jump letters and she has mastered F, E, D and we are currently on P :) She knows all the names and sounds of A-H and days of the week and months of the year.

I try to incorporate lots of many different things into our school day because the child does not like to play by her self. Gee, I wonder why? Here are a few pictures of her working on her cutting skills and a little science lesson with dancing milk. Don’t ask me what the actual “science” is in the lesson. Pinterest doesn’t tell you all that.....bahahahaha!

The Best Part

One of the best things about James and Audrey’s daddy working at the same school they go to is that he is privy to some insider information about them that probably not all parents are privileged with. For example, Jon was walking down the hall one day last week and ran into (okay he didn’t actually run into him in a physical form but passed him in the hall) the music teacher/band director. The Music Man said “Hey I’ve got a funny story for you about James.” Imagine that, a funny story about our boy :)

On the first day of music for this school year, the Music Man asked if any of the kids did any thing exciting this summer?! James was the first to raise his hand (shocker I know) and proceeded to tell the Music Man “Yeah!! We went to our grandparents for a whole week this summer!” The Music Man said “Oh that sounds like a lot of fun James! How wonderful!” James replied with “Yeah it was. And the best part was that our parents weren’t even there.”

As Jon was telling me this, those words stung for about 3.5 seconds and then we both started laughing and I said “Yep he is right. That was THE BEST PART.” Muhahahahahaha!!!!!

2+1 is 80

Olivia loves to tell James and Audrey that she is smarter than them. Here are my favorites:

Olivia: Audrey I so am smarter than you
James: Yeah well whats 2+1?
Olivia: 80!!!!

Olivia: I so am smarter than you Audrey!
Audrey: Oh yeah well how many legs does a spider have?
Olivia: 8!!!
Audrey: Nope! They have 6!!!

Hahahahaha oh Audrey I guess she is smarter than you this time!!!

The One Where She turned Four

Olivia turned 4 years old on June 22. While I did not write her a birthday letter and blog about her birthday on her birthday this year, rest assured we partied in style and its sure to be a birthday she won’t forget! Having boy/girl twins its hard to throw parties because they have to be gender neutral. Well I guess they don’t HAVE to be but I hate dislike birthday parties enough with out having to throw two different ones on the same day or even the same week. Twice a year is really pushing it for me :)

So, I’ve never been able to have a really girlie kinda party and this year I thought it would be super duper cool to do a fancy tea party for my baby girl. She LOVES to play tea party, we play it often and when I mentioned it to her she was thrilled! So I stalked Pinterest for a few days pinning any and everything that caught my eye and took ideas (big or small) from several different pictures and threw the best stinking tea party 7th Ave has ever seen :)

 I made this cake and I didn’t threaten to cancel all birthdays for the rest of our lives while

in the process either. It was the easiest time I’ve ever had making a cake and it only took 8 years

to achieve this goal!! You may remember the twins 5th birthday that included the Barbie cake

and the Angry Birds cake and my admittance of seeing myself as cake baker extrodinare when

in reality, I’m so not :) 

Zip on the lam

Pretty positive every one who reads my blog is friends with me either on Facebook, Instagram or perhaps both. So, I will spare you the great depths of details that that this story could delve into and start out by saying, Y’all remember the hermit crab James got last Summer? The one he lovingly named Stubborn because he kept trying to escape his little cage? Yes, ok, I’m sure y’all do.

Now, fast forward a few months after that and their daddy lucked up on some stuff that the BOE was discarding (we are such dumpster divers. not literally but figuratively, ya know?!) and wouldn’t you know among some of the stuff he went through was a larger cage. After Stubborn settled into his larger home he quit trying to escape :)

Now rewind to our summer this year. Audrey decided she wanted a hermit crab, too, so she and James learned to fold clothes and folded about 1,00 loads of laundry for me (all while watching The Brady Bunch!) and earned enough money to buy themselves two hermit crabs each! Woo.hoo.

Wait, rewind again. James got into this horrible habit of leaving the top off of Stubborn’s cage to which I assume was only because he was too lazy to put it back on when he got done feeding or watering or taking him out for a stroll. And it was a habit that I strongly reprimanded him for time and time again but he just refused for whatever reason to head my warnings. You see where this is going, don’t you? Yeah.

Now we are caught up to present day hermit crab shenanigans. Our kids are weird because they like to PLAY with their hermit crabs. Like get them out and watch them crawl around together on the floor. It’s sad really. But not sad enough for us to cave on the “no cats, no dogs” rule :) I digress. On Sunday afternoon whilest I was relaxing on the couch I noticed my two eldest children looking under furniture and pillows and what not. When I asked what they were looking for James says, “Well I really don’t wanna tell you.” He eventually did and at first I thought they were just pulling a joke on me because it was just so unbelievably wild. He says “Well this morning while I was getting cereal out of the pantry I happened to look down and I saw Zip under the cabinet. But I DIDN’T PICK HIM UP RIGHT THEN and when I went back just now to get him he was gone.”

HE WAS WHERE??!! YOU WHAT??!!
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU SAW THE CRAB IN THE KITCHEN AND DIDN’T PICK HIM UP???? See? See why I thought they were tricking me? It’s ludicrous, isn’t it? Insanity I tell ya.
I mean #1 how in the ever living world did a hermit crab get down stairs in the first place and secondly why would that boy choose to keep walking after seeing his CRAB in the kitchen? As you can see, it still boggles my mind. We searched high and low for that stupid dumb crab to no avail. We finally accepted the fact that Zip had found a deep dark whole to crawl into and stay to die. James learned a few very valuable lessons on Sunday, bless his heart.

Yesterday, after the kids got home from school, I was in the kitchen (can you believe it) and Audrey starts screaming “I FOUND ZIP!!! I FOUND ZIP!!!” I couldn’t believe it but she sure had. That stupid dumb crab was at the bottom of the stairs. Apparently he decided that there was nothing for him downstairs and was trying to get back to his home. Can you guess where the lid is to that cage now?