Here's a little attempt at making a little note about every day.
Friday, September 16: Today was the final meeting of Mary's Summer Reading group. The theme was Shakespeare. I checked the library for Shakespeare stories appropriate for young children and found an illustrated retelling of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale by Bruce Coville. It was the perfect introduction to Shakespeare for Mary - the story has kings and queens, a prince and a lost princess, and lots of surprises. Best of all, unlike the more popular Shakespeare tragedies, this story has a happy ending. Mary said she liked the story. For our presentation, we made paper dolls of a few of the characters in the story. I found some printable paper dolls in clothing from ancient Greece, where the story takes place, for Mary to color in. I asked her what her favorite part of the story was, and then I looked up Shakespeare's original text for that scene and printed out a few lines. At the reading group all of the kids do little presentations on their books, and Mary and I told a little about our book and then acted out a little scene with our paper doll puppets. After everyone presented we had a Shakespeare Midsummer's Day Tea Party, and Mary had her own little tea set to use! She LOVED it!
Saturday, September 17: The kids had all been needing a bath, and I decided to put Lily in the tub for the first time (she's been having sponge baths on the bathroom counter until now). She had fun splashing around in the bubbles with Mary and Joey for a little while.
Today was also Uncle Alan's birthday, so we had a little surprise party for him which was fun. At night I took the kids to a local harvest festival for the fireworks display. We met some neighbor friends there and the kids had a good time running around and dancing to the live band before the fireworks show.
Sunday, September 18: Today was the first day of our church's family christian formation program. Mary went with a group of other kindergartners, Joey got to play in the toy room, and they had a speaker for the adults. Afterward we had planned on going to the harvest festival parade, but it was rainy and chilly outside. Fortunately we knew some friends who were going and they took Mary along with them so she could catch a big bag of candy for us!
Monday, September 19: We spent the morning playing with some friends at their house. The kids played a little Just Dance on the Wii, played outside a little, played pretend a little, and just had fun. In the evening I took Mary to an informational meeting about organizing a Daisy Girl Scouts troop at our local elementary school. On the way, I saw something crawling in a driveway in our subdivision and we pulled over to get a closer look. It was a salamander!
Mary enjoyed meeting the other girls (they had a "Princess Party") and we signed up for Girl Scouts. So that should be fun, although it was more expensive than I expected. I'm looking forward to Mary making some more friends her age in our neighborhood.
On the way home I noticed our new neighbors were outside, so we stopped over to meet them. They have a little girl and boy close to Mary and Joey's age, and we ended up spending over an hour at their house with the moms and dads talking and the kids running around and playing. It will be fun having some friends that live close by!
Tuesday, September 20: We played at a friend's house in the morning and then Mary went to her Homeschool Art & Gym class. It was the second meeting, and she'll be going every Tuesday until December. She likes it so far - it's for homeschooled kids ages 4-6. She already says she has lots of friends in the class. She loves the art class and tells me she makes fabulous works of art - I'll get to see all of them in the art show on the last day. In gym class they've played soccer and kickball so far, with lots more to come. In the afternoon we picked up my cousin from school and then stayed at my aunt's house for dinner. Mary fell asleep on the way to pick up my cousin from school. This isn't the first time in the past few weeks that she's fallen asleep in the afternoon at a time when she would have been in class at public school. For me, this reinforces our decision not to send her to public school this year - she is still such a little girl in a lot of ways, and going to school all day long would be completely exhausting for her. I've talked to parents of lots of other kindergartners who say their kids are completely wiped out after a long school day. Plus then she would be missing out on all of the awesome things we do every day! We spent the evening at my aunt's house and the kids had a good time playing with my cousins and their dog. We took some pictures of Lily in her new sweater - it has the cutest hood!
Wednesday, September 21: This morning Mary wanted to do some workbook pages, so we got out her Brain Quest 1st Grade Workbook. She looked at the Table of Contents and said she wanted to do Spelling, so we turned to that section and she did a few pages. One of them was on short vowel sounds. It had words like "map" and "doll" and "bell" with the vowels missing and she had to choose the correct one and write it in. I was surprised that she did the whole page without any help and without any mistakes! Short vowel sounds are a bit tricky since they all sound kind of similar. When she's writing she often has trouble with the short vowel sounds and mixes them up, or sometimes just eliminates vowels all together. For example, she was trying to search for nursery rhymes on YouTube and typed in "nrsre" and she drew a picture for my sister Melanie and wrote "To Melny." So it was neat to see that she's figuring it out a little more.
Lily is six months old today! It's hard to believe it's been half of a year already! She is starting to grab anything within reach and put it in her mouth, which made our monthly photo shoot a bit more entertaining.
Thursday, September 22: Today was errand day! The kids and I and Uncle Alan went to Goodwill, Boston Store, Kohl's, Walmart, Pick'N Save, the bank, and the egg farm. Whew! We got a lot done though. Mary and Joey really enjoyed looking at all the Halloween stuff at Goodwill, and Kohl's even had CHRISTMAS stuff out! In September! Tonight I went to Red Lobster with some friends for Mom's Night Out (with Lily - she's still too little to be without me for that long!) and it was really nice to get out and have some uninterrupted conversation. They have their endless shrimp promotion going on and I definitely came home very full.
