A few weeks ago I went to pick up Ethan from Mother’s Day Out.  One of his teachers was sharing with me that he enjoyed the story of Peter Pan that day and was one of the few children in the class that recognized Tinker Bell.  I laughed as I told her that didn’t surprise me since his older sister is a ‘princess’, so at our house we know all about princesses and fairies and such.

His other teacher overheard our conversation and started to laugh with us.  She knew Kate from school last year and she added her take to the story.  She said,

Oh, yes.  Kate is most definitely a princess.  She’s always wearing her tiara.  You may not always see it, but it’s always there.

After laughing hysterically, I came home and told Shawn this story.  He also laughed his butt off.  We decided then and there that this was most definitely the best description of our daughter, ever.  She is always carrying herself like royalty, constantly reminding her siblings of how things ought to be done (she told Ethan that he wouldn’t be invited to her tea parties again because he was not using his manners), but also constantly generous to those around her.

So now, whenever Kate does something particularly ‘princess-y’, Shawn and I just look at eachother, laugh, and say, “You may not see the tiara, but it’s always there!”

One of the traditions I like for my kids’ birthdays is to make a cake or cupcakes or cookies for them for their big day.  (Not because I’m good at it - I did NOT get the baking genes passed down from my grandma and mom - but just because it’s something special that I don’t normally do throughout the year.) With the entire city out of dairy products, though, that was going to be impossible.  Every cake mix requires eggs or milk or both.  Since I was already having a little bit of a difficult time accepting my baby becoming a toddler (I wouldn’t allow Shawn to even use the word toddler around me during that last week.), this just added to the emotion for me.

Somehow, my sweet mother-in-law found about my little breakdown and went to a store 20 minutes away that had dairy.  She bought me a cake mix, eggs, milk, and even the icing for on top.  That has to be one of the most thought-full things someone has done for me in a long time.  I made the cake with great thankfulness and didn’t even get upset when it broke a little coming out of the pan.  I iced it and then decorated it with mini-marshmallows from my pantry that I then colored with food coloring.

It was not the most beautiful cake I’ve ever made.  But, it was definitely filled with the most love.  Karis will probably not even remember anything about this birthday, but I will remember that someone special paid attention to the smallest of details to make it memorable for me.

Thank you, Brenda.  :)

Karis 'helping' clean up after Hurricane Ike

I’ve been away from posting for the past few weeks due to a beautiful little storm named Ike.  And by ‘beautiful‘ and ‘little‘, I mean destructive and HUGE.  One might even say ‘Texas-sized’…

During the past few weeks, we’ve been without power (much shorter than most, though!), without water, without internet, and without dairy.  Any one of those things is a daunting challenge in and of itself.  Add all of them together and you’ve got the makings of a really interesting story.  :)

My husband wrote our story of Hurricane Ike beautifully, so I’ll post it here.  But, being a mom and a woman, I had to add one thing to the following story.  After you read Shawn’s post, click here to read my addendum…

We spent all day Friday preparing the house (and yard) for Ike. I took the reflector from my satellite dish down, since it had the biggest potential to be torn off in high winds. We setup a shelter in my garage office, since it is the most secure part of our house. Had an air mattress, the kiddos’ sleeping bags, battery-powered lantern and other goodies in there.

We spent most of the evening hours in the cul-de-sac, visiting with neighbors who rarely spoke with us otherwise. That was probably the most enjoyable part of the experience.

The kiddos crashed early, and the sound of the portable A/C drowned out the noise outside, which was probably a good thing for them.

I got up pretty much every hour throughout the storm to look out the front and back windows, and to shoot some video. Finally around 4am, the storm reached its peak at our house, and the wind was pretty fierce. We lost power around that time.

I was able to access the nearest WeatherBug via my iPhone, which was really handy for monitoring wind. Our sustained winds were around 50mph, with gusts as high as 89mph.

At one point, I heard a strange sound, and since the wind was not too bad (in between gusts), I put on a rain jacket and ventured outside to take a look around. The back yard was littered with branches, but otherwise okay. When I went to the front, however, I discovered that my neighbor’s small live oak tree had been blown over on top of my car!

There was no way I could move the tree by myself, and I figured that if I left my car where it was, the winds would eventually scratch it to hell. I decided to grab my keys and back it out; even if it got scratched in the process, it was bound to be better than what the wind would do. I backed it out and decided to wait until morning to see what damage, if any, had been done to the car.

The next morning, the wind was still gusting and obviously, it was raining. We were able to manually light the natural gas stove to boil water and fix hot oatmeal and coffee. As the weather continued to lighten, I made another tour of the outside of the house.

We’re surrounded by two-story houses, and that probably ended up being a good thing for us. Our neighbors had lost numerous shingles, and there were tons of branches of various sizes strewn across the yard. I found one of my gutters in my side yard, but otherwise, our house had no damage whatsoever.

Best of all, my car had no scratches at all! My front right bumper had been popped out, but I can easily fix that. A tree fell on my car, and it was virtually undamaged. How about that???

We spent most of Saturday listening to the battery-powered radio and trying to keep the kiddos entertained. We limited our trips to the refrigerator, but had plenty of food and water to keep fed for days, if needed. In the evening, we fired up the charcoal grill and enjoyed pork chops and sausage.

The kiddos were a bit scared of the dark, but we enjoyed a candle-lit dinner and moved our “camp” to the living room for the night.

Sunday, we spent most of the day cleaning up the debris from our yard and visiting with our neighbors.

Suddenly, in the late afternoon, we heard hoots from all around the neighborhood as the power came back on. I am not kidding when I tell you this, but the sun actually began to shine at the exact same moment!

But perhaps the best line — and a comment on our culture — came from one of our neighbors who called out, “See you all next year!” as he and his wife returned to their house.

We all rushed back into our houses, and cranked on the A/C, happy to be returning to normal. We turned on the TV for our first look at the pictures and were shocked at the extent of the damage in Galveston.

However, the power went down repeatedly, and after only about three hours, it finally went down again for good. Fortunately, the Houston area received a cool front, which was a welcome relief from the hot, humid and sticky air.

That night, we set up camp in our master bedroom, with the kiddos in sleeping bags all around us. With windows open, we slept fairly well for the first time in three nights.

The next day following breakfast, we went to the park to enjoy the cool air and let the kiddos burn off some of their cabin fever. The weather was so beautiful, it was easy to forget that we had all just come through a hurricane!

When we returned to our house after a couple of hours, we were delighted to discover that our power had been restored — this time for good.

All total, we were without power for nearly 60 hours. We went through the milk and other perishables. But we had plenty of water and could have continued to cook on the natural gas stove for a few more days, if needed.

Today, I’m back at work, since apparently, our bills aren’t going to give us an extension due to the hurricane.  :)  But it is nice to be returning to normal, and our attention is turned toward the hundreds of thousands of other Houstonians who will not have power or basic supplies for some time to come.

Time to be our best selves!

Ethan's 1st Day of Mother's Day Out

Ethan (my 3yo) did great at Mother’s Day Out at the church around the corner from us - it’s also where Kate went last year and loved it.  He has a huge class of about 12 kiddos his age and 2 teachers.  They said he did great and only got weepy at nap time when they wanted to help him take his shoes off.  He, of course, would have NO one touching his new shoes and got defensive and whiny for mommy at that point.  Too funny what kiddos will get hung up on, huh?  Other than that, he seemed to have had a great day and he said he liked it and had fun.  His favorite?  The kitchen play area.  Hmm.  Do we have a future chef on our hands?

We dropped off Karis (my almost 2yo) at Mimi’s house today so that she could have a playdate with her cousin, Ariah, who is one week older than she is.  They had a great time playing together, coloring, and making maracas, and Mommy was able to have wonderful one-on-one time with Kate.  Thank you, Mimi, for giving us that special time together.

Our 1st Day of Kindergarten

Kate (my 5yo) and I had a blast doing school today.  It was our first official day of homeschooling for her Kindergarten year.  She only complained a couple of times, but even that is good, because it showed me where her attention span was maxed out and I needed to back off a little bit.  The lessons we’re doing are only supposed to be 5-15 minutes each, so it was interesting to see how on some of our lessons, she was ready for WAY more, but on others she was definitely done within that time period.  She said her favorite thing was actually an impromptu craft that Mimi gave her when we dropped off Karis.  It was a butterfly mobile that we punched out, tied together with string, and hung in her room.  (Thanks, again, Mimi!)  

If you want to know more about the specifics of what Kate and I did on our first day together, you can read our weekly plan on my new site (thank you, honey!) Homeschool.Me. Just click on the ‘Our Curriculum’ link at the top and you’ll see our plan.

Overall, by the end of our time with ‘official school work’ she was sad that school was over already!  That makes me feel good.  ”Always leave ‘em wanting more” as my wise husband always says.  Plus, this morning she drew me a picture with a note that said, “Mom your the best teacher”.  I couldn’t have asked for a better review of our first day together.

Shawn asked me later how I did with it all.  I have to say that I was really excited most of the day, but also really relaxed - it just felt comfortable.  What was interesting to me was how easily I slipped into ‘teacher’ mode with Kate.  It was a different feeling - not so much the Mom role that I’m used to.  I told Shawn the thing that struck me the most was the increased level of patience that I experienced during ’school time’.  I figure that won’t necessarily always be the case, but in general, that’s a REALLY good thing!

Daddy & His Girls

I’m really looking forward to another school day tomorrow. No, seriously. It’s already been a lot of fun and I can’t wait to see how we do again tomorrow. Not something I said very often when I was a public school teacher, unfortunately…

So, what about you? How was YOUR first day back to school. I’m looking forward to hearing about all of your experiences, too. Just leave a comment below…

So, instead of living with the masses of piles everywhere, I started looking for ideas of what to do with it all to help contain it and keep it from taking over my entire house. I came across several great suggestions like these:

• Put the artwork into a plastic box that fits under your child’s bed. You can always add more to the box as it starts to build up again. And, you can usually talk your child into culling through the pile that’s been in the box for a while in order to get more of the new stuff in.
• Get a clean pizza box to store artwork (even some 3D artwork will fit in these). You can even have a box per child per calendar year stored away in a closet somewhere.
• Take digital pics of the faves and then recycle it all. (Talk about NO clutter!!)
• Hang them in your playroom or child’s room from a clothes line/string.
• Then, there’s the ever-present refrigerator door. (Can you find the door or handle behind all those brilliant crayon masterpieces?)

While these are all great solutions and work for some people, the problem I had with most of these was that the artwork was stored away somewhere that no one could see them on a daily basis. Or, if they were on display, there was just TOO much volume of work to keep up with it all on ONE refrigerator door.

So, we decided to do something different. I ran across an article about making a collage of your child’s artwork on a canvas and hanging it in their room. And while the task of putting things on a canvas seemed a little daunting to me, I liked the general idea of being able to put MANY pieces of artwork together into one larger piece of art.

For Christmas, we bought Kate a simple, wood frame from IKEA. We got the poster-sized frame so that we would have plenty of room to display LOTS of artwork. And the great thing about this frame, besides how CHEAP it was, is that it uses plexiglass for the front instead of real glass. SO nice for a little kid’s room where strange things happen to things that can break.

We took that frame, painted it her favorite color, pink, and then added several decorations to it to make it truly hers. She loved getting to personalize it any way that she wanted to with little foam butterflies and wooden letters painted to match her room. And I loved that the whole project, including frame, wooden letters, paint, and foam cut-outs cost less than $10.

Then we took her PILES of artwork and started culling through them all to determine which pieces we absolutely HAD to keep and which we could cut out just a special piece of, and which ones were truly recyclable. (This process, by the way took at least an hour! She comes from a long line of pack-rats, so it was inevitable that it would take forever.)

Once we had the ’special’ pieces ready, we started to place them on the poster sized paper that was included in the frame. We took special care to cut things out with fun edged scissors, label the things that needed it, and arranging them just right so that nothing was covered up that was really important. Then, we glued it all down. (Quick tip: using liquid glue tends to make the paper wrinkle and even make marker bleed, so we wound up changing to a glue stick half way through the project.) When everything is glued in place, I have Kate take a marker and sign her name and date to the bottom of the collage. I think this will be a fun way to not only keep her artwork from this age, but also get to see a piece of her handwriting, too.

Then, all that’s left to is pop it into the frame (might wait for the glue to dry first, though) and hang it where it can be admired by all. We have Kate’s hung in her bedroom so that everyone visiting her can see all her special pictures. It’s been a great way to personalize her room even more and she loves being able to show off all her artwork to her friends and grandparents.

UPDATE: It’s been a few months since we did the original collage and there have been plenty more ’special’ pieces of artwork generated in that time frame. So, we bought a piece of posterboard, cut it to size and went about creating a new collage of the current artwork. Once it was done and ready to pop in the frame, we just set the new collage on top of the old one in the frame, sandwiching the old collage between the new one and the backing of the frame, and voila! a new collage for her wall with all her current artwork.

This is a photo that Kate took on Shawn’s iPhone recently.  She obviously blurred whatever she was looking at, but the resulting image was just too pretty to delete.  What’s amazing to me is that Kate’s a better artist on accident than her mommy ever is on purpose!!  :)

Q: Any tips for handling a 3yo boy who likes to call everybody silly names? (pumpkinhead, pottyhead, poopoohead, boogerhead. I could go on… LOL) We’ve spanked, we’ve done timeouts, we’ve taken away toys, we’ve ignored it, we’ve laughed at it, and we’re all out of ideas. We even resorted to calling him the same name he calls us, (that was short lived as he thought it was the funniest thing he ever heard) and nothing seems to work.

A: We’ve set the rule of no name calling at all, just in case you hurt someone’s feelings when you are just trying to be funny.

AND we’re only allowed to use bathroom words IN the bathroom (which has stopped the embarassingly loud announcements of “I have to poo!” in restaurants, but has also spawned numerous toot and tee tee bathtime songs). To me, this was a safe way for them to get to enjoy those funny things about their bodies which all little ones find so hilarious without shaming our family in public.

But you know, since my girls aren’t allowed to say, “I gotta go poo!” in public any more, we’ve had to come up with acceptable alternatives. Wouldn’t Ethan look so sweet and precious with, “Excuse me, I need to go freshen up.” Priceless.