Paul and I have not done much “school” since I posted at the beginning of February about our “school at home” progress. Obviously, this was due to the fact that I was in the uncomfortable last stages of pregnancy and then actually having a baby and taking care of a newborn.
Never the less, we have read through a book about the Earth from a fabulous Early Bird Early Learners series by Lerner Publications (this particular book). It’s written for slightly older kids, but by reading together, one chapter at a time, Paul and I enjoyed learning how the Earth’s crust moves, what volcanoes and earthquakes are, and what all of that means for us.
Since neither of us have been in the mood for worksheets lately, I was trying to think of a way to make remembering and reviewing these details fun. We weren’t interested in sitting in the school room, but Paul always wants to play board games with me!
Voila! We turned Earth’s Crust into a game!
I found a mostly blank game board online. Paul found pictures in the book that he liked and I found similar ones online as well as a few clip art images to illustrate the game board. Then we added squares to correlate with the images: each of these squares gives or takes away an earth “token.” So, landing on a volcanic eruption may cost you two tokens, and the squares before and after it are labeled “volcanic ash” and may cost you one token. A “sleeping volcano” gets you a token.
And then we made questions, Paul reading me sentences he liked from the book and me rewording them as a question or as a true/false sentence. When we land on a blank space on the board, we have to answer a question. Right answers get us more tokens. Whoever has the most tokens when we’re done playing the game wins!
Paul and I have played this every day for two weeks now. He loves it! For the first days, he’d have to read the book to find the answer; sometimes I had to help him by finding the page or picture that correlated to the question. But now he knows the answers without having to look for them. How many four-year-olds care about magma (the name of a new imaginary friend, apparently) and lava and the plates of the Earth’s crust, which are moving? It’s quite fun to see him get excited about these things.
Caroline is usually on my team. She usually sleeps through our turn. Sometimes Paul wants her to play by herself. She sleeps through that, too, and Paul takes her turn. He loves to include her, though.
All pictures on this post taken March 8, 2012. Caroline, age 2 weeks, 1 day old.
It has been an incredibly mild winter here in Chicagoland. Here it is, the middle of March, and it’s been in the 70s and 80s. Paul has enjoyed playing outside this week.
Three-week old Caroline has been outside with us too, of course. I’m a bit concerned about her being out in the sun, so we’ve been going out in the later afternoon. She usually stays under wraps in her carrier in the shade.
She is wearing a boyish outfit from Paul’s infancy. Most of Caroline’s newborn clothes are pink outfits, long sleeved and footed. I thought it would be cold this time of year! Silly me. So when it’s warm, out come the short-sleeved blue outfits. Again, who’d have thought that it would be so warm already?! Not that I’m complaining.
Ryan and Paul were sick with colds this week. Paul was still in good spirits for the most part, although he did have a day or two of temper tantrums and unpleasantness. Ryan was out with a flu-like cold for two days of not feeling well. So I tried to keep everyone else away from Caroline, which resulted in me be exhausted. I felt like I was in a daze all week.
And then, of course, I got sick too. So now I feel pretty icky. Caroline and I stayed home from church this morning and took naps.
Better this week than next, however! This week, Grandma Peggy and Papa Paul are coming. Next Sunday, Caroline will receive a name and a blessing during our Sacrament meeting! What a special day it will be.
I think it looks like she is smiling in the second picture here. It is said that babies don’t smile with meaning until six weeks or older. But, as happened when Paul was newborn, I am certain she has smiled at me because I am me. She sees me and smiles. It feels great to be recognized. She is so beautiful!
Caroline has proven to be a very eager eater and a voracious pooper. Way to go, new baby!
She still has to learn that night time is for sleeping four hours at a time, while day time should be when we wake up every hour or two. But, she’s only a week and a half old, so I suppose I should give her a little longer to figure that out. *Yawn*
Caroline didn’t cry when she was born. She went from swimming in amniotic fluid to completely born in twenty minutes, apparently gulping lots of fluid in the process.
They gave her to me immediately. My only thought was that she was pink and looked well. But she didn’t cry. Paul didn’t cry either, but this was a bit different. Something seemed odd.
After just a few moments, the nurses took her back from me. They wanted her to cry, so they gave her a shot she needed, gave her a bath, and proceeded to give her a vigorous rubdown. She had her eyes wide open, but she did not make a sound. I was stuck on the delivery table getting stitched up and I couldn’t see her, but Ryan stood by her. I remember starting to get a bit concerned after about ten minutes or so of this.
Shortly, Ryan and the nurses left with her “for a little while” to take her to the special care nursery where she could get further attention.
I can’t recall thinking much other than “a little while” isn’t very long.
I was still running on adrenaline. When I was discharged from Labor and Delivery we went straight to the special care nursery. Because she was born so quickly, Caroline had developed TTN (Transient Tachynea of the Newborn) which meant that she had liquid in her lungs and as a result was breathing quick shallow breaths.
Because I’d been up more than 24 hours at this point (well, except for the brief, contraction-filled two hours I’d had at home), I was incredibly the first day. The three days Caroline spent in the Special Care Nursery were rather draining on me; I like to know what is happening and I felt pretty out of control for my little girl’s sake. Anyway, let’s not dwell on those days. You’ll notice I didn’t take many pictures. The nurses were great and Caroline is fine: there are no long-term issues from TTN.
Caroline came home on her third morning.
Paul came with Grandma and Grandpa (where he stayed Friday night to Saturday) and he was so excited to finally meet her. He’d seen her through the nursery window. “That’s my sister!” he said with pride. When she and he were finally together, he was so excited to read her a story.
Paul is a great big brother. He’s feeling the stress of new rules and less attention, but overall, he seems quite pleased to be a big brother now!
In some respects, I can’t believe it’s been so long. Didn’t we just get here? Honestly, all the rooms look pretty much the same as when I gave our new house tour. I haven’t changed the furniture or decorations for the living room, family room, front hall, kitchen, or our bedroom since we got our new furniture just after moving in. I’m just not one to rock the boat when I like how things look, I guess.
On the other hand, I also can’t believe it’s only been three years. I love our home! Every time I drive up to my house, I feel so grateful that we were able to move here. I truly am coming home. I can barely remember the previous places we lived and I just love where we have ended up. I never want to leave.
We may not have made lots of decorating changes in the past few years, but since we moved in, we have done a number of big things for the house. We refinished the hardwood floors. We insulated the attic and the basement. We had the roof replaced. We had the cedar siding and trim repainted. We replaced the patio door. We painted the ceiling of the basement in anticipation of more changes down there. And we’ve now painted the smallest bedroom in preparation for a new baby!
There is still lots to do to make our home the most beautiful it can be. But I’m pretty happy with how it is today!
I’ve been pondering home schooling for about a year now, although Ryan mentioned it to me as a possibility long before that.
“Oh, no. I could never do that!” I argued. I’d be too tired, I don’t know enough, it would be stressful.
Then last summer Paul taught himself to read. He’s probably at a second grade level now, at least if the text is large. (If it’s small text or too much on a page, then he still “can’t” read it.) If it was only reading, I may have let it rest. But that was not all.
Using his fingers, he began to put together the rudiments of addition. And because he has an analog clock in his bedroom, he wanted to learn how to read it. He loves putting coins in his piggy bank, and I found myself explaining how each coin has a different value.
In the fall, he started requesting books on different scientific subjects, firstly the planets. From October through December, he wanted to read everything he could find about the planets.
In about November, he began expressing an interest in the human body, probably because my body has been changing with baby growing. He became fascinated by digestion (pee and poop!) and by the heart (I feel my heart beat! I’m alive!) and his bones, which he can feel through his skin.
Around the same time as these science topics began to fascinate him, he began asking about maps. We printed a map to the church, and he wanted to follow it as we drove; he has always been fascinated to watch the GPS cursor on the map in our car navigation system. We’ve learned about map legends, the four directions of the compass, map scales (this is still a bit confusing to him), and some other things.
Because of his fascination and because he seems so advanced in his interests, I thought I’d experiment a little bit with just how interested he is: what can I manage to do with him as a stay-at-home mom? Could I possibly homeschool him?
I bought a handwriting book about ABCs and Numbers. It has a “Kindergarten” label on the cover, so Paul, being the reader he is, decided he was doing “Kindergarten School at Home.” We decided to collect his worksheets in a binder, and thus began Paul’s homeschooling. Now that we moved my office into the same room as Ryan’s office, we also added a space for Paul to be his “work space” or school desk.
We’ve been through two phases of home school now. The first phase lasted about two months, and it was exhausting. Paul wanted to spend every afternoon doing all the different subjects: ABC worksheets, number worksheets, more advanced math concepts (money or time or something new), science, and maps. Every day he wanted some of everything. It was so much fun! He didn’t want to stop for dinner! Needless to say, this was exhausting. We literally spent three or four hours every afternoon doing more and more worksheets. I couldn’t keep up in finding or creating interesting age-appropriate worksheets.
We’ve moved in to a new stage now. I should clarify that before we began “school at home” and before Paul practiced writing on the ABC worksheets, he found writing itself “too hard.” We set up a desk space for him. The numbers and the ABCs in caps and lowercase are on the bulletin board for him to refer too. Now, he does not mind writing, and in fact likes to spend an hour a day writing his own games and worksheets and activities. Some of these are for me to do, others are just for fun for him. He loves it!
A skeleton worksheet Paul made me: I was to label the body parts/bones!
So the new stage is much more balanced between Mom’s worksheets every now and then and Paul’s imaginative writing and creating. We still do some more “formal” school at home.
He loves finding things on maps, and we have been learning how there are seven continents. This month we have particularly been focusing on Antarctica and penguins for science and geography. (The human body is still on his radar, but he’s a little tired of it at the moment. Every few days he has a question and we find pictures in a body book.) In mathematics, we started learning about adding one to a number, but it hasn’t clicked yet that he doesn’t have to start at the beginning (1, 2, 3,…) to add just one more. (He regularly figures out basic adding on his hands, though.) We’re still practicing patterns, and he often makes up his own, which I hear is good for early math skills. He loves to do mazes. We’re learning about “greater than” and “smaller than” maybe once a week, and we practice reading clocks on the hour and half half hour about as frequently. Sometimes we get out the pretend money and set up a store where things cost pennies, nickles, and dimes.
And I’m trying to introduce him to the concept of “history.”
Although he still is intensely interested in learning, we’ve mellowed out to about 30 minutes or 1 hour a day of “school at home” before he’s ready to do his own writing or learning projects.
That’s just perfect for a four year old. He has preschool twice a week still to keep him social. He has gymnastics and swimming lessons to keep him physical. And he’s hard at work at challenging himself to learn and practice in his own imaginary activities as my teacher.
In the state of Illinois, school is legally required for all children beginning at age 7. Home schooling parents are not required to submit grades to the state, but they need to have records of some kind to show children are learning according to the state standards.
Paul, then, has another two years and eight months before I’m required to officially home school him. At this point, this is my plan: for the next two years, I’ll follow his lead. We’ll (probably) do three-day-a-week preschool again next year. The following year, I’ll either send him to kindergarten for 2 hours a day or I’ll join a co-op where he’ll play with kids his age. (I’m leaning toward the co-op, as I imagine that half-day kindergarten with 2 or 2.5 hours a day will not provide much time for socialization.) When he turns seven, and when kids his age are in first grade, I’ll determine just what kind of “curriculum” he needs and we’ll implement it. I suspect he’ll be far above first grade Illinois state standards come that point, if his present interest in learning about the world continues. And if he does slow down, I suspect we’ll be able to get in to a slightly more formal school routine (especially with co-op friends to support us) without too much trouble.
At any rate, I’m really excited to see where “school at home” takes us in the next two years. There are so many possibilities!
This post is evidence that I must update my blog more often! But since I’m now 2.5 weeks away from my due date (!!) I really just feel this urge to get up to date…so I can hopefully soon move on to newborn pictures.
Our family Christmas present this year was a new patio door for our kitchen. We ordered it the first week of November. After more than a few hiccups, it was finally installed the last week or so of January! Here it is!
It does not stick when we try to open it! It’s not rotten on the outside! It doesn’t leak when it rains! It’s a sliding door instead of a swing open door, so there is more room in the kitchen! In general, I think we’ll like it very much. Ryan applied primer to the trim: we still need to paint the trim and figure out curtains at some point before the Western setting sun gets too irritating come this summer.
And then it was my birthday. Birthdays are very much NOT a big deal for me. My friends treated me to a baby shower a few days before, and it was so fun to get excited for a newborn baby GIRL!
Here are some pictures of Paul making a birthday cake for me with his grandma!
And then we ordered a rocking/recliner chair for the baby’s room. We got it the week after my birthday (after a bit of an issue: why did we have so many issues with delivery people in January?!).
And then we come to the fact that I’m now 37.5 weeks pregnant. The count down is on! As of two weekends ago, we had a disaster area in the room formerly known as my “office.” I was in tears bawling because I was less than a month from having a baby but WE DIDN’T HAVE A NURSERY READY! Ryan talked me down off the edge of break down and we got busy painting. I did the walls; Ryan did the trim. I think it turned out very nice! We intended to have a grayish blue, but it turned out far more blue than we anticipated. With the dark brown and light pink accents we’re anticipating for the curtains (Ryan says he has an idea what we should do; good, because I am not a curtain person), it should look just right for our baby girl.
Now that the nursery is set up and I’ve officially reached “full term,” I personally am feeling rather emotional. I am incredibly excited to meet my girl. And I am so bored with being pregnant: feeling miserable, feeling exhausted and in pain, waddling when I try to walk, grimacing when I stand up, having to pee every 60 minutes, and waking up to pain as I try to move in the bed at night. Not to mention not sleeping well at night overall.
That said, I feel panic whenever I realize that I could give birth tonight or tomorrow. I dread spending time in the hospital. I dread the pain of childbirth, while at the same time I dread the fact that I may end up with medication like an epidural or a Cesarean against my wishes. I panic at the thought of having a newborn to bring home this weekend. I dread the lack of privacy in my own home. (Don’t get me wrong: while I”m glad to be near close friends and family and I’m excited to share my baby, I’m still a bit in a panic about how life will go on with visitors. I am a private person!). Paul will lose the one-on-one time we’ve been enjoying so much lately. I’ll be so exhausted from never sleeping. I’ll have 10 or more diapers to change a day. I’ll have a human being depending on my body to provide nourishment every hour or two (for an hour!). I’ll have two children to get ready to go out to whatever we have to go to — even the drop off for preschool is going to be quite the bother, since I’ll have to take Caroline in with me each time! I can’t handle another child yet! I should be so happy to have the time to clean my house right now.
Except I can’t bring myself to do the basics: clean my house (it needs it!), go to the gym to exercise (my last chance!), cook a fantastic creative dinner (I have time!).
So I’m torn between feeling exhausted and bored and overwhelmed and guilty and excited and delighted and just plain tired.
Photo at 37.5 weeks.
Incidentally, I’ve been collecting a few things others should NOT say to a nine-months pregnant woman. Any others you can think of that really got on your nerves?
“I see your third nipple!” (This from the nurse, referring to my belly button poking through my shirt. Great. Thanks. Can I kill you now?)
“You look far too happy to be about to have a baby!” (Oh, how I hate you for saying that! I feel so miserable I can’t even begin to express it. Maybe in public I really try to not be a whiner? Ever thought of that?)
“My, that went fast!” (I’m quite tired of hearing this too. No, it didn’t. It’s been 37 weeks. And I’m tired of it.)
“Oh, I didn’t know you were pregnant!” (I can’t blame people on this one if they haven’t seen me in a while. But REALLY? A bit annoying to hear since I obviously have a baby in my stomach at this point.)
“You’re about to pop!” (I’m not a balloon. And while I wish it were true that the end was near, it really could be 2.5 more weeks! Which seems like an eternity at this point.)
“I was 10 days overdue with my third…” (Not what I want to think about.)
Something I love to hear:
“You look fantastic!” (No other comment necessary from giver of this comment. I don’t feel fantastic, but I’d love to pretend I look it!)
One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to update this page with family pictures in the same month in which the activities took place, starting with Christmas 2011. I especially want to be better since I posted 50+ pictures a month of newborn Paul and I want Caroline to feel she’s just as special a newborn.
I intended to post these pictures the last week of December. And yet, here I am well in to the new year, waiting for Paul to go to preschool to do so.
At any rate, Christmas was wonderful this year. I baked cookies and fudge to enjoy for a month and to give away to neighbors. Paul was incredibly excited to countdown until Christmas and he enjoyed the activities we did.
Before Christmas, I was able to attend Paul’s preschool holiday party. I haven’t attended any of his parties before so it was fun to be there to help and take pictures, etc. This was a rather chaotic party; I wonder if preschool is always like this? At any rate, they had some carnival games, a few craft projects, and then a gym floor covered in bath sponges that were called “snowballs.” They were encouraged to have a snowball fight. Put 20 kids aged 3 and 4 in a room and tell them to have a snowball fight? Um… Paul reacted much as I would have. He threw a “snowball,” then watched people for a while. Then threw another. It was a bit intense.
Here are some of the best pictures of my little guy. The full album of the preschool is on flickr with a guest pass.
Reindeer bowling
He's proud he knocked some bowling pins down.
We are low-key about presents (I do not want to raise a spoiled or greedy child who says “I want that!” for every toy he sees). I gave him a (plastic) kids microscope, books (which is what he asked for), and an inflatable globe, among some other smaller things. Grandpa Sorenson gave us a book of silly stories that he wrote and Grandma gave him a Thomas the Tank Engine puzzle. Grandma Peggy sent Trio blocks, which along with our Legos, have given me lots of time as Paul slips downstairs to create yet something else. (YES!)
We enjoyed the true spirit of Christmas. At the beginning of the month, he loved selecting some clothes for a “poor boy” from the library’s giving tree and talked for days about the boy who was too poor to get his own clothes. (He was particularly excited because the boy was FOUR just like he is so he knew just what the boy would like.) He loved selecting gifts for his cousins (we do a family gift rotation among my siblings). He loved the excitement of wrapped presents and waiting for them. I don’t think he was tempted to open them, he just loved shaking them and counting them and wondering. He was fascinated by the mystery of magical Santa (although *cough* the reindeer forgot to eat the reindeer food that Paul left on the front step. How’d I know he’d check that FIRST?! even before looking under the tree?).
And most importantly, Christmas was, for our family, about the true meaning of the season, the birth of our Savior. I love having Christmas on Sunday, because then church reinforced the real meaning of the season. I wish we had services every Christmas morning, but of course, that’s not how it works.
The not-so-materialistic goals we have worked well this year: we got to church at 10:30 and someone asked him what he got for Christmas.
“Ugh….I forgot.” he responded. (But he did remember to say that the reindeer forgot to eat the reindeer food he left for them…). So, at any rate, I know Christmas for Paul was not about the presents. Mission accomplished!
We also got to spend the afternoon with Grandma and Grandpa and Paul’s Sorenson cousins. It was lots of fun to watch the kids playing, and it was great to gather with family on a special day.
Decorating for Christmas was not pleasant this year… and I just keep thinking how taking it all down will be even harder because I’ll be that much more pregnant. Nevertheless, Paul loved helping put up the tree. And I do love the lights and the Christmas music. (Guest pass to view this set on Flickr.)
And then we come back to Santa. Do you remember Raisin’s reaction to Santa last year? Well, this season began much the same.
“I don’t like Santa. Santa is grumpy.”
“I don’t want Santa to come.”
“I don’t need any toys.”
So when we headed to the Lake in the Hills tree lighting, I warned him that Santa would be there, but we didn’t have to talk to him. We would leave after we saw the Christmas trees. Surprise! Once he saw Santa, he really wanted to talk to him.
They had this set up for pictures as we waited to talk to Santa. Paul is saying “Merry Christmasssss!” which is why his tongue is sticking out. I only had my phone with me (I wasn’t planning on meeting Santa, remember), so that’s why it’s totally out of focus.
I kept asking Paul what he was going to say to Santa. Would he tell Santa “not to come” like he did last year? He just said, “You’ll have to listen very carefully.”
So what did Paul say?
“What do you want for Christmas?” asked Mrs. Claus.
“Books,” said Paul without hesitation. “Books about books.”
