After two days of serious frustration with my 3 oldest kids, Sam and I decided to have a family meeting and present a schedule for the summer.  It’s pretty funny, because we didn’t really discuss the schedule before our meeting…and maybe it’s just the way my personality is, but I just love that he made it up and that was that.  It seemed great to me…so today is our first day on the schedule.  Of course, I have to be a little flexible with it, and it does allow for some flexibility, which is good.  I am telling you that this is the way to go.  Today I had so much less complaining and much better attitudes.  There was no argueing when it was time for rest time, and I love this 45 minutes I get all to myself.

So here it is:

So here is our tentative schedule…
Up and dressed at 8:00.
Breakfast, 8:15
Clean up and then play outside.
Snack, 10:15
Homework, Journal, Reading and Chores
Lunch, 1 kid assigned to help prepare & clean up each day on rotating schedule, 12:00 - taking Kate Gosselin’s idea of a picnic lunch when we can…LESS CLEAN UP
1:15 Rest time - ON BEDS, sleeping or reading or listening to music
2:00-4:00 Free time which may include playing, art projects, extra jobs, DS. - Quiet Zones in effect while baby is napping.

4:00 - clean up from playing, get the house ready for Sam to come home
6:00ish - Dinner
7:30 - Baths and bedtime routine
9:00 bed (8:00 for baby)

I love that there is a lot of play time, so we could go do something fun or run errands, like this morning, after we were cleaned up from breakfast, all they had to do was get their shoes on and we were out the door to go to the credit union and got there even before they opened.  It wasn’t so fun sitting there for almost an hour in one of the offices while we opened accounts for each of the kids.  We gave them money for their grades on their report cards, and their school participates in a program with the CU where they will be able to deposit $ into savings at school.  It wasn’t much fun, but they weren’t too bad, and afterwards we went to Target and got popcorn combos or slushies and everyone got a pair of flip flops for the summer.  When we got home everyone wrote in their journals and then we got lunch ready.  I thought it was a good morning (even though I was a little stressed at the CU).

I have printed up the schedule and posted it on the refrigerator so they can keep me on it, too.

I probably should mention that we have used the stoplight discipline system all year.  This is something that they do at school, and we continue it at home.  Bad choices mean consequences and it goes like this, 1 warning, then yellow light, another warning, then red light, The kids try to stay on Green light all day.  Red light gets spankings, Green lights all week earn rewards.  This goes for anywhere we are.  So I made each kid an envelope with a hole cut out, and papers inside (red, green and yellow) to change accordingly if needed.

So that’s about it, oh and I am having the kids track on a calendar their days and which light they are on.  They will color in the square appropriately for how they end the day.  That’s how we will track for the rewards.

And I am also going to try making up some clothespins to clip on the bottom of their envelopes for positive behaviors they accomplish each day.  It should be a nice visual reminder of their responsibilities…I am hoping.  And these are easy enough to take down and take along with us when we go to the fairs and camp this summer.  I will try to post a picture later for you.

Rest time is over…see ya

I finished up work last week.  Spent a couple of nights at school till 1AM trying to get my room cleaned up.  I finished up on Friday afternoon, but I have to take in some paperwork & stuff tomorrow morning.

This weekend was a whirlwind of cleaning and entertaining…Max’s birthday party.  It was fun.  It took a lot to clean up the house.  It was so trashed - because I have basically done very little to maintain it the last 3 weeks.  Next year I will think about hiring someone to help me clean those last 3 weeks…I just need a little help with that since my attention has to be so focused on work.

Today, I felt like I had a chance to relax and breathe.  This afternoon I took a short nap.  I cleaned up stuff around the house, did some laundry…spent time with the kids.  I had them write in their journals, Max and Karson practiced their sight words and we all played a rhyming game that had to be ended because the boys were trying to rhyme male anatomy and bodily functions.  What is up with boys this age?  I seriously think that is all they think about!

Savannah, Max and Karson are going to Kids Kamp this week at Trinity Wesleyan Church.  Jasmin is going to the babysitter’s.  I am looking forward to having some time to myself.  Though, I do have to spend a couple hours at the dentist tomorrow…and I am not looking forward to that AT ALL.

I have a lot I want to do this summer.

• work on stuff for school next year…both art and kindergarten (I’m doing the same thing, in case you didn’t know.)
• get the Pirate show ready which includes repainting, painting and decorating the inside, and getting the costumes ready to go.
• paint…um…this is low on my priorities…but I would like to paint the living room, the front entry way and the back mud room…and maybe do some touch-ups in other rooms, and then there are the window frames outside that need to be scraped and repainted.
• have a garage sale…this really needs to happen.
• work on reading and math with the kids.
• lose weight, eat healthier & get a tan.
• keep my lawn looking as good as it does right now (thanks to Mark, the lawn guy).
• Journal and draw daily - which will be tough, since I am totally not in the habit of doing this.

It’s good to have goals, right?

These past 2 weeks have flown by.  I have given more tests than I think I have ever taken in my whole lifetime!  But I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment at finishing something I had no idea how to do a year ago.  I will miss my kindergartners.  They were a great group of kids…and parents.  Next year I am slated to do the same job, morning art and afternoon kindergarten.  Sure I am disappointed that I won’t be going back to teaching all art…but I am extremely grateful to have a job and to be doing the same thing as I did this year…and not having to learn something completely new, again.

I am in the midst of planning a birthday party for Max who is turning 7 next week.  I cannot believe he is already that old.  Bad thing is that this is ALWAYS the worst possible time to plan a party when you are a teacher.  When I was pregnant, his birth day couldn’t come soon enough…but now, I don’t think I would have minded if he would have hung out another week.  But I feel bad for Max, because seriously, his whole life, he has gotten jipped on pretty much every party.  It’s easy to do that when they are little and they don’t understand what a birthday is, and you can just call up your fam a couple of days before and say come on over and they actually show up with presents and food and everything.  But now, Max has friends and parties are a little more involved.  Last year we invited friends to Fun For All Kids…a place with a bunch of inflateables (which is now closed down).  And it was a good party.  Easy on us.  The kids had a blast.  But this year Max wants to have an Art Theme party…which of course I think is cool…and I can’t be lazy about planning this one…after all, I am an ART teacher.  So I asked my friend Sara (who designs stuff like this - check her out on Etsy!) to whip up a cool invitation for it. And it is REALLY cool.  Thanks Sara.  So I got the invitations out, but haven’t done much since then.  I have a ton to do around the house.  We are having a lot of guests…and I was planning an outside party, but it may rain, so we may do our grilling in the garage and I will need to be creative with how I do the activities.  I’m still trying to recover, I think, from staying up till 3 and 4 in the morning for 2 days in a row.  But my kids have some great little memory books to remember their year in Kindergarten. 

My kids’ last day is Thursday.  Bean does their field day on the last day of school, so since I will officially be done with work tomorrow, I get to go.  But then afterwards, we are grabbing lunch and heading over to my room to clean, clean, clean.  I have to clean up both the kindergarten room and the art room.  It’s a lot to do, but since I didn’t have to teach kindergarten today (because we had an early dismissal), I actually did get quite a bit cleaned up.  I feel good about that.

The pictures were taken a few weeks ago, after buying a container of glow sticks (the kind you make into necklaces & bracelets) from Michaels and using our night setting on the camera.

It’s been an interesting weekend.  Friday it rained.  We all came home from school and sacked out…around 7:00 we decided to go get something to eat.  I was carrying Jasmin down our steps.  Not remembering to be careful because they get slippery when they are wet, I somehow slipped and we fell down.  I landed on my knees and the back of my hand, Jasmin landed on her back and smacked the back of her head on the pavement in our driveway so hard.  It was scary.  She didn’t lose consciousness, but after we got her calmed down, which took a long time, we decided to still go eat and as we were driving she was falling asleep.  So I had Sam drop me off at the Express Care for kids to get her checked out.  I was thinking I probably would have to take her to ER to get a CT scan, but the pediatric dr. at the Express Care seemed to think, after checking her over, that she was doing fine but to watch her.  It was nearly bedtime when we got  home, so I got her ready for bed and put her to sleep after giving her some tylenol.  I woke her up a few times during the night to check her.  She seemed normal.  I think she’ll be ok.  I was a little worried because she didn’t bleed or get a bump or anything…and I thought that might be bad.  It is an awful thing to think that I could have hurt her.  I know it was an accident, but all I kept thinking was how I should have turned or something so she wouldn’t have hit her head.  We didn’t sleep very well, and it didn’t help that the two movies we rented to watch this weekend were both about dying!  (Seven Pounds and Marley & Me).  I cried so hard at the end of Marley & Me…because it totally was what happened with Cooper.  I miss him still.  Not that I want a dog right now.  I told Sam he shouldn’t watch it. (I watched it with the boys)

Anyway, I still don’t know what is going on for next year at school.  They haven’t told us because they are offering an extension for the buy out and hoping some people will take it.  That will determine how many lay-offs and what everyone will do.  Right now all the admin. can do is come up with several possible scenarios…it’s kind of crazy.  I would think we should know something soon.

I am looking forward to this weekend.  We are going away to a campground - staying in a cabin for the whole weekend.  We’ve never been there so I hope its a good experience.  It will be fun to just be away and do something different and I am glad for the extra day off! Only a few more weeks…and I have so much to do!  Time is flying!

As I am typing this, my hands are sore…and I am feeling a little worn out.  I’ve spent several hours this weekend outside working in the yard (while the inside looks like a disaster zone).  My goal was to get the lawn mowed and create some nice play areas for the kids.  They helped out a lot, even though mostly they just wanted to play.  We washed the inside of the playhouse and cleaned out all of the spiderwebs and dead leaves and weeds.  Then we spread out a bag of mulch on the ground.  We are missing the plastic for the skylight in the playhouse, so when it rains water comes in and splashes down on the dirt - because we don’t really have grass growing in there anymore - and makes it really muddy…so I am hoping the mulch will keep it a little cleaner in there.  We took the little picnic table up to the car wash and Sam sprayed it until it was clean.  Now it looks like we just bought it at the store!  We weeded, ripped down vines off the fence and cut back the wisteria vine that grows up the side of our house.  I pulled all the weeds around the swingset, and put 8 bags of mulch around it.  We put together the new sandbox and filled it up.  We swept the patio and part of the driveway that still had leaves from fall.  We dug up all the rocks that border the flowers that grow on the side of our house and replaced them and then added mulch around the plants.  Everything looks so much better, we are even considering having a Memorial Day thing with our friends.  It’s been a while since we have entertained outside, because our yard really requires a lot of maintenence.  Which is weird, because we have dug up and removed SO many plants!!!  You should have seen it before…seriously I think the previous owners must have spent 8 hours a day outside between May and August just maintaining the yard/garden.  Who has that much time?  Certainly not a mom with a full time job and four kids.

So as we were cleaning up around the patio, Sam decides to get rid of the grill.  We already have a new one on the way that we have ordered from Amazon.  We bought this one because the reviews on it were great and we can take it with us camping.  It will be so much nicer to be able to have a grill to cook on while we are out at the fairs this summer.  Our old grill we have had for at least 10 years…actually, I think longer.  It no longer lights with the ignition, so you have to turn on the gas and light it with a lighter…and risk singeing the hair on your arm.  It only will light on one side and the grease cup was missing, so we had attached a soup can hanging from a coathanger wire to the bottom of the grill.  It was a great grill when we first got it, but I don’t even think we have used it for a year!  So Sam says he’s going to put it out by the road with a free sign on it. I am thinking to myself…WHO would want it?  It doesn’t even work! But he insists…and it’s gone with in 5 minutes  - SERIOUSLY!  Then we decide to put our old red lady bug sandbox (that we bought for Savannah when she was a baby) out by the road.  The eyes are missing and it has had rotten leaves and moldy sand in it for a year…disgusting.  I’m thinking no one would want this…but I am proved wrong again…and within minutes it’s gone too.  Sam and I think that this is one GREAT thing about living on 3rd street.  We have saved so many trips to the dump by just sticking our old broken stuff out by the road…I don’t know why people would want it…but someone always takes it…the couch sofa with the ripped seat cushions and broken legs (we had to break them to get it out of the basement), the old water heater (that didn’t work any more), and now the grill and the sandbox.

Anyway, I hope you all got a chance to get outside and enjoy the weather this weekend…I am loving Spring right now!

Tonight I went with Savannah to Brownies.  It was our last meeting, so I thought it would be cool, since we are done working on Try Its to make a little scrapbook of our year.  I got some pictures printed and the Girl Scout scrapbook stuff at JoAnn’s was 40% off this week…so I made some little 6×6 booklets with some of the GS paper.  I sewed them together with my sewing machine.  They turned out really cute.  And I got some of the stickers for cheap too.  Anyway, at the end, before we left, we had each of the girls share their scrapbook, what their favorite thing was about their book and Savannah said how she like the pages that had the Girl Scout Promise and the Girl Scout Law the best.  She said she would “probably read them every night.”  It was just so cute how she said it.

A glimmer of hope I saw on my principal’s white board in her office…

“JD memart/robart”

probably no one knows what that means…to me, it means POSSIBLY I might get my old job back!? JUST teaching art…no more kindergarten.  No guarantees, for sure, right now…but HOPE…and hope is good these days.

I drew this little sketch of Parker during our computer lab time today.  My students were busy with Kid Pix Deluxe or Starfall…so I thought I would try to draw one of them.  I used the mouse to draw this in Kid Pix Deluxe.

…is procrastinate about saving my report card files somewhere else besides my flash drive.  I have been thinking about it and meaning to do it since January.  I am so mad at myself for putting it off.  Last week my flash drive started acting weird.  Sometimes my computer wouldn’t recognize the hardware and some files were missing…I found them, but at first I couldn’t.  So I worked on my sub plans for Thursday last week (I had a meeting in the pm) and then it was so late I went to bed and forgot about copying the files to my laptop.  So when I got up on Thursday morning, I remembered and I went to copy them…and my report card folder was EMPTY!!!  My heart started racing…and I panicked and ran upstairs crying…wanting Sam to tell me it will be fine, that he can recover the files easily.  He came down and tried and couldn’t copy them (to the mac) from the flash drive at all…he took it to work and him and Sid worked on it, but I am afraid it’s beyond hope.  So yesterday I sent home a note to my parents asking for report cards back, so I could copy them.  Today I got 4 back.  That’s a start.  I can probably come up with most of the data from written records I have kept, but it’s going to be a lot of work to re-enter all of the information from the whole year for every student.  I could just kick myself for being so naive about the dependability of a flash drive that I have been literally carrying in my pocket five days a week for four years!  I really didn’t think that anything would ever happen to it. I really don’t know how it got damaged…ALL I know is that I learned a tough lesson…and I will be so much more careful about backing up important files in other places in the future!

I’ll be the first to admit that we have made some pretty stupid decisions regarding our finances over the past few years.  The thing is, I never really understood how to be smart with money and how to live debt free…or even why we would want to.  It’s such a trap.

We have just completed a thirteen week course called Financial Peace University (Dave Ramsey) through our church.  We have learned SO much through this course and have committed to get out of debt (except for our main mortgage for our home).  We have a lot of work to do still, but we are happy to say we have completed baby step 1 and have been working on our debt snowball and have payed off four of our debts freeing up 340.00 a month that we can now apply towards the next debt on our list!.  It feels so good to do that.

I only wish that Sam and I had taken this course 15 years ago.  But then, I think, maybe we might not have been ready to make the commitment either.

But seriously, my opinion, EVERYONE should take this course…whether  you have a lot of debt or none.  It deals with so much more than just getting out of debt.  You can work through the course online for a small fee if you can’t take a class.  And the FPU member resources are amazing and so helpful.

Check it out…Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University