Slip and Slide

It has been so hot here and I was so sick of being 'stuck' in the house because it's just not fun to play on the street when it's 100 out. So, on Monday, the "last" day of summer,  I decided to do something about it and we rented an inflatable slip and slide and invited a whole bunch of people to our house. It was chaotic and crowded and fun and totally worth it.

 

Willow's 1st Day of School

Willow's 1st day of school ever, could not have gone more differently than Jayden's.  Oh, how different these kids of mine are.  Jayden, we prepped for months (years?) about school, and then even on the first day I still wasn't sure he was going to go.  Willow has been asking, quite frequently now that Jayden's been doing school, when her first day was.  We decided that for Willow's pre-k year, we would send her to school, and then next year for Kindergarten we'll decide if we want to homeschool her with Jayden or keep her in "traditional" school.

Willow woke up this morning and crawled in our bed and I looked at her and said, "Hey Willow.  Today's the day!  Today you get to go to school!"  She replied, "FINALLY!!!!  I have been waiting for this day for YEARS!!!!"  We get up and she insists on wearing some of her new clothes, despite the fact that they are probably going to be a little warm on our 95 degree day.  But I have learned to just not argue with Willow and her clothes choices.  As long as she's modest and her body is covered up, then I'm just gonna let her wear what she wants.   The big shocker of the day though came when she came running into my bathroom and said, "I'm ready for you to fix my hair!  You can fix my hair everyday for school!!!"  Hallelujah!  I usually only get to fix her hair on Sundays for church and then every other day is a quick while she's eating, I pull it up in a messy ponytail just to get it out of her face.  She is been cursed blessed with hair just like mine.  Kind of curly, kind of straight, kind of wild, and kind of the type of hair you have to do something with or it looks like mice live in it.  Although, even when I'm "allowed" to fix her hair, she still has opinions.  "1 braid, 1 high pony tail, 1 pony tail down low, 2 pony tails, but no braids and no ropes just hair, etc..."  She's got opinions that's for sure!

When it was finally time to get in the truck and head to school, pretty much the entire ride there she was singing/shouting, "It's finally time!  It's finally time!  It's finally time for school!  It's finally time!  It's finally time!  It's finally time for school!"  Jayden kept checking with her to see if she was feeling nervous and she just kept saying, "Nope!  I'm not scared!"  Jayden insightfully said, "Man, I was NOT this excited for school at all!"

Inside, by her locker.

She immediately wanted to play in the sand.

But eventually, we got her to go grab a book and sit on the circle and wait for her new friends to show up.

And then Royal, Jayden, and I left.  And I'm pretty sure she had the most fantastic day.  When Jayden and I came back to pick her up, we saw her out on the playground and when her teacher blew the whistle to come in, she hops right off the slide and marches with her arms swinging and her little piggy tails bouncing, right over to the line, with all the confidence in the world.  I was just so proud of her.  A friend of mine asked me if I was sad to see my last little kiddlet starting school and I thought about it and, really, how in the world can I be sad when she is SO excited!  The world is not a scary place for her.  And that is another reason I am glad Jayden is predicted to be 6'3" and is a bit timid of most things because he will be able to grab her from jumping off a bridge after her friends and drag her back to the house.  Willow, I think, will push Jayden's comfort zone to get him to try things he wouldn't of been able to get himself to do, but I think Jayden will be a great balance to Willow's crazy (because we all know it's coming - I refuse to call her trouble and instead tell her how much fun she will be), and I'm going to teach him to sit on her when she's thinking of something stupid unwise to do!  :)

When Willow got in the truck, I got a little video of her talking about her first day.

Back in the Water!

The kids were excited to get back in the pool today!  It feels like forever since we have been at the swim club, but the break was nice, at least for me.  :)

Willow got a new pair of goggles today.  The pink and blue ones she's been wearing for the last 3 years finally wouldn't stay tight anymore. (sorry for the blurry pics, I am just no good at taking pictures with my phone!)

Willow's class was in the little pool today because the big pool was a freezing 74 degrees.

But poor Jayden had to suffer in the cold water. It's just to hard (and crowded!) to swim 50m of anything in the small pool.  He was pretty darn cold, but his teacher just kept saying, "It's not cold!  It's refreshing!!"  I don't think they believed him.

Here's to a great year of swimming!  (or session, you never know when my kids might just totally bail on me and my Olympic dreams for them....:) heehee )

Pesto Party

We picked up a bunch of basil from the farmer's market this past weekend, because well I have zero, zip, zilch basil growing in my garden.  My, poor, poor garden.  But there is just nothing like homemade pesto, so this year I had to buy my basil!

Willow has become such a great helper in the kitchen.  She "tried" to shred the cheese, but in the end it was much to heavy and Royal finished it up for her.

She peeled all my garlic, and there was lots of garlic!

And she helped measure out the pine nuts, cheese, basil, garlic, and olive oil and whir it around in the the food processor, so now we have a few half pints+ to throw in the freezer for winter!

In the Garden

My garden is Pa.The.Tic!  Pathetic!!!!  I suppose that's what happen though when most of your plant starts get destroyed by tornado winds, we have a cold spring, so cold that the day after I transplanted my ginormous strawberry patch it snows and kills them all! And then what I do manage to plant, I desert for 2 months.  I'm not exactly sure what I expected.  Miraculous plant healing and growth?  That would of been awesome!  But so far, the only things we producing are some cucumbers, we got a couple zucchini yesterday, and I think one of Jayden's pumpkin vines has finally produced a pumpkin!  Now to keep Sam away from the thing so it can grow.....

We pretty much had our garden guards away for the summer - Sam was with us and Scooter pretty much was trapped indoors while we were away - not that she minds so much anymore, she's getting quite fat and lazy in her old age.  Or it might be that she doesn't love us quite as much and could care less about leaving us presents on the doorstep.  Because I'm pretty sure she left a dead animal on my neighbor's front steps the morning after my neighbor petted her for awhile.  It was totally Scooter's m.o.  The body of some helpless creature she caught with it's head eaten and the rest of the body in a bloody pool.  Can't say I'm totally jealous of that....  Anyway, with our garden guards on vacation all summer, it appears a bunny has made a nest in one of my garden pots.  We often times put my overflow tomato or basil plants in these pots, but with all my tomato and basil starts getting blown away this spring, the kids used some packets of wildflower seeds to fill up our empty dirt and create a butterfly garden, and that's where we found the little bunny burrow.
See the little bunny buns???  There's a whole grip-load of them in there! 

I'm so not letting Scooter out at night anymore, because I don't want to find those little baby bunnies headless on my porch in the morning!

Willow had one of our neighbor girls over to play and they asked if they could pick a couple flowers out of the butterfly garden.  I turn my back for one second and they've pulled the head off of every flower blooming.  Awesome.....

Oh well, I'm sure we'll get lots more!

And my elderberry plant I got at the end of last summer has grown huge! (I'm planning on making elderberry syrup to help keep the kids well during cold and flu season)  It has grown so huge, it totally took over Royal's withering blueberry plants and we had to rip them out of there.  And we have gotten our first berry crop ripening.  However, it looks like the birds are picking my berries off one by one.  Darn those wild animals!!!!  I may have to stick around next summer just to keep things covered up and help my garden do better!

But in the mean time, I guess we will just enjoy the wild animals that are enjoying our flowers and food.  :)

First Day of 2nd Grade

Jayden's official first day of school was today!

We received our curriculum for the eCademy a couple weeks ago, but couldn't start until today because the eCademy follows the Andover school district schedule and today was their first day of school too.  So today we could finally log on to the "school" and start submitting assignments!

We did some word building with letter tiles.  I'm not sure why the heck I didn't think of these little bead organizers to use to keep our letter tiles sorted.  Last year, we were constantly sorting through this huge plastic bag full of letters and it took forever to find the right ones.  So.  Annoying.  I gave up after awhile and we did different things to build words.  But this year I had a stroke of genius and found these little gems at Michael's! 

We put upper case letters in one and lower case in the other.  Willow worked on finding the letters for her name...in a leotard...wearing tap shoes....can we say she's excited to start her dance class???

 Jayden has 4 different main subjects.  Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies.  Language Arts is broken up into Writing, Spelling, Grammar, Reading, and Handwriting and it takes the majority of our school day, every day.  Math we do everyday also, and so far Jayden hasn't struggled too much in this subject, at least last year he didn't, so it doesn't usually take up too much time.  Science and Social Studies we do each of them 3 times a week.  So most days we only have 3 subjects scheduled to do, and one day a week we have 4.  Although, last year we often times did 1 extra lesson everyday, so we could have Friday's off.  Who doesn't love a 3 day weekend???  And really, Jayden and I could always use an extra day of me just being his mom and not forcing him to do school work.  Some subjects are definitely harder to get done than others!

Learning how to create good experiments in Science.

And finishing up a quick math quiz!

Ready or not, 2nd grade here we go!

Corn-atopia!

Things have been a bit hectic since arriving home 9 days ago.  I've been getting kids registered for school (homeschool and pre-k), signed up for gymnastics, and swimming, and ballet.  Doctor appointments made, chiropractor appointments made.  We've had playdates almost every single day with all the friends we've been missing over the summer.  Of course we've had to go to the pool too!  So it's been so, so busy!  But we are trying to slow down a bit, get the house under control, cleaned and organized during our last full week of vacation, not to mention get prepped and ready for school.  Jayden has an orientation day for eCademy next Tuesday and then we start school for him on Thursday.  2nd grade!  I can hardly believe it.


So, I thought for sure we were going to miss corn season this year.  I left before the corn was being harvested, and Royal was a working fool while we were gone, so he had no time to do corn by himself.  I figured for sure corn season would be over by the time we go back, but we lucked out!  I was down to about 5 bags left in the freezer from last year, so I was pretty pumped Gaeddert Farms was still selling!

We grabbed 2 boxes of corn (8 dozen) at the farmers market and got 2-1 dozen bags for free (facebook special!  gotta love that!) and we did corn this past weekend.  Royal does all the shucking - 120 ears of corn - that's a lot of shucking!

And I do all the cutting, cooking, and cooling.  We try and get the kids in on the work as much as we can, but hours and hours of corn can get pretty darn boring.  So, when they show an interest in some part of the process, we try to include them and hope that the next year they will be able to do a little more on their own.  Jayden really wanted to help cut the kernals off the cobs.

Willow played out in the river that was running down the street.

And I managed to get all the corn cooked and cooling.

Then Willow helped me bag it.

Royal usually helps bag the corn as well, but it seems all the shucking wore him out and he settled in for being read to and being climbed on while "resting his eyes" as he likes to put it.  "I'm not asleep, I'm just resting my eyes"  Mmmmm Hmmmm, my dad used to say the exact same thing...that looks like asleep to me, as asleep as you can be with a kid on your lap reading and a kid climbing over the back of the chair to try and find a spot on your lap/chest/shoulder as well.

Our freezer is almost all stocked and ready for winter!