Afterschooling

     I always dreamt of the day when I would get to plan fun activities and crafts with my children, and now it is finally here! I feel like Laura took a long time to get to the point of enjoying activities I planned (and sometimes she still isn't into them), but when we do get to sit down together and work on something, it's really great. I am in my element here.

     Afterschooling is a sort of compromise between homeschooling and... not homeschooling. It's just about right for me (who, if we're being honest, can use a mental break from being the mom of a two-year-old while she is at school, but who also really enjoys planning toddler crafts and activities to help said two-year-old develop her mind). It's really the best of both worlds.

     Laura's preschool has weekly themes to work with, which makes it even easier for me to come up with ideas to complement what she is learning (with much thanks to Pinterest). Last week they focussed on apples, and this week, fall. Here are some of the things we got up to:

Crock pot apple sauce. Sooo yummy.

Apple sorting and counting tree

'A' is for apple!
We've been trying to follow along with the letters they are working on each week at school, too.

 We also made apple prints, but apparently I forgot to take a picture.

We made them into a birthday card for Grandma.

This week we went for a 'hike' along the trail to look for fall treasures.
Laura's favourite was the "milk leaf" (aka milkweed pod).
We gathered them up and brought them home to make some prints with.

(our prints)

I would have preferred to go to an actual forest, but I don't know of any good spots around here.
We're planning on going for a real hike up at Grandpa's next weekend.

We took some books on fall out of the library,
and talked about how the geese fly South so they don't get too cold in the winter.
We also talked about how squirrels gather up nuts and hide them so they have food all winter.

We made sugar cookies to look like fall leaves to share with Laura's class.

Sadly, they have had to mandate that no homemade food items are allowed to be shared. :(

And of course what would fall week be without leaf rubbings?

Rachel: 4 Months

     Today Rachel is four months old!

     She went for her four month check up and shots last week and weighs 13 pounds and is 24 inches now. Thankfully, she fits fairly well into all of Laura's hand-me-downs for the correct season (except shoes), even though Laura was born three months earlier in the year.
    Rachel is just the sweetest little baby, and can go days without crying, providing a nice contrast to her... shall we say 'high maintenance' sister. She always has tons and tons of smiles, especially for Mama, and has been laughing more often now. She is even starting to get a little ticklish. So cute. I feel bad because I have to take advantage of her easygoing nature to attend to Laura a lot of the time. But, at least Laura is in school twice a week now so I have a little more 'full attention' time for Rachel. Hopefully she doesn't sleep all the way through it. ;) When she does cry, though, she really cries. I refer to her as the Drama Queen because she is just so... dramatic. When we were at the doctor's last week, he put the cold stethoscope on her chest and she wailed. Good set of lungs on that one, but a bit of an over-reaction if you ask me.
     She has become quite wiggly in her old age (hence the less than stellar picture), and will immediately alternate arching her back when propped up in a sitting position with scooching her bum forward so that she wiggles all the way down to laying flat again. You'd think she likes the view? She still really loves grabbing onto her toys hanging from her activity gym, clothes and hair, and really anything she can get her hands on. She has also taken to this fairly hilarious 'grumbling' that she does when she is slightly unhappy (bored or mildly hungry, usually), but will carry on for half an hour or more. Grandma says we better watch out when she learns to talk because she'll never stop!
     She has yet to roll over again since she first did those two times at 3.5 weeks, and still hasn't slept through the night, either. She usually goes to bed around when Laura does now (8:00 - 8:30ish, totally awesome) and will sleep for at least six hours, but not all the way until morning. Most days I am still having to bring her into our bed in the early morning or else she wakes up several more times than is necessary (I think because she is cold, but it is too hot to put a sleep sack on her when she goes to bed, and she's too little for blankets yet!)
     We've been battling the neck stinkies the last month or so, as well. Mostly only when it's hot, she gets funk built up in her neck rolls (disgusting, I know) and it smells so bad, and gets all red and irritated. Looking forward to her outgrowing that! She also, as of today, has acquired her first cold, with special thanks to Laura for bringing that one home from school. Poor kid.

Rachel grumbling (and farting. Sorry, Rache.)

Routine

     We are home. Josh is home from an awesome week-long recording session up North, and the girls and I are home from spending the week with Grandma. We had a great time - went to the zoo, the fall fair, and enjoyed some of the fineries the town had to offer. It was a busy week on all our parts, and now it's time to settle down. I am fully looking forward to the new routine that September brings.
     Summer's done, I'm hoping to go back to work two nights a week, Laura is going to preschool two afternoons a week, and I'm even attempting to get Rachel into a consistent napping pattern so we'll be able to have a little more structure to our day. Every so often we get into a bad, too-much-TV-watching rut, and then I realize I'm letting my parenting slip and am inspired to do more with the girls. I'm hoping to start incorporating a weekly library trip into our schedule, and I'm happy that Laura's preschool has weekly themes that I can use as a kind of springboard for activities and crafts for the 'after schooling'  I want to do at home to compliment what she is learning about. I also want to start working on her letter and number recognition more consistently.
     With all this planning and routine-setting, I think I am going to try to implement a cleaning schedule so that things get cleaned more frequently than just when we have people over. ;) If everything else is in a schedule, it will be easy to add cleaning into it, too. (Right?)
     I've even gone as far as making an entire meal plan - not just dinners! - for us to follow, mostly for Josh, as he needs to incorporate more fruits and veggies in his diet, but also for me, because I could stand to lose some weight, too. I'm thinking about doing a sugar detox sometime soon, as well. We trialed two weeks of the meal plan at the end of August, and realized that I was a little ambitious about all the healthy snacks I was going to make. I ended up spending over an hour every night in the kitchen after the girls were in bed (aka all my free time) making ridiculous things like fruit leather and kale chips. It essentially left zero time for myself, and that wasn't going to work. So, we've made some adjustments, and Josh is just going to have to settle for more fresh fruits and veggies, since most of them are better for you that way anyway. The meal planning was a ton of work, but probably worth it if we can benefit from it in the health department. I think I will just use the two weeks I made as a sort of example framework to stick to now. I used the Canada's Food Guide to base it off of, and had the following constraints:

• must have fish 2x a week
• must have orange and green fruit or veg every day
• must have at least 5 servings of fruit or veg every day
• must have at least one serving of nuts/ lentils/ beans every day

(The other guidelines I wasn't as strict about, because even with these constraints it was difficult enough to come up with a rotation.)
Here is a week sample - it's not perfect, but it had to be attainable at the same time:

     There is something to be said for routine - it provides a sense of comfort and familiarity.
     Until we get bored. ;)

Preschool!

     As you know (if you read my blog) we have been batting around the option of preschool for Laura all summer. The last few weeks of August we made more progress in our decision, and visited a couple more schools as they got back to us with available positions for her. We had sort of ruled out the Montessori one that we previously toured for a variety of reasons, so it was down to two. One of them was run much more like a daycare, which was not really what I had in mind for Laura, but had perks that I knew the other school didn't offer. Unfortunately, we only had a few days to decide once we were notified there was a position for Laura there, and we weren't able to see the one I really wanted to send her to until after we needed to make our decision, so we were taking a bit of a gamble...
     Fortunately, when we toured the third school (the one I had always been leaning towards all along) it was more what I had in mind - so we signed her up! Starting today, she will be going for a 2.5 hour program two days a week... and here she is on her Very First Ever Day of School!

Marching right in :)

her classroom

     When I picked her up, the first thing her teachers said was, "Her forced laugh is hilarious!"
I was a little disappointed they didn't say much else other than that... no report on what they did, or how she behaved, etc. I had to gather as much as I could from her in the car on the ride home, which I guess was kind of fun in itself. :) She sounded like she had a good time, and didn't particularly seem like she wanted to leave, so I suppose it was a success!

Happy First Day of School, Baby Girl!