THE MISSING GLOVE

I am going to stitch Luke's gloves and hat to his body. OK, not literally but he keeps loosing things. In the past month Luke has lost one of his snow gloves at least 5 times. I will show up at school to pick him up and he will say, mommy I lost one of my gloves. So we dig through these three huge bins of lost and found and we don't find it. I tell him to keep checking back and sure enough about two days later it appears in the bins. He then will have two gloves for about two days and we go through the same process all over again. It is literally making me crazy!

I ask him what are you doing with your gloves? He sticks them in his pockets. Pockets that are obviously not deep enough to keep the gloves inside of them. I then tell him not to take them off until he is at his locker in his class room. As you can see he listens to me so well since we keep repeating the same ordeal every few days.

He has also lost two hats. The hats have never turned up in the lost and found bin but I don't ever see any hats in the bins so I am thinking if a hat is lost it gets tossed. Probably for the prevention of spreading lice, that would be my only guess. Either way we have lost two really nice (NEW) hats and I don't think they are coming back.

What I find interesting is how easily young kids can loose things. Luke it is constant with the hats and gloves. But as I said before the bins are crazy full of shirts, gloves, lunch boxes, etc... Where are the owners of these things. We were walking out of school last week and a really nice brown girls sweater was just laying on the side walk.

Do your kids have trouble keeping track of their things? Any suggestions on how I can keep Luke from loosing his gloves all the time?

KEEPING UP WITH SCHOOL

Luke is in first grade and I am amazed at how much a parent has to do with their children to help reinforce what they are learning in school. Just to give you an idea, a typical evening/week of school work includes the following....

Sight words: These are flash cards that he should be able so see and say with in 1 second of seeing the word and he is not to sound them out. We have about 90 of these right now and they add about 5 new words to this list each week. Our flash cards are divided into two piles, words we know and words we are working on. Anyway, it takes about 20 minutes to run through all these words mostly because I can’t flip the darn things fast enough.

Spelling words: Each Monday he comes home with a new list of spelling words. He has 10 words each week and they are different from the sight words so in total he learns 15 new words in a giving week. We do two practice tests in the evening. Usually one on Monday night so I can see where he needs the most help and one on Thursday night right before the test on Friday. In between these two tests we practice them verbally when we drive in the car.

Reading: The requirement is 10 minutes a night and I have to sign a paper. At first it was more me reading to him but we are changing that and I am making him do more of the reading. 10 minutes is not enough time for Luke to get through the books at the level of reading he is supposed to be at. Instead we spend about 30 minutes a night reading. We also have a 10 book challenge each month where he is to read 10 books and I sign off on the books. Another reason I am making him do more of the reading.

Another reason I am making Luke do more of the reading is I have found that the sight words that he knows, I will catch him sounding them out when he reads them in a book. This is not good because I think the cards have been memorized and he doesn’t translate it over to his reading the way he should. I have actually sat down and written up a bunch of sentences using his words and making him practice them this way.

Math home links: These are all assigned on Monday and due back on Friday. Each week varies as to how many we have to do. It can range from 2 to 4 papers per week. I would say this is the easiest part of all the home work. I say that because Luke really gets into math and does it with ease. Often he will sit down on Monday night and do all the papers by himself in a very short time. I then review them with him to make sure he did them right.

I would say we spend about an hour and a half every night on school work. This is tough on the nights we don’t get home from work until 6. It seems like we make dinner, eat, squeeze homework in the middle of all this, take baths and go to bed.

Luke goes to an excellent school and I think part of the excellence comes from what they demand of the kids and the parents. I just worry as this is only first grade and what do I have to look forward to as he moves up each year. I also feel like I put a lot of time into all of this because I really want him to do well in school and when I was growing up my mom put a lot of time into us kids and I am thankful for that.

Do you have school aged children? How much time do you put into helping them? Do they carry this type of load?

A little cute, & a spelling test

Sometimes the creativity is just to funny not to share.

This is our make shift car with a better seat....I am guessing.

Such a silly boy!

On another note: I must share how proud I am of my 1st grader. This past week he had a spelling test with some pretty big and tough words like "because and strike". It was the first week where the words were very random and no themes with sounds.

He took his test and that day I asked him how he did.

His words "my teacher was not happy because 21 out of 23 kids failed the spelling test".

I asked him how he thought he did?

"Mom I did good, I know it."

Sure enough he got a perfect on his spelling test. It was him and another little girl in his class who passed the test. I was so proud of him. It also gave me a great teaching moment. We practice our spelling words a lot in the car. On our way to school I quiz him and on the way home I quiz him. It is a great way to use our travel time. Lately he has been complaining about my car quizzes and not wanting to do them. Now he is glad that I do this and no longer resisting our practice time.

The Closet Project

I feel like we are starting the year off on the right foot. First project on my list of things to do was clean out the boys closet and finish it. When we did the boys room we never finished the closet so it had no hanging bar and no shelving to speak of. I was using it to store Luke's clothes that he had outgrown in the closet in trash bags. Let me just say I did not take picture of before because it was like throwing caution to the wind when opening that closet door. Between the bags of clothes and over stock of stuffed animals.... it was not pretty or safe.

The boys room is small and the closet is even smaller. We have bunk beds in their room and a dresser and not much else fits. See the ladder for the bunk beds, the feet of this ladder touches the bottom of the dresser on the adjacent wall. (small room)

My husband and I debated back and forth on how to maximize the closet space and surprisingly I won this round. The closet is very deep but narrow (the width of the door narrow). I wanted to put shelves all down the back wall and two hanging bars out front. My husband said that was silly because the clothes would be in the way of the baskets. This is true, but I don't have a lot to hang for the kids and I don't need to access the baskets but once a season. He also didn't like my idea because while the closet is deep it is not deep enough for the shelves and adult hangers. Again, I am using this for a kids closet so I don't care.

Anyway, we did as I wanted and then I bought baskets to fill all the shelves and stocked them with all the excess clothing that will be handed down to Thomas. Personally, I love how it turned out. I bought every brown basket my Walmart had and I still need six more to finish it off.

Here is a view of the end result. Sorry not the best picture but you get the idea.


Here is a close up of my baskets and everything labeled for easy future access. Way better than trying to find that next trash bag.


Step two of all of this was to move all of Thomas's things upstairs and into the bedroom. For 7 years now I have had an amour in my dining room or living room. Currently it rests in my dinning room and quiet honestly I am sick of looking at it because it is so out of place. I guess when you have a small house you do what you have to do.

See the armour.... so out of place.

The amour was Lukes and when we moved him upstairs into his bedroom we bought all new furniture. The amour does not fit in their very tiny room and I don't want it in ours. So it is time for it to go.

I guess I am very excited because project one has been completed. I have 6 bags of clothes, stuffed animals and crib blankets and sheets all packed up and ready to go to Goodwill. I am givign my crib to our Church nursery and not sure who is taking the amour yet but it will be gone very soon.

Have you ever had furniture in places in your home that don't really belong? Do your kids have to share a room?

LETTING GO

I recently spent some time cleaning out the drawer below the baby crib and removing all the blankets, sheets and everything that is baby. I have it neatly folded inside the crib waiting for my husband to take the crib apart so that I can get it out of our bedroom and give it all away.

Sounds great.... yet I am having issue with getting rid of it. I have no plans to have more children, two is all I want. For that matter, all I can handle. However I have this fear, this fear that I will part with all my baby things and the unthinkable will happen.

I fear this because I did not plan either of my children. They just happened! The second one I wanted to happen but it wasn't planned when it did. I have placed the burden on my husband to take care of things so we cannot have more children and he has not done this.

I have purged baby clothing and many other things but not the crib. Why am I afraid to send away the crib? I need to get it out of my house for space reasons it needs to go and yet I can't bring myself to do it.