It’s been nice to get back to our normal routine. Getting our school work done is becoming a little easier as I’m learning which activities work best at what times. It really feels like fall now that the weather has cooled and all the school buses are driving by during the day.

This week, Ethan is starting to work on writing “S”s, recognizing “S” words and learning the “sssss”  sound. It’s nice that the uppercase and lowercase letters are the same. The fine motor skills are the least natural for Ethan at this point (which I think is pretty normal for kindergarten). I’m concentrating on reinforcing the correct was to hold his pencil and scissors and he’s learning that it makes it easier to control them that way! We don’t work on it for hours on end– just some short exercises to develop those skills. I get to do lots of cheering! I can’t wait to see how much he progresses by the end of the year!

It’s been interesting to see how Ethan has taken to math. He really enjoys it and “gets” it. He already understands “plus” and “minus” and he can look at a group of items and very quickly tell me how many are there. He knows what a group of 4 items looks like without actually stopping to count: 1,2,3,4. Does that make sense?

We made another trip to the library today. We returned the first Boxcar children book and a few other books and we picked out some new ones. I found “The Littles” books. I was so excited. I remember enjoying them when I was a kid. I think Ethan and Audrey will enjoy them too. Ethan also picked out a book on dinosaurs and Audrey picked out a collection of Princess fairytales!

Another thing we’re getting caught up on is laundry. I finished our laundry and the few dirty items the kids had (Dad kept on the laundry for the kids for me while we were gone!) on Monday morning. I have not been able to do any laundry since because we didn’t have any salt in our softener and I could really tell a difference. Clothes weren’t coming out as clean and some still smelled funky.

That’s the news from here. Now it’s time for me to head to bed.

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Nathan and I had been talking about rearranging some of our furniture to make a better space to do school work, so I took some time to get started yesterday afternoon. We had planned to move the TV and entertainment center downstairs to make a man-cave for Nathan and free up living room upstairs. So, I started with emptying the bookshelves. That’s all I had energy to do!

Then Nathan arrived home and was ready to move everything. And he made this decision at about 9:00 last night. Only crazy people carry bookshelves and entertainment centers down their stairs late at night when they should be getting ready for bed. Crazy, we are.

Our house is still in a bit of a state of disarray. I would have taken a picture of the basement for you, but it’s still a mess. I did take a photo of our new Schoolroom/Playroom. It’s not completely arranged they way that I want it yet. We’re going to swap this couch with the one downstairs. I also want some bookshelves for bins for toys, school supplies, games and books and I’m on the hunt for a little area rug. My hope is to have Isaac-friendly items at his level and everything else up higher, but still accessible for Ethan and Audrey.

I really wanted our space to be upstairs. I didn’t want to be in the dark basement away from the sunshine. We accomplished that with this move. Also, I wanted a to have a comfortable place for reading since we’re doing a lot of that and I want to keep that up. We also have toys to keep Isaac occupied (as much as possible) and other toys for Ethan and Audrey. I am happy about having the TV out of the way in the basement as a reminder that playing with toys is fun and that we don’t need to have as much screen time.

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