Home and School

Well, things are ALMOST starting to get back to normal.  Amelia had an eye doc visit with Chris on Saturday and he returned home with this comment, “We are horrible parents.”  Amelia’s pink eye, which every  night seemed better, had reached epic proportions.  I had been too sick to take her to the doctor, but ugh, her eyes looked worse than ever.  So he ordered some heavy duty drops and an eye ointment (I know, weird), but the doc did say she could go swimming.

On Saturday we saw the family at my cousin Ed’s house.  I saw my sister for the first time in forever (and my nephew and his family). It was weird and scary but things seem to be ok now, I guess.  I don’t know, I still feel the need to tread lightly.  Kids had a great time, and spent ALL of today in bed.  In fact, our church dilemma is delayed another week as we didn’t make it to church today.

However, you may recall that I was stressing about how to raise and teach my kids.  Guess what?  I got over it.  I simply realized that there are things that I’m passionate about (reading, culture, art, poetry) that I can pass on to my kids in my own creative way.   I’d love to sit here tonight and make a schedule for tomorrow, but I don’t have the patience right now SO I’ll try tomorrow.  In the meanwhile, there will be time for drawing – which will see me sketching or creating mockups or writing.

I want to read some poetry so I know I need to do a little better right now just sketching out story time for them and somehow making it much more interactive without a whole lot of pressure.

And here is this fabulous idea I tried before the plague struck my house that helped.  I wanted Amelia to clean up the toys that were NOT part of her train set.  So I got a box and I sat and demonstrated that I only wanted non-train set toys in the box.  Not only were trains to be be left out, but signs and tracks and anything else Geotrax.

Guess what?  She got it.  And put all the non-train toys she saw in the box PERFECTLY.  She missed the princess phone, so I told her there was one more toy.  And I gave her a clue: it was pink.  Now Amelia is sketchy at best with colors, and I didn’t really know how good a hold she had on the color pink.  Turns out she knows it perfectly.  She carefully looked around the room and firmly walked to the phone and put it in the box.  I WAS SO PROUD OF HER!

As I observed her this week, I realized that she does know her colors, but mixes up the words sometimes.  We’ll need to work on that and get back to the “letter of the week”.

Finally, I picked up a book on potty training and will give that a shot next week or the next.  Wish me luck!