Oye

Okay, so this blog thing... Yeah. It's really falling through the cracks. Sorry.

Here's a brief overview of the last 3 months and then I'll do a post for each kid.

I've been making lots of diapers for my business. It's moving slowly but it is moving. I really do love my cloth diapers. Weird how much I've come to hate disposables. And the ones I make are just so darn cute!

For "fun" people around here do math on the white board. I don't really get it, but hey, whatever makes them happy. Raelin even does math as a coping strategy when she's upset. Again, I have no understanding of how this could possibly make anyone feel BETTER and not worse, but whatever floats her boat! In this picture, Brice is teaching Raelin about fractions and graphing--rise over run and whatnot. It's a good thing Brice sticks to math and I stick to spelling when teaching our children. Brice would teach rabits and lizzards (click on the pic to enlarge and see what I mean) and I would teach 2+2=7. We balance each other well that way.

So, Alaina has a thing about dropping eggs on the floor. It must just be the greatest thing to her to see them crack and splatter all over the floor because anytime she gets alone in the kitchen, she gets out the carton of eggs and drops them ALL on the floor. (Right now she's standing next to me pointing to the picture and saying, "Essa egg messy." Love that girl!). The day before her birthday, we had just enough eggs for her birthday cake. She broke them all the morning of her b-day and since it was on Sunday and we don't go shopping on Sunday, we had to borrow eggs. A few days later I bought a full 18 carton of eggs and the very next morning they were ALL splattered on the floor:

She was not happy about the scolding she received. But I was certainly glad we had a dog at that moment. Dog tongue is by far the most efficient medium for cleaning up egg.

Most of what's kept me so busy lately is trying to figure out how to change the cleanliness habits of my entire family. First I tried cleaning the whole thing by myself to give us a good starting place. An impossible task. I've been learning that we need a schedule that includes free time and chore time and homework time and that we need to stick to it. It helps the kids not balk at doing chores when they're asked:

I've also learned that I need to restrict my kids' play area until they become better cleaners. I discovered one day why it was that I could never get the house picked up and why I was always so frustrated that the minute I turned my back on a clean room, a magic tornado swept through and destroyed all my hard work. My kids concoct these great imaginative games that require the use of every room in the house and all sorts of props from all over the house as well. The day I discovered this, they had forts in the living room (I hate forts), a firepit in the piano room, and a park in Ryker's room. To make forts, they get blankets and pillows from their bedrooms and bring them to the living room. To make a firepit, they took their moon chairs and blocks from the living room and set it up in the piano room. They also need sleeping bags and camping food. So you see how the WHOLE house gets turned upside down in three minutes. I hate to stifle their creativity, but until they are good at cleaning a mess that size, I've had to say no to making a mess that size. But we're making progress, so at least there's that. This has been a huge area of contention in our family, so wish us luck in getting the housekeeping under control around here!