Priorities/Balancing

The hardest part of each day is the balance between being a mom and a working mom.  I realized early on that I would not be home for most of my children's youngest childhood.  If I become a stay at home mom it won't be for at least a couple more years.  So, the learning playdate really started from my anxiety 4 years ago that everyone else is teaching my daughter things that I can't.  Luckily we have been amazingly lucky and have been able to choose all the environments that my children have been in.  They have been looked after by people with my own ideals and similar teaching and disciplining methods.

Yesterday is a prime example of trying to find the balance for the kids sake.  It was the first snow day.  Ya, it only snowed a trace, but for a 2 and 4 1/2 yr old...that is enough.  I got home from work at 1:20pm and my babysitter dropped off the kids from a play date at her sisters house at 1:45pm.  I had to feed them lunch and then get ready to leave for work again.  Thur is a long working day for me.  Ballet from 9-1 and 3-7:30.  I wasn't sure if they kids were going to be coming with me to ballet for the first little bit before my husband could pick them up or if he was just going to make it home in time to get the kids before I left at 2:45.  Regardless, it was easy for me to say no to their pleas of going outside because it was not enough time to bundle them up, then unbundle them and get them ready to go with me if they got wet.  So, Remington got on the stool by the back door and was looking out in awe.  He was pointing at all his toys and yelling at me about what had happened to his shovels, his bike, his trucks, the swing, etc.  I got a lengthy video of that moment.  When he gets excited he huffs and puffs between words and then says a word several times.

So, I got Madalynn to come in and read.  I first read her a book and then we went through a unit of Hooked on Phonics.  We did the ending -ub, which when Russ came in and heard her reading he called out the same sentence I did.  Rub a dub dub in the tub.  Haha.  Two parents thinking alike.  She is started to have -s on the end of a word and learned about an apostrophe for the first time yesterday.  She learned the sight words: who, my, of and reviewed here, what and like in her story.  She struggled with the word "but" because she still has the "b" and "d" backwards.  I am going to work on that again this week with the rolling dice.  She earned two stickers and was a tropper.  I read several books to Remington both this afternoon and this evening.  I will be writing a post about the board books my kids read soon.

Russ got home at 2:30 and the kids begged him to go outside.  He bundled them up like a great dad and out they went.  We are going to have to remedy the lack of snow pants for the son, but they had a great time.  They had a total of 20 min outside play.  Russ taught them to throw snowballs, Remington learned that his hands get cold touching snow, they learned if you sit in it you get wet, I took several pictures and videos and then left for work.  Russ made sure to help Remington notice the snow from his boots on the sidewalk.  That is what is happening when this video begins.

The rest of these picture were my poor attempt at a sibling picture.  I have holes in my tennis shoes, so I wasn't willing to go and stand them next to each other.  I just stood on the sidewalk and took pictures.

Priorities: They needed a few minutes, just a few minutes in the snow and we made that happen.  They had a full day of play.  They learned to listen to the sitter while she took them to her fun workout class.  They learned to play nicely with a puppy at the relatives house of the sitter and they played with lots of other kids, getting social interaction.  It is definitely hard knowing that they are getting those opportunities and I am not there with them, but I am glad that they get them.  If I was home all the time, I would probably tend to stay in my house and they wouldn't get as many of those moments.

When I came home we watched videos of the artist we are going to go see today for Museum Friday.  I am super excited we get to see an artist doing his art.  We read scriptures with Madalynn and made her read the words that she knows and they went to bed.  No, there weren't tons of "teaching" moments, like school type stuff, but the moment I did have were definitely full of wonder.  And that is how we go about this business right now.

Hope you enjoyed.

Shadow Play

One of the days last week I had to run up to BYU to buy some of my ballet CD's.  It was the dead middle of the day.  It was also probably the last true warm day we will have this year.  The sun was shining bright and Madalynn was skipping along singing.  She was trying to engage me in the song, but I was in a hurry to get my kids home and get back to work.  Of course, she grew more and more frustrated.....and so did I.  She started lagging behind complaining about her legs hurting.  However, I was determined to not loose my temper and was trying to figure out how to get her to move quickly.

I don't know where thoughts come from in my mind...however, all of a sudden I stepped on her shadow and called out to her, "you can't catch mine!"  Well, naturally all the college kids were staring at us as we were running up the walks across the square in front of the library, all the way up the walk to the visitor parking at the MOA.  By the time we were done, I was sweating from running, dying from laughing and she was having the time of her life.  I didn't always let her get the shadow.  Sometimes I hid behind the stroller, sometimes I let turned a little and made it fall on the stroller, and sometimes I let it fall right under her feet.  We talked about how shadows are created.  She watched and then tried the various ways to get it to change direction.  We talked about the sun and its placement.  We watched how it was different when we were running along a diagonal across the square and when we were running in a straight line up a hill.

It was just a good reminder to me that playing/learning are always combined.  It was a small, but very significant moment to remind me how to have patience with my daughter.  Man, she moved right along once we were having some fun.  My son of course was super jealous...as he was strapped in a stroller.  I would have let him out if I wasn't trying to get on and off campus in less than 15 minutes.  Next time we will have to let him play too.

Hope you enjoyed our outing.

Normal Play night 11/11/14

I wish I had taken a picture of Madalynn putting on the flag today with Russ.  However, I was jumping in my car for a long 9 1/2 hour work day.  I worked at UVU from 9-1 and I taught piano from 2:30-8pm tonight.  I don't get much done on Tues.  However, like I said before, I work long hard days so I can spend time with my kids on the other days.

I learned about 6-9 months ago a fascinating thing about my son.  When I am near him and sitting on a piece of furniture he is constantly trying to get into things and quickly moving from one activity to another.  However, if I sit on the floor...even if I am not paying attention to him, he can sit and play with the same toy for an hour.  Crazy huh!!!  I can't believe I even figured this out.  So, we started closing his bedroom door and playing on the floor about that time.  Well, on Tues nights I put the kids in his bedroom...with a door knob child proof handle on the inside.  I can watch them from my video monitor while I am teaching, but they stay out of my way.  I only do this for the last two lessons.  Russ has to leave for his calling at church and I still have to finish my last two lesssons.

Recently he has taken to emptying every box in the closet during this time.  It is driving me NUTS!!  Seriously!!  Well, last Tues he got the train tracks out.  He has loved trains since he was really little.  When he first started talking, one of his first imitations was a train whistle.  We live by lots of train tracks so he sees them a lot.  It never ceases to amaze me how he can spot a train anywhere when we are driving.  Well, I cleaned the floor last Sat and moved the kitchen table and let them build with the train tracks.  It is amazing the skills that are used...just to create a track.  The small motor skills to put the pieces together.  The logic that a child needs to use to get the pieces to turn and line up.  As I watched Madalynn trying to get a bridge to stand up and watching her decided how many supports it needed, I was just amazed at her patience.  Usually if something doesn't work, she gets super super angry and won't try again.  Well, she tried a few times until she got the bridge to work.  Simple play moments, really create huge teaching moments.  I talked to her about how to add tracks to help the trains turn around, how to make quick turns with tiny pieces and how to make large turns with the longer pieces. I could really go on and on, but it is not necessary.  We had to clean up all TOOOO soon because I had to get to a family party thing.   There is a certain time frame that my kids seem to need to have ample child play and I probably cut it an hour short.

Well, tonight my son dumped out the Lincoln Logs.  There are two sets combined in this box.  The ones my dad played with when he was a child in the 60's and a newer set my grandparents had purchased when we were kids.  The newer set has an instruction booklet on several different forts you can make.  I had Russ show Madalynn how to do one of those about 2 months ago.  When I came in from teaching, she had made this one.

Well, she wanted to know more about building tonight and I decided this was going to be our playing/teaching time for the day.  I told her that first she had to clean his room before we could build.  I told her our limited time period, since I got in there at 8:15 and she needed to get ready for bed a 9.  Clean up is an important part of play, and they did it super super quick.  Remington is constantly amazing me with his ability to understand how to play with building/boy toys.  He started stacking the small pieces with no problem.  I talked to Madalynn about height, directions, windows and doors, stability at the base, strong and weak points based on how wide or skinny a tower is.  I showed Remington to how to put on the roof and let him line up roof pieces.  I let her talk through several design ideas giving input as needed.  We were all fully engaged.  We talked about hitting, as Remington of course just wanted to destroy after 20 min and they started hitting each other and crying.  We learned about how to put the piece in the box with long and tall pieces stacked and little pieces just falling around them.  Etc.  It was the perfect end to a very very long day.  I look forward to some playing/teaching moments tomorrow after I pick them up from the babysitter.

Building a castle tower

Tearing down and rebuilding the wall

Learning how to take turns as they build a larger and larger tower

He is watching Madalynn take her turn

Putting on the roof

Determined to get the roof finished.

Mom, take a picture...and she smiles.  

I can't find the exact quote, but in the book I am reading it states (paraphrasing), that the more a child sees you taking pictures and notes about their work, the more it validates their ideas.  I take LOTS of pictures of each activity that we do.  I want my daughter to know her work matters to me and her ideas are strong and important.  So while each picture may not have been necessary to view, it meant the world to her as she moved through each stage of building.  She would yell out when she wanted a picture and after the whole night, she wanted to look through them again and discuss what she was doing in more detail.  So, if I post a ton of pictures this is my reasoning for taking them.

Hope you enjoyed.