Summer Week 6- SummerSummerSummer + Freedom & Bravery Cont.

Summer, summer, SUMMERTIME!!  We got our SUMMER ON this week!!  Since Ken's job ROCKS and he has a 4-day weekend for the 4th and since it would be crazy to think about going back to work on the 5th after a long night of fun and fireworks, we ended up with a 5-day weekend with Daddy!  We loaded it up with so much summertime fun!

At a surprise swim party for our sweet friend Ed!

When you live in a place with 3-digit heat most of the summer, a nice getaway to cooler temps is AMAZING!  We went to Cloudcroft for a mountain picnic. It was GLORIOUS! 

A little tree climbing! 

Hiking with Mommy! 

It wouldn't be a day in our life if there wasn't some sort of ruckus to sort out.  When we got home, the girls brought me this.  This would be about 10 My Little Ponies shmooshed together with a handful of Bunchems.  Do you know about Bunchems? Well, they are super fun and the girls really love them. HOWEVER, they usually only play with them under my supervision.  Unfortunately, Ellie always finds a way. *sigh*  Ken and I tried for about an hour to salvage what I could but in the end, we had to break the news.  It was either throw away the bunch or cut the ponies' hair.  Ellie hated both plans and Sophia, always reasonable, thought that cutting the hair would be the best choice. 

I set out the ponies with their new dos in front of the girls and asked them to close their eyes.  When they opened them, Sophia thought it was hilarious and Ellie went through all of the emotions before settling on hysterical crying because she didn't want "boy ponies." Teachable moment? Sure.  We told her that MANY girls also have short hair.  Finally, she decided that her Barbie, who had also been thrown in the mix, looked like Ellen, her favorite person :) 

For the 4th, we started the day with a Patriotic breakfast and ended up not taking one other picture all day!  That's a sign of a GREAT day!  Having so much fun swimming, grilling, swimming, drinking, swimming, laughing, swimming, and lighting fireworks that you forget to look at your phone much less take pictures is a good sign of a great holiday :)

Daddy's last day off was pretty much rinse and repeat with the addition of a makeover session by sweet Sophia.  Lookin' good, right? 

Summer 2016 will forever be remembered as The Summer of the Watermelon for us.  I'm a total watermelon snob.  Seedless is the WORST. For some reason for the last several years, all I've seen at the stores here (yeah, we have like ZERO good markets here :( ) all I've found are seedless.  Flavorless, dry, bleh.  This year at Walmart they had a HUGE box of giant SEEDED watermelons!  They were so yummy!!!  The girls and I made our way through about 2/3 of the first one with our lunches.  It was weird that I had to teach them how to spit out the seeds since they had never seen that before.  Ellie thought it was awesome to spit on her plate.  Sophia, on the other hand, couldn't be bothered with such things and asked if I would start taking out her seeds. Um, no. With the last 1/3, I threw it in the blender to make some juice for Watermelon Moscow Mules. Ahhhhhh-MAZING!!  And that little bit of watermelon went a long way in the juice department!  

Anyway, for the 4th weekend, we bought another one with intentions to juice a lot of it for watermelon margaritas (again, Ahhhhhh-MAZING!).  We mentioned to some of our friends that this stash at Walmart was better than normal (apparently we've talked about watermelons and the lack of good ones in LC quite a bit). So they bought one, cubed it up, and brought it the 4th shindig.  After the party, they left us with 2 large containers of cut watermelon plus we had more than half of our own plus the rest of the juice.  Seriously, our entire fridge was filled with watermelon!  A couple of days later, our same friends who were through Texas called to tell us they picked up ANOTHER watermelon so that we could try a true blue Texas watermelon which we've been told are amazing.  We were super excited and grateful AND hysterically laughing because of our never ending flow of watermelons!  Before they dropped it off, I hit the kitchen to figure out what in the world I was going to do with all of this!  I pureed/juiced it all up and headed to Pinterest!  

Did you know that if you throw cubed watermelon in the blender WITH the seeds, the seeds just move around and are not ground up into the juice?  Bet not. I do. 

That afternoon, our friends Sharon & Ed stopped buy to bring our watermelon.  Ed carried it in, set it in the kitchen and said "Let me go get the other one." The other one? WATERMELON FOR LIFE!! Ha!  It's a good thing watermelon is my favorite! 

I feel like I'm somewhere between I Love Lucy and they just keep coming and coming and Ethel (Read: Ken) and I are trying figure out where to stash them, and Bubba. Watermelon Popsicles. Watermelon Sorbet. Watermelon Salad Dressing.  Frozen Watermelon Cubes. Grilled Watermelon Salads...

Our own garden also took off in the last couple of weeks!  I'm notoriously terrible at growing a garden but this year, I'm doing pretty well!  Our zucchini was looking a little sad so I looked online to see if I could green up my thumb a little.  Ours were pretty small and kept yellowing.  Apparently this is due to under-pollination.  Dang it! Bring back the bees!  There were are few solutions but only two of them were really doable. 1) Plant some flowers that attract bees or 2) Hand-pollinate. Want to know how to hand-pollinate a zucchini plant?  Well, here's what you have to do. Find the boy flowers (you know it's a boy because it's on the end of a long skinny stem), pick them off, pull back the petals, then stick the little nub that sticks out in to girl flower which can be found on the end of the stubby stems (actually the zucchinis).  There is a round "hole" inside the girl flowers.  I read this information to Camille as I found it and we were both busting up laughing like middle schoolers.  She told me that after I'm done with my zucchini sex, I needed to come have zucchini sex at her house because she doesn't have the energy for it anymore.  AHAHAAHAHAHAHAH!!!!  But here's the deal - it WORKED!  No more tiny yellow puny veggies, we've got big whoppers coming out EVERY DAY!!!  I may have felt totally weird and SUPER awkward out in my garden, but it was worth it!

This was the final week of NMSU Swim School for us.  It is AMAZING how much the girls have grown from these lessons!  Sophia went from being timid about being in the pool without floaties to swimming laps (both freestyle and backstroke) with amazing form!  She's so excited about it and she's GOOD! We went for two, three-week sessions and decided to take the 3rd session off but Sophia will be right back to it for the fall!  She wants to compete and has decided that she's going to be in the Olympics.  Keep an eye on this one ;)

For Fun Friday, we finished up our lessons about Freedom & Bravery.  I wanted the girls to understand that it's not just in the past that brave people fight for our freedom and for our safety.  I wanted them to know that bravery doesn't just mean fighting in wars.  It's standing up for what we believe even when (or maybe ESPECIALLY when) the easy option is to go along with what others are doing.  It's also doing jobs that protect people on a daily basis. I wanted them to know that freedom doesn't just mean that you aren't ruled by dictator or imprisoned.  It also means that you have the ability to pursue your dreams.  On Thursday, I posted on Facebook that I was looking for names and addresses of service people to send "thank you" notes.  I noted that it could be military, police, firefighters, etc.  We got several responses right away.  The next morning, we woke up to find out about a tragic shooting in Dallas where police officers were specifically targeted.  I reposted and specifically asked for names and addresses of police officers.

I created this simple card.  Ellie colored the front of them and Sophia wrote inside each one.  I wrote out the words for her and she filled them in including the specific names we were sent.  As of today, we have sent out about 18 cards and we have about 15 more that we need to get out on Monday.

Our hearts go out to all families effected and we pray that our county can heal and find a way out of this that doesn't involve any more pain or fear.

Later that afternoon, we watched He Named Me Malala.  I recorded it a long time ago and I was waiting for the right time to watch it with Sophia.  I know some people might think that the content is too grownup for Sophia, but I trust her enough, I know how she thinks, and I want her to understand the real importance of freedom and bravery.  We don't hide the truth of the world from her but we do soften it.  She understands death and has faith in God and the promise of eternal life in Heaven for all that are saved.  When she watched the video, she was very sad in parts, asked a lot of questions, and felt proud of Malala for being brave.  She also immediately recognized immediately how unjust it is for girls anywhere to be denied an education.  We talked about how education itself is a huge key to freedom.  Sophia said "Girls should get everything that boys get. We both have skin and eyes and brains." Yep.

If you're not familiar, Malala is a girl from Pakistan.  Her father is an advocate for education and she followed in her footsteps.  She gained attention for speaking out for the education of girls and as a result, she was shot by the Taliban.  It was a miracle that she survived much  less recovered to the point where today she is a global advocate for girls' education and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

To end the night, we watched the U.S. Olympic Track & Field and Gymnastics trials and had a little girlie time doing our nails ;)

Summer Week 2 - Animal Week!

Week 2 of summer, just another week in this house.  You know, a full day showdown over cleaning their rooms that began with not being able to find ANY matching flip flops for EITHER girl (even though they each own like 5 pairs!), ended with me eavesdropping on them in Sophia's room while they talked about how I was being mean and how they needed to write me a letter asking me to be nice, and SEVERAL tears, a garbage bag full of toys that were going to be thrown away if they didn't put them in their homes within the next 10 minutes, and "promises" to keep their rooms clean from now on ;)  I won't like, I'm sure it was super traumatic for them to see all those toys in the bag since I've been known to throw away toys MANY times.  Especially for Ellie.  She knows that when mama says "I'm coming to check, Ellie!" I mean business.  If (after a couple of times asking her to clean up) I say that and I go in and find her playing instead of cleaning, I throw away a toy.  Typically something that I chose in advance because I'm tired of seeing it on the floor!  Sophia on the other hand said "That's ok Mommy.  I think you should throw away the toys because we already have enough toys."  Nice move, Soph.  The bag was mainly filled with Ellie's toys!

How about you?  Are you as sick of picking up toys on the floor as I am.  I seriously CAN'T TAKE IT!  And my kids really don't have that much stuff!

Anyway...
We definitely ended the day on a fun note.  Since it was Animal Week, we decided to watch The Lion King.  This was also fun because we are going to spend Thanksgiving in New York and we're going to see The Lion King on Broadway!!  Before the moving started, we talked about Africa and what types of animals we would expect to see in the movie.  We also enjoyed a yummy piece of chocolate cake that Grandma gave us!  :) Once we moved to the couch, Ellie fell asleep in about 2 minutes.

Totally my kid.  It's so hard for us to watch movies at night on the couch!  I kept dozing off and Sophia would not-so-gently wake me up so that I didn't miss anything.

The next morning after swim school.  We talked about the movie.  Sophia made a list of the things she expected to see then made a list of what we actually saw.  She also wrote a few sentences about her favorite part of the movie.  She really liked both parts where the baby lions were lifted into the air.  She liked that everyone was excited about a new baby :)

We also found our first tiny tomato in our garden!  This was super exciting because I'm the WORST gardener ever!  Everything always dies! Ha!  This year I'm determined that our garden will not only survive, but also flourish :)

We also found this adorable guy on our patio.  He and his mama/daddy are definitely culprits in the yearly failure of my gardens!

I had a bunch of work to do Tuesday and Wednesday and since Grandma was still recovering from a long weekend of many guests, I didn't get much alone time to do it.  We checked out several books from the library about endangered animals so I asked Sophia to read them to Ellie at the table while I worked.  After each book, she would find videos or more information about the animal on Discovery Kids and National Geographic Kids where apparently she's earning points with each activity and video she completes.  I don't really know what that means yet, but she likes it.

Tuesday night we had a FUN friend date with our pals Jianna, Alya, and Elin!  It was definitely controlled chaos but we had a blast!

Thursday we really got to business doing fun things!  One of the books Sophia read was Animals and Me by Marie Greenwood.  This book goes through all of the types of animals (mammal, reptiles, etc.).  Sophia LOVES to make her own graphic organizers so she asked me to create a form for each type of animal.  Each one had a header, a space for characteristics, habitat, food, and examples.  Then she went through the book with Ellie and they filled in as much info as they could.  Some items were not in the book so she headed back to her new favorite websites to look up info.  (Um, this is totally new and strange to me, by the way.  My 6 year old kid is using the internet to do research?)

Next, Sophia had a really fun idea.  She and Ellie collected a bunch of stuffed animals and other animal toys and brought them out the living room.  She wanted to sort them based on the animal group they belong to.  We discovered that we own a BUNCH of mammals but had a hard time finding any invertebrates.  We looked through everything and couldn't find anything.  Then Ellie held up her hand and said "This looks like a worm!"  It was her bubble gum that she pulled out of her mouth (after I had told her 8 times not to do that) and it totally looked like a worm!

Our next project I just KNEW would be fun...and I was right!  I found this on Pinterest.  They are animal activity dice!  One die has an action and the other an animal.  I swear they could have played this for hours!

Finally, for #FunFriday, we went to the ZOO with Grandma!!  It was super hot but definitely could have been worse.  There was a breeze which made it bearable :)  This was the first time we had been to the El Paso Zoo.  It was pretty average as far and the variety of animals but the facilities were great.  I found this Zoo Scavenger Hunt that we brought with us so that we would remember to actually talk about the animals as we saw them.  There were a couple that weren't available but we also saw some things that weren't on there.

They have a splash pad which was a HUGE hit after walking around all morning.  Their time spent playing was TOTALLY representative of my kiddos! Ellie charged in with no fear and Sophia was by in large dry for the first 10 minutes of play.  Ellie was plowed down by bigger kids a couple of times but in true Ellie nature, she gave it right back to them and set things straight :)

Another great week in the books. Ken was out of town most of the week so the girls and I had several sleepovers in my bed.  There is something so comforting about sleeping with your babies.  It's like you can feel their presence when you sleep.  You can also feel their feet in your back and hands slap you across the face in the middle of the night ;)

Next week - Ocean Week!

Summer 2016 - Nature Week!

It's SUMMER!!  No more rushing around the house in the morning to get two kids off to school.  No more driving back and forth and back and forth across town to drop off and pick up.  No more scrambling to get my work done during the few hours of quiet time I have while Ellie is at school.  SO MUCH time to hang out with my girls, do fun projects, and so much time to fill with exciting and engaging activities for the girls so that I can still get things done. Wait.  Maybe I didn't think this through...

One of the biggest challenges I face as a work at home mom is the struggle to balance my work time and my time spent with the girls.  During the school year, Ellie was in school 8 hours each week.  Sophia was in school 35 hours.  That was a LOT of time to run errands, make phone calls, and generally work on anything that needed to get done.  I'm so excited to have this extra time with them but I'm also a little nervous about how I will get everything done with two stinky adorable faces around all the time!  It's tough to make sure I'm getting my work done when really I just want to spend my time being a mom.  But I just gotta do it ;) After all, if I don't work all of my businesses, they don't work themselves which means I don't get paid and eventually, I have to go back to teaching.  Nope.  Not happening.

I knew I needed to have a good plan for the summer.  One that gives me the time I need with my girls, gives me time to work diligently and consistently, and one that I will stick with.  They are enrolled in swim school through the NMSU Rec Center and will have class Monday-Thursday mornings through most of July.  Super excited to have them in the class and glad we will have a reason to get up and at 'em in the mornings but the class is only 30 minutes so there is still plenty of time in the day to fill.  I remembered that one summer when Sophia was tiny, we did a weekly theme thing where we focused on one theme and incorporated reading, writing, math, art, etc.  Time to bring it back!  I decided to schedule out the summer with weekly themes, activities that I can do with the girls and ones that they can do by themselves while I work at the table with them, and scheduled times for them to go to Grandma's so that I can just focus on work.  We started this week and I have to say, it was one of the most FUN weeks I've had with them!

For this week we focused on nature and being kind to the planet.
Monday was memorial day and Tuesday we had to be out of the house all day so we spent the day swimming at Grandmas.  Well...they swam all day.  I swam a little then headed inside to work.  We officially kicked off the week on Wednesday.  After swim school we headed to the library.  Ellie is in an interesting point in her development.  She is still QUITE a handful but now, as long as I give her complete instructions on how to behave in specific situations (ie church, at the store, etc.), she's rockstar!  We spent the car ride talking about appropriate library etiquette.   She rocked it and we can't wait to go back! We picked up some books about the planet, nature, and animals - for next week.  Next up, it was lunchtime and we were right by the Farmer's Market so we stopped for a bite to eat.  It was cool, cloudy, and there were some sprinkles!  Usually we go to the market on Saturday when it's super crowded so it was fun to check it out during the week!

We spent the rest of the afternoon reading our books and finding fun nature videos on http://discoverykids.com/ and http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/.  We especially fell in love with a series called Nature Boom Time which follows a few people as they tour some National Monuments and explore different and unusual forests.  Side note:  We TOTALLY want to visit ALL of the parks they highlighted!  I read Crinkleroot's Guide to Giving Back to Nature to them, Sophia read The EARTH Book to Ellie and I, and Sophia started to read Just Grace Goes Green to herself.  Later that day, Ellie told me she had the greatest day ever.  Swoon!

Thursday we focused more on math.  The girls went out in the yard and collected a giant pile of items: rocks, sticks, leaves, flowers, etc.  We used the items to create patterns, make shapes, do some basic addition and subtraction, and sort the items in to piles using different criteria.  One of the things I miss most about teaching is watching kids have that "aha" moment.  It was cool to watch that happen with the girls - Ellie while practicing an AB pattern and Sophia when I challenged her to create and duplicate a more complex pattern.  We also watched some more Nature Boom Time.

Next up was #FunFriday!  Keeping with the theme, we decided to go for a Nature Walk.  I found this cute activity on Teachers Pay Teachers and we took it with us.  Also, Sophia has been asking to go on a trash pick-up for weeks so we incorporated that into our walk.  I invited my friend Mayra to join us because she's a long-time fan of Fun Friday and we totally needed to catch up.

We went to the path down by the river to do our walk.  I wanted something that was full of nature, but not full of snakes ;)  It was so cool to see the girls making observations and not so cool to see how much trash was around.  On the way home we reflected on the week, talked about all of the things we can do to help out our planet, and got excited about next week - Animal Week!

In full disclosure, I definitely didn't get as much done on the work end of things as I wanted to but next week we will add their "mornings at grandma's house" into the mix.  I had so much fun with them and I LOVED doing things like this with Ellie.  She's at the perfect age to do meaningful activities and Sophia really enjoyed helping me guide her along.  I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel guilty about not working as much this week though. The scales definitely tipped to the girls but I'm ok with that. I'll catch up next week and for now, I'll give myself a much deserved pat on the back for a successful 1st week of summer!