Bye, Bence

Today I realized that these three things are mutually exclusive: feeling patient, feeling cute, and feeling productive. I always want them all! I usually only get one at a time though. Today seems to be a productive day. I suppose I should be glad. In the name of being productive, here’s a bloggeroo.

We just said goodbye to Spencer. He’s starting first grade tomorrow, so no more carefree summer days of babysitting bliss. Ha, what I mean is I’m down to two kids again. It’s already kind of strange, and Spencer has barely been gone an hour! Like most things in LIFE, having Spencer over for 20-30 hours each week this summer was hard in some ways but great in other ways. Even though we don’t have any kids in our family starting school this year, it feels like we’re losing that older brother to school, and I’m wondering how many times over the next few weeks I’m going to have to answer questions like “is Spencer coming over today?” and “where’s Spencer?” (or, in Rose’s case, “is Bence toming oder day?” and “weer Bence?”).

This week I tried to take a few pictures of the three kids playing together. It was hard because Spencer is an awesome cheeser when he sees a camera, and they usually play so well together that I’m too busy getting something else done before the next disagreement to waste time picture-snapping. Nonetheless, there are a few photos from this week that more or less describe our summer days at home with Bence. At some point, Rose voluntarily started calling Spencer Bence for short, even though the rest of us always call him Spencer. I kind of love it.

Rose took this picture of the buddies.

Jay took this one

Ha, boys TOTALLY don’t automatically put their arms around each other and smile for a picture like girls do. Awkward!

They’re happier (and most photogenic) as ninjas.

Reading and waiting for Spencer to arrive one morning…nice one, Jay. Usually I managed to get Jay and Rose potty’d, dressed, and breakfasted before Spencer came over.

[it wasn’t easy]

Playdough! This batch has lasted for months in a baggie in our fridge. Amazing.

Rose’s hair is getting so long.

Playdough intensity—he would not look up for even one quick picture.

The performer. He was cracking me up!

Pita pizza party! Spencer brought his lunch every day, but every now and then we whipped up something tasty for lunch. They adore these easy-peasy pita pizzas.

It doesn’t look like much, but they are rather tasty.

Coloring time. I went into super stealth-mama mode for this one. They’re so cute when they’re playing happily all together. Maybe that’s because it wasn’t always this tame.

Bye, Bence!

Hello, Preschool. Jay’s friends from church told him all about preschool, and he was dying to go when he turned 4, but I simply don’t feel like it’s worth the money. Jay is worth it, but preschool was not. I only get him to myself for another year anyways, so I’m keeping him! I’ve spent the past few months talking up home preschool and Jay is pretty excited about it. To make it feel more official to him, I made a preschool calendar for us to change every day.

Looking online for ideas was a mistake. You can get sucked into the black hole of Pinterest Preschool Possibilities and never surface. It’s scary in there. Even amazon.com, my normal Pinterest-alternative was a little much. Some people spend millions on such simple things! I exed out of Pinterest and Amazon and just started free-handing it. The total cost of this was $1 for the pocket chart (Target’s dollar section), plus sales tax and I think 3 pieces of cardstock and a tiny bit of printer ink. We have only played with it once so far, but it seemed to do the job just fine.

My preschool plan (as I’ve mentioned before) is to start each day with the calendar and letter/sound/word/number of the day and then do whatever activity or project that we feel like. We use the term preschool very loosely around here. I’m excited to teach Jay and Rose officially about Real Things, because they are such enthusiastic clever little pupils.

Rewind to this weekend for a minute—it’ll all come together at the end…

We went to Seattle this weekend and stopped at Ikea. This was the first time that Jay and Rose were big enough and potty trained enough to go into the kids play place.  I was surprised that they were ok with us leaving them because lately they’ve kind of had issues with that now and then. But they had a blast while we wandered through the crowds shopping.

I hid behind some carts and took this picture of them through the window. They labeled the kids so thoroughly it made me think of the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The spoils! We got a cube shelf system and an $8 side table which is the same size as their $20 kids table (which broke) but way sturdier, and various art supplies/kidstuff.

How to spend a long Sunday morning before 1pm church? Let’s put Ikea shelves together, together! We were actually late to church because we got caught up…

The kids filled all the squares with blankets and stuffed animals while we put the finishing screws in.

Before:

…

After:

The bins and drawers that I wanted to put in the cubes were out of stock at Ikea, so we’re making do with what we’ve got for now. We actually conveniently already had some black Ikea bins (on the bottom) that were made to fit theses cubes. WOW, it is so nice to have storage in the kitchen. After a mere 2 days with these shelves, I already love having my art supplies right by the table instead of way far away in the hall closet like they were before.

Here’s our preschool nook. Isn’t it cute? I mean, in its own ramshackle way, with papers stuck to the wall and homemade cardboard kitchen items on the bench. Up till recently, I was scared of hanging kiddy things in the dining area because I didn’t want to damage the décor. Then I realized that there really isn’t much décor to damage in there or to make it look junky. Luckily I got over that. So I duct taped that USA poster to the wall and tied the calendar to the bookshelf with string. It’s just what we need, and so far I don’t feel like I’m compromising color schemes or anything.

In case you didn’t notice it before, this is the amazing $8 plastic side table. They’re using the chairs from our old broken Ikea kids table (and a stool my Grama made). Awesome.

There you have it. Bring on the school year! I plan to put a wall shelf above the cubes to get a bit of extra out-of-kids-reach storage.

Hopefully that works out better than the last shelf we hung in the kitchen.