Droppers and Dabs

Even in the great state of Texas we have cold, rainy weeks. While I feel like curling up under a blanket with a great book, my boys usually prefer bouncing off the walls, the furniture or each other, which doesn't usually end well.

Two indoor things that the boys are enamored with recently are color mixing with droppers and painting with q-tips. Montessori Services sells this whole kit or individual droppers and bottles. We make up a tray with 3 dropper bottles (red, blue, yellow), a watercolor mixing palate (so they have more wells to experiment with colors) and a sponge. I can't tell you the hours that have been spent creating special colors and complementing each other on their color combinations.

I don't know why I haven't tried q-tip painting earlier. It is genius! The small, short q-tip gives them more control than a paint brush and they use a lot less paint. Our stay-within-the-lines son like to outline dot-to-to pictures with dabs, while our other son uses the q-tips to make wild messy streaks, much to his delight. Again, we use cheap watercolor palates with lots of holes and they also experiment with mixing colors.

Another boredom buster suggested by Kat awhile ago was marshmallow/toothpick building. I think we will use this later to practice forming letters.

Best wishes as we all brave the depths of winter!

Tackling Mount Washmore

A long time ago, a reader asked about our system for dealing with clothing. Ours is an elaborate one, and will take several posts to fully explain, but I wanted to begin with something that we are focusing on at home right now: the laundry system.

One difficult thing about laundry, like other housework, is that it never feels "done" -- you can get all of your clothes put away, but unless you are naked while you do it there will be clothes in the hamper again before you go to sleep! I find this very frustrating, and I cannot be thinking about needing to do laundry all the time, so I have limited laundry to 3 nights a week. On the other nights I know that I am "off duty" for laundry, and I don't give it another thought.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights after dinner my children have chores. (Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we are out of the house, so this works well for us). While some empty the trash cans and diaper pails around the house, others bring all of the laundry from the various hampers (one in each bedroom) to the laundry room. Ideally, they use a laundry basket for the gathering so that the hampers stay in their places.

Once the children are in bed, I sort the laundry into three piles, whites for bleach, lights and darks. When we are in survival mode I often don't sort, but right now we have several new, bright red articles of clothing, so it is well worth the effort. With all of our laundry, I usually have enough for one white load, and three or four color loads. I use ALL Free and Clear on everything, so I do not need to wash baby clothes separately. Diapers do get their own load, though, usually last! Our washer and dryer are pretty fast, so I just start doing a load at a time while I clean the kitchen and do the rest of my evening routine. I pull out a few things to hang to dry but most of it goes in the drier. I try to be as non-anal as possible while still doing the job properly, it is all about getting it done! Once the kitchen is all cleaned, I put on the TV (reruns of John and Kate plus 8 are a favorite for this) and get folding. As I fold, I sort by owner so that I end up with 8 piles of laundry as well as a pile of kitchen linens (we use cloth napkins, dish towels and rags, so there is a fair amount of kitchen laundry).

In theory, the sorted clothes get put away by each family member first thing the next morning, but this is where our system was breaking down a bit -- if it doesn't get put away immediately, I find a crawling baby quickly knocking over piles of clean laundry, which is just depressing. This week, we have tried to fix this by purchasing eight small, handled laundry baskets. They stay stacked in the laundry room until it is time to fold, and now we fold and sort into a basket, so we wind up with eight baskets of clothes instead of piles. For the little kids, at the end we sort the laundry by dresser drawer so that they can put it away easily. Before breakfast on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we empty the baskets and return them to the laundry room. If the morning is going to be very busy, we can at least get the basket to the right room and out of the living area, with a plan to put away the laundry at quiet time or before bed.

I will confess that I do not have a regular time for washing sheets and towels, which means that this does not get done as often as it should. I cannot decide whether it would be best to pile this on to one of the wash days or to do it on one of my "off" days. Making up 7 beds feels like a huge chore to me.

Sometimes, like after a trip or during illness, laundry piles up and gets out of control, at which point I don't mind devoting a day to getting back on top of things. If I am folding during the day, I have taught the children to fold napkins and dish towels -- helping with this saves me work and also keeps them busy while I fold the clothes!

So, this is what works for us, we don't own enough clothing to do laundry only once a week, and if we did the task would be too big for me. Doing laundry three days also means that if I miss one day for some reason I am not too far behind, but unless things are really out of control I try to force myself to wait until the next laundry day, I do think that it is important to have rest days set into any system. The kids help at the beginning and the end of the laundry job, and this makes a huge dent in what I have to do, especially when I am pregnant and tired, it is great not to have to carry laundry up and down stairs.

We put away our decorations this morning, and it is nice to be in an uncluttered home thinking about the routines that make our life hum along, using the extra time with Dad (our organizer) to improve the routines, and getting ready to embrace the comforting rhythms of ordinary time!

Getting our Groove Back

(Not a normal day)

Four years ago today, I awoke as a freshly unemployed campaign coordinator for a major county in Texas in a hotel bed after a long night at the elections department and a post-election party, exhausted in a way that made running a marathon seem like I had just taken a walk in the park.

Today, four years and three children later, I awoke equally exhausted. A four day family wedding and a baptism followed by 8 consecutive days of the stomach flu in all its glory have left us tired and quite a bit out of our normal routine.

Melissa Wiley often describes her homeschooling adventure as tidal learning. Homeschooling or not, we all experience some degree of tidal living. While I don't begrudge the crazy and chaotic times of traveling and family events (well...maybe I do begrudge the stomach flu!), there is something nice about looking at your calendar for the week and seeing nothing other than your usual friday morning playgroup written down.

(A Normal Day)

So it is time to get back in the groove of life with toddlers. We need our routines to maintain our sanity. Everyone benefits. Well rested, well fed, active boys are much happier. Instead of spending our mornings making sure we have all the pieces to a 2T tuxedo, or washing sheets (again), we can listen to classical music and spend time reading from our fall book basket. We will have outside time and note all the signs of the changing seasons. When Incredibaby naps, we can get out the messier things like paint and clay. Our routines help us create a more peaceful atmosphere in the home. If find that a routine allows me to be more attentive to my children, which in turn makes them happier, which makes it easier for me to be patient and joyful. A happy cycle. Not that all our days are smooth sailing...there will be flights over the blue clay and who gets to blow out the candle at prayer time, but having a baseline helps us tremendously.

How we handle Paper

Erin wrote:

Our biggest problem area is paper-- mail, bills, cards, owners manuals, newspapers, interesting magazine articles, letters, shopping lists, coupons, receipts we think we might need but really never will... all this paper seems to take over our kitchen and family room and drive me crazy. Any tips for controlling the paper frenzy?

My father in law has a saying "you take your mail, and you deal with it" -- what that meant to the young adults who had come back to the nest after college was that if you mail was not off the counter by the next morning it would be thrown away! I am not a "paper person" by nature, but I really took this advice to heart, and I think that my husband and I have found a great way of dealing with our paper, so perhaps it will work for others.

We have a drawer of our living room desk devoted to mail. It used to be a basket, so if you don't have a drawer, no worries. When I get the mail, the trash goes straight in the trash, the bills, invitations and other things go into the drawer, often unopened. I also throw in doctors receipts that my husband will need to submit at work, papers from household maintenance, anything that is going to need to get filed or dealt with.

Every (almost) Sunday night after the kids are in bed we sit down and sort through the drawer. We pay the bills, or put them back to pay the next week. We balance our check book, we look over our calendar and make any plans for the coming week or month. My husband puts the things that he needs to take to the office right into his bag. If it is not too late, I might RSVP for parties right then, too, or else I make myself a little Monday morning "to do" list.

We have a large file box (plastic, from Staples), we have moved so often that a file cabinet did not make sense for us, but we may switch over to that in the future. At the end of each Sunday meeting, there are usually two or three things that need to get filed. You can google for a list of what papers and receipts really need to get saved and which can get thrown out or shredded.

If we do our filing right then, it only takes a few minutes because the pile is always small. The bills tend to come in heavier some weeks of the month than others, but even on a busy week the process only takes about a half an hour.

Now -- once this system is going it really is easy, but this may not seem helpful if you have a dining table full of mail and more mail coming in every day. Here is what I would do -- make two baskets. One will be your ongoing Sunday (or some other time) meeting basket, and new mail will go in there. Into the other basket, sweep all that nagging paper that is cluttering up your surfaces. For the next few weeks, when you sit down to meeting, do the new basket first, then plan to spend half an hour sorting through old stuff. Do NOT stay up all night working on it, just do some and stop. When two of you are working, this goes really fast, I do secretarial stuff like address envelopes, open letters, etc, while my husband pays the bills online, so it all goes really quickly. If you have a super ton of paper that needs to get dealt with, you might want to tackle that basket a few extra nights a week until you get caught up, but don't sit down to it until your other evening chores are finished, dishes, etc. Put down your knitting or other hobbies for a few days until you get it all under control, but really, it will go fast. Have a trash can right at your feet, and if there is stuff that you cannot decide about on your own, move it to the Sunday basket to discuss with your husband.

Our file box has a lot of categories, but since we bought our own house I have decided to also keep a home maintenance notebook that is separate from the file box. I keep this in another drawer of the secretary, and for now I am just tossing things that need to go into the notebook in the drawer. One quiet evening I will sit down with my whole puncher and catch up those files so that will also switch to something that just has to be maintained.

I also have a notebook for recipes that I keep on the shelf with my cookbooks, if I pull something out of a magazine, print it out or get it from a friend it goes into that notebook.

With this baby (#5), I have used one all season diaper bag the whole time and I have kept the baby's immunization and growth record right in a pocket of that bag, and this way I don't have to remember it when I go to the doctor. Mrs. Kennedy (the mother of John F.) kept a note card file for each of her children's health records, which I don't do but think is a great idea, it would be an easy thing to jot down "stomach flu" or "well visit" or "head lice" and the date, and hopefully you never need the record but if you have a child who turns out to be chronically ill, it would help, for example, a certain number of ear infections per year and you are supposed to get tubes, but in the midst of the nasty ear infected winter can you remember if your child had six or three last year, or who had what? I have a terrible memory, so a paper trail would really help.

Well, I hope that some of those are things that can help you conquer the paper trail. If Sunday night is not good for you, or if you pay the bills alone, I still think it is great to have a regular time to do it so that it will really get done.

One last thing. I can't say that we always do this, but I try hard to remember to offer some prayers during this Sunday meeting, prayers for the activities we have coming in our week, prayers for generous hearts and good stewardship of what we have, prayers of thanksgiving that we are able to pay our bills, even on the weeks when things seem really tight or tense. This helps us to have perspective. Oh, and if your husband doesn't want to do this with you, you can tell him that looking at the bills each month has been a reality check for me, and they say the one who pays the bills spends less, so if you do it together you will have better stewardship of your money -- I go around turning off lights now like I am my own grandpa, and I love to watch the electric bill go down!

Quiet Time

When people ask "how do you do it?" I often forget to tell them about the one sanity preserving secret that I have learned from other homeschooling moms of many. Let me tell you about the joy of quiet time. The idea is that your children do not ever stop observing the afternoon nap time, when they stop sleeping it switches over to time in bed alone. In our house, quiet time follows lunch (or sometimes an after lunch walk/bike ride), and lasts for an hour and a half.



During quiet time, PT reads (I count this as "school time" in his hour reports for the district, I call it sustained silent reading which is a legitimate thing that should be happening in school anyway, and he sometimes has assigned reading for some portion of the time). Merry colors. The Lion naps. And the twins -- ah, the twins, they are in the rough in between stage, too old to sleep, most days, and too young to quietly entertain themselves. Sometimes this means that I spend much of quiet time reinforcing and policing, but lately, being pregnant, I have really needed to lie down and sometimes even sleep during quiet time, so right now it is safe to say that they are basically destroying their rooms. If they are seperated, the damage is not too great, but if JJ sneaks downstairs that is when things get exciting.



One day last week they climbed out the window (first floor, but still, I found them balancing on a window ledge outside of the house). Today they were just generally loud, so I had them come into my room, where I assigned them each a pillow and spot on the floor and promptly fell asleep myself. I figured that I would hear them if they got up to too much trouble. I slept through most of it, and things seemed fairly intact at 3:30 when we went back to our other activities, but tonight when I went to my closet I did find that the laces had been pulled all the way out of my sneakers. So now, as my dear husband sits with a size 11 sneaker and a screw driver trying to put the frayed laces back through their tiny holes, I think it is time to give JJ and MaryB some very specific activity for quiet time, a little basket of toys perhaps which will keep them occupied for this very important time. After all, they may not need a nap, but I do!