So here we are into the second week of September already. It amazes me how quickly the summer went by. It seems like just yesterday I was at the Preschool end of the year program right before Memorial Day. Now here we are and both Alex and Lizzie start school next week. This is Alex’s last year of preschool and his last year of “Traditional Schooling” Next year he starts kindergarten and we start homeschooling. I am really starting to look forward to teaching both the kids. Especially after this summer. We had such a great and relaxing summer. It wasn’t until the very end of the summer when we had a heat wave here in New Jersey that I started to think I needed a break from the kids. This is a huge improvement over last summer, where two weeks into the summer I was ready to ship the kids off to military school. I think a lot of that had to do with the weather and their ages. Both kids are much more independent this year and I was able to send them outside without me so that I could get some things done around the house. And the fact that I could send them outside at all was a huge improvement over last year as well. We had such a cool summer here. It wasn’t until the last two weeks of August that the temperatures were too high for Alex to play outside the entire day. So they both got a lot of outside time, which anybody who has small children knows is essential to keeping Mommy sane. I was also able to do a lot more with them this year, without feeling like I had to take the whole house with me to go anywhere. We went to places like the Please Touch Museum, Free Movies at our local movie theater, our local farm where there is a huge play area and lots of fresh fruits and veggies to pick, and a couple of trips to the zoo. All in all it was a great summer.

Like I said before, both kids are in preschool this year. Well if you can call Lizzie’s class preschool, it is more like an organized play group where I don’t have to be present. They don’t do very much school work, it is a bunch of two year olds after all. I think it is going to be a great year for both of them. Alex has grown up so much over the course of the summer. We are still having some of the same problems that we were having at the end of last year, but they are much less and he is learning how to cope with things much better, plus he is finally potty trained, which is a huge thing for us. I am doing a little bit of homeschooling this year. I am planning a Bible Study with the kids on Tuesday and Thursday the days that we are home. It is a toddler program, but I am adapting it to work with both my toddler and preschooler. It is actually the same program that we are using with the toddlers at church so I am very excited about that. Another big thing that we have started here at home is chores for the kids. Both the kids have always helped with things like taking their dishes to the sink, putting dirty clothes in the hamper, things like that. I decided that it was time to give them a little more responsibility now that they are older.

Here are their chore lists:

Alex

1. Brush Teeth in morning and night
2. Take a bath or shower every day
3. Get lotion on
4. Put clothes in hamper
5. put shoes away
6. put books away
7. make bed
8. put backpack away
9. Set the table at dinner and lunch
10. clean up playroom
11. Help clear table
12. Help put away clean clothes
13. Stay clean and dry all day (potty)
14. Clean up outside toys
15. Try one new food a day

Lizzie

1. Brush teeth in morning and night
2. Take a bath and wash hair everyday
3. put clothes in hamper
4. put shoes away
5. put books away
6. Make my bed
7. put backpack away
8. Set table at lunch and dinner
9. clean up playroom
10. take dishes to the sink
11. clean up outside toys.

Surprisingly they have been so excited to do their chores every day. I know a lot of it is stuff that we were doing anyway, but I wanted to get them started on things that I knew that they could accomplish. As they get older we will add more chores for them to do, so that they learn to help out around the house. If the do all their chores during the week then on Friday they get to go to either Wendy’s or Chick-Fil-A for lunch. This would not have been my first choice of things to do since I am now officially on a diet, but that is what they wanted to do, so I will have to learn to deal.

I am really looking forward to this new school year and all the fun it will bring.

Heather