Thursday, January 30th
12:00 am - I am sleeping. :)
3:25 - Adam wakes up and I roll over and nurse him and he falls back to sleep in about 5 minutes, as do I.
5:00 - repeat
7:15 - Adam awakes and I am up for the day. I snuggle with him for a little while as he babbles and I talk to him and sing to him and drink up all that baby preciousness.
7:35 - I jump in the shower quickly and put Adam in a playpen I have next to the shower for situations like this (kids still sleeping and Daddy out flying). He fusses a little but nothing major. I get dressed and start singing the Bear in The Big Blue House "Good Morning" song to wake up Ashley, who came into my bed last night. She grins big and is up and cheerful. Then I go to the girl's room to wake up Emily and Alexis. With a few tried moans they slowly get up. Everyone has colds today but they are very mild so we keep to our usual routine. Everyone dresses, Alexis showers, and Ashley does her morning chore - putting all the laundry down the laundry shoot.
Today we're having banana muffins I made last night and scrambled eggs.
9:40 - Alexis heads upstairs to work on her stuff and Ashley runs off to play with her dolls and I begin Emily's reading lesson. We're doing the Barton Reading program with Emily, who is dyslexic. It has been amazing in helping her and she has been growing by leaps and bounds in her reading ability. I set Adam up with some giant buttons and strings next to me, but he's always more interested in whatever his sisters are doing. When Daddy's home he usually takes him for a while during this time, but today we just manage.
She ends up propping her book on the chair so he quits crawling all over it.
After Emily's finished I get up to put the reading things away and get Emily's Math lesson ready, but I made the mistake of not picking Adam when I left the room. Ever since he's been sick he's been a little extra clingy. So I picked him up as I gathered a few things.
I changed his diaper - the antibiotic he is on causes him to have diarrhea a dozen times a day. After that I got him interested in some stacking rings.
Emily and Ashley play with an I Spy puzzle.
I then pull Emily over and we do her math lesson. She's in the third grade and we're working on multiplying. I have a great book I used to teach Alexis multiplication and I'm going through it with Emily currently. It takes 3-4 weeks and they have it down pat. It's amazing and they love it - lots of stories and hands on activities. It's called "Multiplication in a Flash."
While Emily's working on her math lesson I pull Ashley aside and asked her if she wants to read Mommy a story. She's in Kindergarten and so most of her day is spent playing - as it should be. But I do plan a few fun educational activities for her each day. We're doing a letter of the week right now for fun and we try to do a service activity each week based on that letter, as well. We also read together every day. Usually I'll read her a book and then she'll find one to read me. Today I read her the book "Lentil." Then she read me, "Little Mommy." In case you couldn't guess our letter this week is 'L'. We also rolled like logs, leaped like frogs, and crawled like ladybugs.
Then we headed to the table and used some shaving cream to draw L's and write "l" words. Emily also drew her multiplication fact of the day's story to help her remember it.
Meanwhile, Adam was getting sleepy - it was 10:30 - so we headed upstairs for his nap. We peeked in at Alexis who was busily working on her lessons. She's in the 6th grade and prefers to sit on her bed and independently work where it's quiet. She's using "Life of Fred" for Math, Apologia "Anatomy" for Science, Language Lessons for the Secondary Child, Jabborwocky: Poetry Study for Junior High for a Poetry study, and she loosely uses Institute for Excellence in Writing for writing, although mostly she just writes - a lot. She has a notebook full of stories and chapters of stories she writes and she keeps a couple of journals. She also uses "All About Spelling", but we do that together.
I nurse Adam on my bed while I get on my computer for a few minutes and he falls asleep fairly quickly.
I come downstairs and Ashley's pulling the dress up clothes out.
10:50 - Emily does her language. She uses "Language Lessons for the Very Young." I do some Math time with Ashley. I use a book called "Family Math" to pull different math activities to do with her each day. Today we are estimating how many Tablespoons and teaspoons can fill a small wooden cup. We lay a blanket on the floor and use rice. At 11:10 Adam wakes up from his very short nap. So her joins in the rice fun and is quite happy.
Emily is now working on developing an outline for a story about a little girl who meets a fairy and travels to fairy island.
Ashley has me take a picture of her mountain in Japan.
11:40 - Alexis comes down stairs. She's finished with all her lessons except spelling. Emily and her take a break and explore an Atlas for a while. They are both really into geography and History at the moment. Everyone helps themselves to lunch with me helping little ones. Foods like apples, sandwiches, banana muffins, yogurt, and strawberries are eaten.
After lunch I read from Apologia Astronomy book for Emily, but all three girls listen.
Then we work on Alexis' Spelling.
1:00 - I get invited to a tea party.
Alexis plays some piano and violin.
For 'L' week Ashley makes a lantern. She wants to make it Chinese so I look up a few symbols and she copies them on her lantern.
Meanwhile Alexis is dancing with Adam while I'm helping Ashley.
Here's Ashley with her finished lantern.
1:45 - We do a midday tidy up. Dishwasher is unloaded, breakfast/lunch dishes loaded, kitchen cleaned, and living room tidied up.
2:00 Everyone goes off to play. Alexis goes to her room to read. Adam takes another nap during this time, as well. Emily plays with Tangrams, dolls, and pretends to be princesses in a magic kingdom with Ashley. Ashley plays house, princesses and asks for a cardboard box so she can have a chariot. Emily pulls Adam around in the chariot and Ashley pretends to. We put on a "Little House on the Prairie." to watch while playing. The older girls and I plan out a couple of mother daughter sewing projects.
4:00 I start preparing a simple dinner and Ashley asks me to play dolls with her.
5:30 - We sit down to dinner. Tonight it's a quick easy favorite. Chicken puffs, steamed broccoli, oranges, and corn. We also play our Family Dinner Questions game we got for Christmas from Aunt Becca. Tonight's questions of discussion were "Would you like your family to be on a reality TV show?" The unanimous opinion on that was "no". It also asked if you could trade places with one person for 24 hours, who would it be? That was trickier and everyone ended up discussing a few names but I don't know that any real decisions were made. Emily said she'd like to be me and we all agreed that being the prophet would be neat.
6:00 - Evening chore time. Ashley tidies the playroom while Alexis cleans the kitchen/puts food away and Emily does up the dinner dishes. I tidy the living room and Alexis vacuums. Then Emily helps Ashley finish the playroom, I sweep the kitchen, and Alexis folds the laundry I washed earlier today and delivers it the everyone's room for them to put away.
6:30 - I play with Adam and start getting him ready for bed while the girls get my permission to pull out a box of play lip gloss and jewelry and Alexis' fingernail polish and they all play beauty parlor and Alexis paints everyone's nail.. At 7:00 I put Adam to bed and when I come downstairs I find out that one of the play nail polishes (not Alexis' real one, thank goodness) was a little dry and goopy. So Emily suggested to Alexis they microwave it to melt it so it would spread easier. So Alexis did and it exploded all over the inside of the microwave. So as they clean it up I discussed with them the importance of only putting food in the microwave. :)
7:30 - Daddy calls from his hotel room and we read scriptures as a family, sing "Kindness Begins With Me" and Alexis says the evening prayer. We all tell Daddy goodnight and then we read the next chapter in "Little Britches".
At 8:00 I take Ashley upstairs and help her brush her teeth and read her a story and tuck her in. The older girls hang out for a little longer (singing together, from what I heard.) I come downstairs and we watch an episode of "The Cosby Show" and then at 9:00 they brush teeth and head up to bed. I prepare a couple of things for tomorrow, and then head upstairs at 9:30 and play around on my computer for an hour and a half and then I go to sleep at 11:00. This represents a fairly typical winter day with kids with colds. Usually we try to spend some time outside, but with sick kids we definitely didn't venture out today.
