The book was better

Ruby is sleeping much better. ****KNOCK ON WOOD**** She usually sleeps for at least an hour and a half for two of her naps and then a 30 minute nap for her last nap. Not perfect but so, so much better. Not surprisingly, with better sleep, has come more mobility. She can sit up on her own. I actually missed this the first time. We had been in the kitchen and I was cooking and she was in her high chair. Then I took her in the living room and laid her down on her tummy and went back and got my water. In the 10 seconds it took me to get back, she was sitting up. But she did it again today and I saw it this time. Stinker. She did the same thing the first time she rolled over.

She doesn't do the traditional crawl yet but a worm thing. And man she can get around. And she gets into everything. She keeps trying to sneak up on Maggie but she's not quite there yet. But you can't put her down and do other stuff anymore. You have to have eyes on her unless she is contained. I have a feeling she's going to be into everything and I'll be chasing her constantly.

Here she is in her Daddy's hat.

I love that she sucks these fingers. So sweet. Also, definitely not tired.

My little koala!

Maggie found this little notebook. Grandpa was pestering her so she wrote, Grandpa is a little bit annoying. She told me he's saying blah, blah, blah in the picture. Oh children.

Here's Ruby DESTROYING a banana pancake I made for her.

I forgot to mention a couple of things in my school post. Maggie's been working from a notebook. Every evening I write out a list of everything she needs to do the next day. So, her morning list, chores, meals, school work, classes. She goes through it a bit slowly so I think I'm going to let her earn 30 minutes of screen time for every five things she gets done, if she does them within a certain time frame. So, say 10 minutes to brush teeth, brush hair, and get dressed. Otherwise, my God, she will do everything with a slowness you might not have believed was possible.

I've also given her a daily chore we call 5/5. She has to find five things that leave the house: either to be donated, recycled, or thrown away. Then she has to find five things that she will take from downstairs and put them in her room. Oh, what a difference it has made. Her stuff is still EVERYWHERE but less everywhere.

A couple of weeks ago we were watching an American Girl movie for movie night. In the movie, the girls and her family go to France (kind of ironic). Well about half way through Ruby woke up and I had to go upstairs. Then Maggie comes running up and tells me, Mom, I can speak Franch. I got her to go back downstairs and came down a couple of minutes later. I asked her to tell me something in French and she said, Zis iz ze bezt! She's bilingual!

I had told her once about an app that can translate signs. You hold your phone up to the sign and in your phone it will be in English. So she said, Mom when we go to France, we won't need that app. :)

She's continued drawing pictures while we read and it's awesome. It's actually a widely used way to torture kids while they are trying to enjoy a book. But I never have quizzed her or made her do anything so she can actually listen and enjoy the story without PROVING she heard every single word. I think it's funny she decided on her own to do it. And she gets so many details from the reading. The funny thing is that she usually continues drawing long after we've stopped reading and then it really becomes interesting. Did you know there were fairies that lived in the barn in Charlotte's Web? And aliens that say, We come in peace? Well, now you do.

We got The Witches by Roald Dahl on audiobook for the car. She loved it. She actually begged to stay in the car so she could listen to the end of a chapter. And she would laugh so hard and I would hear her upstairs playing and saying, Dogs droppings (the witches say it over and over in this ridiculous German-ish accent because that's what children smell like to them).

Anyway, we actually own that movie. I can't remember how we got it but she's never watched it because the first scene is a small girl getting snatched and murdered. So, yeah. . . But after she loved the book so much we tried again. In the story, two boys get turned into mice. Maggie turned off the movie before it was completely done and her Dad and I asked, wait how to the boys get turned back into boys, and she said, they don't. We both were incredulous so I looked it up and in the movie they get turned back into boys. And I told her what happened and she said, I don't remember that in the book. And, thankfully, I looked up the book AND SHE WAS RIGHT. They stay mice in the book and the main boy is happy about it since his parents are dead and he won't outlive his grandmother who is raising him (which, Jesus, are you effing kidding me? these are children's books!). She can now proudly say, I liked the book better, and, that's not how it happened in the book. I'm so proud.

Not tired

Tired?

Who, me?

What would possibly give you that idea?

Cautionary tale and banana pancakes

I wrote last time about Maggie being able to read my texts and I wanted to write about how I came to realize that. 

Laurie and I often text each other to commiserate about babies that won't sleep. This night I was sitting in the rocking chair with Maggie perched beside me. We were having a particularly bad night and I wrote I considered it a win I'd refrained from throwing Ruby out the window. I had just sent it when Maggie cried out, throw Ruby out the window?!? It took me a minute to even figure out what has happened. I thought maybe I'd said it out loud. I reassured her I would never throw Ruby out the window. But! Be careful with your texts. 

I made Ruby some banana pancakes. They're just eggs, banana, and a little cinnamon. 

Maggie's current school stuff

Like that title? Nice, huh. Also, when I looked at the blog on my computer, it had messed up the pictures. You can just click on the picture so you can actually see the whole thing. I can't find an option for editing it.

Ok, so Maggie's school. First, we do reading. I made a change to her reading several months ago after reading a great article. The woman who wrote the article was a substitute teacher. She was going to be a long-term sub for a woman going on maternity leave. She went to the class one day with the regular teacher to observe. She said the kids hated reading and she noticed that when they read aloud, if a kid got hung up on a word, the teacher would make them sound it out and basically jump through hoops to figure out the word. Which, as one might imagine, was demoralizing, embarrassing, and frustrating. So the next day, when she was in charge of the class, she made a new reading rule. If you don't know a word, just ask. No hoops, no sounding out, or looking for blends or endings or "little words." Just ask and she'll tell you. And, of course, the kids became prolific readers and cured cancer.

Point being, I implemented this rule. What a difference it made. Maggie enjoys reading and reads all the time. Signs, anything on the TV (she loves to announce the titles of shows), my texts (as I'm writing them, she can keep up), she read my home study report while I was typing it. And there's just no frustration anymore. She's not on guard wondering when she's going to hit a scary word and have to struggle through it. So, there's that. So nice. The only thing I make her do is repeat the word after I tell her. Genius.

We're reading a chapter book version of the Disney movie Bolt. It's a lot more difficult (word-wise) than I thought but she's doing great. And it has very short chapters so she's not reading for an hour.

We're working our way through a few books. We're reading The Chronicles of Narnia, which we both love. It's such a good story and I'm a big fan of having an excuse to do a British accent.

We've started a full writing program. I actually purchased it while I was pregnant with Ruby but never got around to starting it before she was born. We've been working on it for a while now and I really like it. It has several pieces to it. One part is memory work. So we work on memorizing things like birthdays and addresses. Eventually we'll do states, continents, oceans, things like that. We also are reading Charlotte's Web and discuss the grammar in the book. She does copy work based on the book to help her understand how grammar works within writing and to practice her handwriting. There are a few more pieces we haven't added yet. I'm trying to add everything in slowly so she doesn't feel overwhelmed. I add a chore here, a piece of school work there, and she doesn't notice how much more she's doing.

She drew this picture while we read the chapter in Charlotte's Web where the goose talks Wilbur into escaping and then he gets scared and doesn't know what to do. I love it. All the animals and the details. Fantastic. 

We're still doing Spelling. We were playing games with the words but Maggie didn't like them and, as far as I could tell, they did absolutely nothing to improve her spelling. So I basically test her every day. We do five words a day and she copies only the wrong ones two times. Once she's gotten the word right three times in a row, it's gone. She's a pretty good speller. We've worked our way through the first Dolce list (~300 most commonly used words).

For math, we are working our way through a first grade textbook. She's making great connections in math. She's able to see it more logically. It makes me happy. We're practicing counting by 10s, 5s, and 2s and we do Bedtime math (which is a short story and corresponding word problems) every day. We still count her allowance to practice with money. Speaking of that she currently has several dollars but hasn't asked to spend it on anything. She decided she didn't want a Kindle (because she has an Xbox) and hasn't asked for anything else.

For history, we're reading The Story of the World. We're on volume 1, which deals with ancient times. I try to find kid-appropriate videos to correspond. It's fun to read about, say, the Nazca lines and then watch videos of them.

For science, we have a topic (right now, we're studying the three states of matter) and we read books, watch videos, and do experiments or activities around that topic. We watched a YouTube video and a Magic School Bus episode and Maggie did some experiments with her Nana and Uncle Steve.

I found some podcasts for kids that Maggie likes and we try to listen to one or two a day. She likes the science ones and the story ones. The story one is where a kid writes a story and then they have actors act out the story. She loves that. We also listen to fables on audiobook through our library.

We have Kiwi crate, which is amazing. We've done an arcade, race cars, treasure maps, and magic. There is so much to do in every box. There's another subscription box for cooking called Radish. It seems very cool and I think I might get it for Maggie for her birthday.

I want to also mount a world map on cork board. Then have three colored pins; one, for places we've read about, one for places we want to visit, and one for places we have visited. It'll have to wait for the new house because we don't have the wall space here.

We're also watching bit of educational TV every day. I've rented Mythbusters because I've heard good things about it and we're watching the documentary, Frozen Planet. I want to watch Life and Planet Earth, as well.

Pictures

Cheeeeeks!

Definitely not tired. 

Who's that baby???

Maggie got a haircut. 

She looks so grownup. 

Baby time!

That look on Jilli's face means she's looking directly at her mama. 

Smile!

Supergirl and Superbaby! Keeping the world safe. 

I had to get my brows done and asked Maggie to sit with Ruby. She asked if she could take a few pictures. I probably erased 50.