Jumping into Spring ~ Starting anew ~ Creating a house of Order!

Hello and Welcome!

Today is the beginning of much! It is Spring and BEAUTIFUL!! The flowers are blooming, the day is warm, and we are beginning a new journey! Your welcome to join us!

The Goal #1 - Become Organized, Set our Home in Order!

"Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house,

even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning,

a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God." D&C 88:119 (emphasis added)

Once Order is put in place (as much as possible) - hopefully by summer's end -

Goal #2 - Compile a LDS Gospel Based Pre-School Curriculum - that can be used by mother's everywhere, within their own homes with their own Children. The plan is to compile 1-2 lessons every week, as we do it here, and post it here on my blog - so anyone can Teach Their Children. It will not be just for Preschool but also for mothers to find an alphabetized list of resources to teach their children at any time; FHE, after-school, Sunday activities, lessons, basically any time you want to teach children a gospel principle there will be an index of great articles and coloring/activity pages to go along.

Okay - back to Goal #1! I'm breaking this down into baby steps! Otherwise I'd become overwhelmed and give it up ~ which has happened before ~ but this time I want to feel accountable to someone, so if you are out there and want to tell someone about how your goals are coming, say Hi in the comments, set your goal, and we'll all work together to attain our goals!

Baby Steps - A few of the ones I'm thinking are needed... more to come I'm sure!

#1 ~ A Schedule/chore chart (kids)

#? ~ A Schedule/chore chart (for Mom!)

#? ~ Menu/meal planning

#? ~ Cleaning

#? ~

On to Baby Step #1!

"Just save the Relationship"

Latest trial in life, one of my little ones is painfully shy, very painfully.  He especially cannot handle large groups of people where he feels that he is expected to preform... like primary, library story time, preschool groups, etc... We have been trying to get him to go to primary without us going too or a meltdown for 2 yrs now.  Before moving ~ 10 months ago things finally settled down and he was comfortable enough with his teachers and fellow classmates to go without any worries.  Then we moved.  And we tried to keep the same routine... needless to say it didn't work.  So we tried the pop-pychology method of leave him, he'll cry and fight for a few minutes and then be fine.  It didn't work either.  I mean he stayed in class usually (with his wonderful teacher holding him) but after months of doing this we weren't getting far, in fact it was causing a lot of residual problems with his trust in us.  I mean what do you think a child would start to think after multiple times of being truly nervous and scared of a situation and doing all you could to let your parents know that you were not comfortable and they say, "sorry too bad, see ya, this is good for you" (we didn't say that... but that is likely what he was feeling).  It didn't do much for his trust and relationship with us.  So we had a parental time-out and looked at our "play" for this situation and realized what we were doing wasn't working and was actually augmenting the problem.  So we tried a new "play" (I'll have to explain this more later - kinda like a football team/coaches come up with plays for their team).  And started back at square one with one of us sitting with him through sharing time of primary, once they headed to the smaller class room he really did fine on a more personal level, so we would bow out and head to our class.  And it has been working!  Then we started working our way out of sharing time a little earlier each week, once we knew he was comfortable enough to not feel nervous when we were gone.  We are down to 5-10 mins now!

My big concern is how things are going to work when we head to Kindergarten next year.  This is part of the reason I decided to take care of preschool myself (which I'll be honest - hasn't been as structured or frequent as I'd planned, and I obviously haven't kept up with blogging what we do).   We are in a babysitting co-op (which is great!) and one of the girls we had over the other day was in the pre-schooling co-op, which we had decided not to join in on in the fall.  But watching him interact with her and with the way things are going now with primary, I'm beginning to think he may be ready for a new change... and started thinking about preschool co-op.    The catch is that I'd need to be able to stay with him for the first 5-10 mins (at least) every preschool day.   And the other one is that once again, I just don't like the idea of leaving his education at this age to someone else... ugh I'm caught.  What I'd love is a preschool co-op where a few mom's worked together to provide preschool for their children and had a schedule etc, but didn't drop off their kids... all stayed together and worked together.  A Mother & Me Preschool!

Anyway what I was really getting at with this post is... everyone tells me to let him cry, just leave him and he'll be fine.  And I tried that, but it does not work for him, and no I don't think that we are coddling him.  I've even had people say I should talk to a psychologist about it... but I don't think he needs that.  I was really flustered about everything, wondering what was the best thing to do... and it came to me all of a sudden, "Just save the relationship" I had read this years ago in Glimpses into the Life and Heart of Marjorie Pay Hinckley.  Yes he may get around to accepting the fact that that is how school goes, but he would be resistant and it would deteriorate his relationship with us (as we already learned), and he would likely learn to hate school.  So despite what anyone thinks of me, him, all of us... I am going to work on saving the relationship.  Because in the end, it won't matter whether he was the perfect school child walking into class, it doesn't matter if people think something of us because we have to work harder to help him be comfortable in new situations, it Does matter how he feels and what he thinks of us as his mom and dad and our love for him.  So now when I'm not sure what to do, if our relationship hangs in the balance I will "Just save the relationship" because if we are close to him, we can be a much greater influence for good in his life.

First Week

I think that to start I'm going to make one goal a week and work towards that goal. It seems to me that without good daily habits in place to allow for the openings of time in which to teach, it would be difficult to slow down from the daily race of getting things done to focus on teaching the children. And unfortunately I have lots of good habits to re-introduce into our daily lives. It seems that with the busyness that came into our lives with having four babies in four years, along with the times that I was restricted in activity through pregnancies, bed-rest, and nursing babies, we fell into the bad habits of crisis living or in other words survival living. Just doing the things that were most important to survival and missing out on a lot of the normal things that bring stability and spontaneity and joy into life. Don't get me wrong we find the greatest joy and love together and in our children, but we seemed to live day-to-day "putting out the biggest fire first". Things are settling down (at least it seems that way) or maybe I'm just finally realizing everything that needs to be put in it's place so that we can have a stable day-to-day life and be emotionally, physically, and mentally in the right places to teach, help, and show greater love to these wonderful little boys each day of their lives.

Goal #1: Reading time - 15 mins a day (It usually ends up being more, but it helps if I say 15 mins.) After each Goal post - I will come back and amend the post each day and report how things have gone. Since I didn't write this post until Thursday... I'll go back and re-cap on the week to date.

Monday - We went to story time at the library today. Then picked out a slew of new books to bring home, most from the early readers section so that I can start working with Alex on reading. After naps we read a handful of them.

Tuesday - Well it is actually Thursday and I'm not really remembering what we did on Tuesday. I know that I went to a Town meeting, and when I came home Daddy had made the boys an awesome couch fort! They had been reading in there with him, so that will be today's reading.

Wednesday - We sat down to read to the boys. At first they wanted to go outside, or watch a movie, or color. But I sat down and started reading and they joined in. We read from McGuffey's Eclectic Primer, Alex read some words all by himself. Michael and Matthew were thrilled to find "my name" (or be able to identify the first letter of their names) in the book. Then we read 2 articles out of The Friend. And some fun poems from a library book.

Thursday - Well today was a long day, we did a lot. Spent the morning trying to get ready for the park... almost didn't make it. Stayed at the Park until nap time. Got naps, up and back at the normals of diaper changes, dinner, and then headed out to the store. Stopped at Daddy's office to see him (he's working late tonight). And got home and ready for bed... and it's 9pm. So we read one quick story and tucked into bed... 15 mins of reading didn't happen today. Good thing other days are usually more!

Friday - Today (and yesterday) I'm just in one of those moods. I don't know why, maybe it's because our house is a disaster and I don't even know where to start and just feel so overwhelmed. Most likely... and I have all these "projects" that I wish I could be working on, but feel like I can't because I haven't gotten my 'work' done first. Hmm... the joys of responsibility. Maybe it'll get me going again if I write it out... the morning was really pretty good. I got up a little before 6am (Thank you to my dear husband's help), quickly got ready for the day, fed Andrew, and was out the door by 6:45am, on my way to Grandpa's (alone!) to pick raspberries. I wasn't 3 mins away and I got pulled over! I thought I was out of the 25 mph zone... but obviously not! It must be my lucky day, he didn't cite me (and I've been told the police in our new town will usually cite if your going 5 over... I was doing 10.) Got to Grandpa's and an hour later (Thank You to Grandpa's help!) had a huge bowl and part of a smaller bowl full. Home by 8:30am so Daddy could head to work. Washed and put up half the raspberries, went out back with the boys and attacked our overgrown garden again... note to self, next year PLANT when you rotatille, once the weeds come back in it's 10 times harder and longer! Planted some carrots. Came in got lunch, made some sourdough english muffins from scratch! They are SO good! Reading time with the boys, we read 4-5 library books. Put boys down, and now... I just want to vegg... but oh, my house is ridiculously cluttered. I am wishing I was the 'Genie' or had one in a lamp somewhere!

Beginnings

I am someone who likes to be busy, I love having things to do and projects to accomplish, and apparently I'm not the only one who knows this! We have been blessed with 4 beautiful little boys in 4 yrs. As of today they are a 4 1/2yr old, two - 2 1/2 yr olds, and 7 months old. My life is full of; joy, tears, smiles, laughs, sillies, questions, noise, energy (though at times not enough in me as around me!), and most important love! I wouldn't have it any other way!! Though I must admit that at times I miss some of the things that I used to do, and keep wishing that I could accomplish some of the projects that are making the "back-burner" full! I think that Heavenly Father knew that I'd try to make my life full one way or another, and that this was the best way.

Along those lines lately I've been searching to 'find' something 'more' to do. And as I pondered and thought and looked and prayed I finally found my answer, right in front of me. My purpose in life is not to do all the things that I dream up in my head (I'm quite a dreamer/entrepreneur in my mind... I just don't have the time in real life to do all the things I think and dream about.) It IS however to be a Wife, Mother, and a Teacher to the dear Children who I have been so very blessed to be the Mother of! I read a great quote the other day about how we measure our success, and it caused me to think about what I measure my success by. And what success means to me. It is my children! Who they are and become reflects upon what we teach them. The thought that I keep coming back to is to work and strive to "Teach The Children" that I love so.

I have always thought it helpful to have a person or place to account to on progress of a pursuit, as this is one which I want to do my very best on, I decided it would be wise to create a place to put the things I learn, resources I find, and the things we do along this wonderful journey of "Teaching the Children".  It is for my own personal reference more than anything, but if you have found your way here and want to read along your welcome to join us.  I hope that maybe something we find or do will help you on your own journey to "Teach The Children".