As I promised in my kitchen post, we did make it up to our kids for having a lousy summer by packing in a ton of summer fun in August. With our kitchen complete, we headed to the park, the pool, and in general tried to give the kids a lot of our undivided attention.
A recent trip to the park:
The big thing we ended up doing was taking our kids on a train ride on the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad! Every summer they have a special dinosaur themed train ride (based off the PBS show Dinosaur Train) that is just perfect for kids.
Trains and Dinosaurs! What kid wouldn't love that?!
Grandaddy, who never turns down a train ride, even came up to ride with us!
The train took us to a dinosaur themed adventure area where there were bouncy castles and all kinds of dinosaur themed fun.
There was "dino golf," crafts, a fossil dig, a nature trail, and of course the star of the show, Buddy, was there.
We all had a blast!
All in all, August was a great end to summer!
A New School Year
Every fall I read posts and see pictures of everyone's kids starting school. My mom and sister, both teachers, start talking school all the time. And for the past four years I've felt a little left out of that wonderful 'back to school' spirit. Maybe I'm just a huge dork, but I always loved back to school time. I loved fresh school supplies and the anticipation of learning new things. I loved the idea of life becoming very scheduled again! And because I went into teaching, I continued to catch the spirit even after I graduated college. But the last four years I've been hunkered down in the stay-at-home-mom zone with two small children and I missed out on that 'back-to-school' feeling.
Well, this year I caught a bit of it. Keziah moved on to the next level in her dance school. This year she is learning tap as well as ballet. And the start of dance again was a very much anticipated and exciting day.
First day of dance:
And something new for us this year is pre-school! The kids are going to pre-school one half-day a week. We had several reasons for taking this step. One is just so I have a few hours each week to get some much needed things done. I have a lot to do on my "nesting" list before baby #3 joins us and some things you just can't get done with small children around! (You moms know exactly what I mean). Did I mention that neither of my kids nap anymore! And Reuel is an early bird up with the sun, and Keziah is a night owl who is never asleep before 9:30! So, yeah, I have no breaks during my day to get things done.
First day of Preschool:
The other big reason for preschool is to give us some feed-back about the schooling decision. Keziah will be in kindergarten next year! And really she's never been in anything super structured other than her short dance class each week. We haven't decided how we are going to "do school" next year. At this point we are in the praying, researching, exploring options phase and we are trying to be open minded to where God would lead. We haven't ruled anything out as of yet and I'm hoping some feed-back from both Keziah and her teacher about how she does this year will help us in that decision. Her teacher has been teaching 4 year-olds for 20 years! And while there is quite a bit of play in her day, there is also a lot of structure and learning in a kindergarten-readiness curriculum.
Reuel's 2 year-old class is mostly play! And although he finds it a little hard to say goodbye to mommy, he is loving it as well!
I even got to buy school supplies for them! No notebooks or folders yet, but I did thoroughly enjoy perusing the school supply section grabbing glue sticks, water color paints, and things. Happy Back-to-School!
