Birthday Boy and our first day of school

Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Bob stopped by for another visit, this time staying overnight. Since today is actually her birthday, we celebrated on Monday night when they were here. My mom baked two blueberry and rhubarb pies, and we put a candle in one to sing Happy Birthday to her.




Entirely unrelated...

I'm not by nature a very organized person. This is not to say that I don't enjoy organization -- I love it, actually, and an organized life is one that leads to far more productivity and creativity. However, the things in my life tend to fall more to the disorganized state of things unless I purpose to the contrary. For this very reason, I've decided to "formally" begin school with Andrew, starting with Kindergarten. I know that I could just teach him simple math and how to read in a here/there hit-or-miss style, hoping for the best by the time he's 1st grade age (next year!!), but I don't really trust myself enough for that.

All of my school-aged siblings had their first day of school on Wednesday, and as it was the day of Andrew's 5th birthday, and he finds the idea of school very exciting, we (I) decided to take the plunge.



Elijah's attention span is a good bit shorter than Andrew's, but I figure that he'll just absorb whatever he can at this point and learn as we go along. Once we get back to Germany I'll probably set aside some time to work especially with just Andrew on certain things, probably during part of Elijah's naptime, but we'll have to work that out later.



It's going to be a challenge, and I'm certainly not committing to K-12 Homeschooling or anything, but we'll just take it year-by-year and see how it goes. Mostly I'm just concerned with keeping them at least on level with their age-appropriate grade, for whenever I do decide to actually enroll them in school.

We did handwriting, phonics, science, and of course the ever present home economics (making red velvet cupcakes).

Since it was also Andrew's birthday, we of course also spent some time opening gifts.





Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Bob gave Lavella this precious pair of pink shoes, but unfortunately they are size 3...and she's currently a size 5-1/2 or 6. Lavella had a fine time trying to put them on herself though for about a half-hour, and if this baby is a girl, I'll be sure to put them on her little feet the moment they can comfortably fit her.


Grandma Claire and Grandpa Mark also stopped by with new clothing for the children. Here, Lavella is modeling a new dress that is actually sized for what she'll be next summer, but we let her model it anyway for a little while.

Isaiah was very amused by all of the excitement.


We babysat Isaiah for the second half of the day so that Hannah could go to work for a few hours, and he was, for the most part, a delightful fellow.




We ended our day with the Red Velvet cupakes -- each person put a candle in their own so that we could all have the opportunity to blow something out.


Happy birthday, Andrew! I love you so much, and can't believe you're already five.