Odds & Ends

L continues to enjoy the Bob books at bedtime, and I think if I hadn't been sick today, she'd probably have finished the "In the Beginning" workbook today, she did one page, but didn't like having to run back & forth to the sofa at the end of each page (prefers it when I do the running from whatever I'm doing to her LOL). It's interesting to listen to her thought processes as she sounds words out. The Bob books at this point are mostly very phonetic words, but they do use the. She struggles with that, but knew (from memory) that the last page of each book says The End, so I pointed out that it was the same word. So then whenever she got to "the" as she read, she'd mutter "the end" under her breath & THEN she'd know the word was the.

Tuesday night we started a book that included the short i sound (and emphasized it) and for whatever reason, she has a hard time remembering that one (for one thing, she seems to confuse the lower case i with the lower case t). Anyway, then yesterday one of the workbook pages we did was on the letter i, so last night when she came to her first i & asked me what it said, I asked her "what animal was on the i page you did today?" it only took her a few seconds (faster than I could remember, actually LOL) to remember insect, so then if she got to a word & couldn't remember the i sound, she'd mutter insect under her breath & that would remind her. I'm more excited about that then the rest of it, since I really feel the most important thing I learned in school was how to figure things out for myself, so I like that she's working out ways to remember things she struggles with.

The girls didn't see dh at all from Sunday night until we met him for lunch on Wed. (he worked late both Mon & Tues nights & went in early on Tues & Wed mornings (& I think they slept in a little later than usual on Mon, so they didn't see him then either). Anyway . . . L didn't seem to mind, just mentioning it once on Tues night as I was tucking them in (when dh is home he stays in their room while they fall asleep & they have "talk time" with him before they go to sleep, so she was upset at missing out on talk time for a 2nd night in a row), but A mentioned it a few times over the two days. Tues morning when she woke up she did a quick "tour" through the whole house to try to find him (he'd already left, I was still in bed), and then when he was gone when she woke up Wed morning, she was none too happy. Anyway, at lunch on Wed, we got there first & were getting our food & such when dh got there, she took off across the restaurant and gave him a big hug, and pretty much didn't let go of him the whole meal :) both girls were very good to have him home on time last night as well, and made up for lost time by having a longer than usual talk.

We have progress on getting rid of stuff we no longer use!! I'd really like to get the garage such that I can park in the garage this winter (we'd always had it so that I could, but then last summer dh got a new (very large) lawnmower and I tried a couple times to get through stuff & make room for it on the "junk" side, but always ended up running into too much stuff that he needed to make the call on, and he's never home, and if he is, he has more important things to do than go through random stuff in the garage. So, he went through a few things w/ me when he stayed home the Sunday of our anniversary weekend (but we didn't do as much as we'd hoped because it was rainy, and so much easier to sort stuff if you can spread it out in the driveway). Yesterday the girls were asleep when I got home so I left them in the car & I started working in the garage. Based on what we'd done last weekend, I'd already offered some of the outgrown toys to my friend, Kim, and she was coming over later in the day yesterday, so I pulled out the stuff for her, and rearranged the other stuff (so that we're back to "ok, now i need dh to go through stuff" LOL) well, I was figuring we could load the stuff into Kim's car while the girls played w/ her older dd, Hannah (who they adore) but Hannah'd fallen asleep so the girls were there w/ me when I was showing Kim what I had & loading what she wanted into her car. And the girls even helped load it w/o complaint. A did mention wanting to keep one of the riding toys, and it was the one that I'd decided could move up to my parents' house (they have a long, slightly hilly driveway and the girls are still nervous on their bikes there, so we generally leave their bikes home & let them ride the smaller riding toys when we're there, but the 2 that are currently there, one is faster then the other, which causes issues), so that worked out well. Granted we were getting rid of stuff they were WELL past using, but in the past that hasn't mattered, they were upset when I gave the exersaucers asway, and they were 3!!! So, that's a step in the right direction LOL.

We did abit of "school" this week besides the reading stuff. They've wanted to do art, so we made pinecone bird feeders and hung them in the backyard. And did another project to make grandparent gifts (since grandparents read this blog, no more details on that LOL).

Probably would have done more today but I ended up w/ a stomach bug of somesort and pretty much slept (or as close to sleeping as you can do while keeping half an eye on 2 four yr olds) all day, the girls did ok w/ that overall, alternated playing and watching more tv than we normally do. I did read them a story & play a couple games with them, and we did the advent calendars, they're really enjoying being able to count how many days are left until Christmas that way :)