Getting Into a Routine . . .

No doubt, as soon as I type that, everything will hit the fan again, but for the moment life has slowed down a tad, Little Bit is stretching out her nursing, and enjoys playing on the playmat, so we're actually doing some school and I'm getting abit of housework done and such, it's nice for a change LOL.

I'm easing the girls back into their chore charts. We'd pretty much abandoned them with things being so hectic, what got done, I needed to do as quickly as possible and when time allowed, not working through it with the girls on kid-time. But this week they've done at least some chores every day.

"School" right now is just Polished Cornerstones (Bible) and read-alouds for history. We read the Kirsten (American Girl) books last week, this week we've just been reading the Little House books (we need to finish the series (we're reading "The Long Winter" right now, so only 2 1/2 left, we'll wait on First Four Years) so we can start over with our Prairie Primer curriculum this fall). I was thinking I'd go through the rest of the American Girl books with them this summer, but I think they'd rather just use the Little House books for both "school" and bedtime for now, so we'll do that, and probably use the American Girl books for bedtime stories later on.

We NEED to go raspberry picking, the bushes behind our house had quite a few berries the beginning of the week, but it's been raining so much we haven't found a time to go around to the bushes up by the pond.

Last weekend we went down to my parents. There's a dairy farm that lets you go feed the calves at feeding time (nice of them to "let" people come do their farm chores huh? But the kids love it). So we met friends there and fed the calves and had ice cream on Thurs. afternoon. Fri we visited friends and then went to a fun park near my parents' house. They have a water slide that we thought the girls would like, but then about the time we got there it started raining (forecast was for isolated thunderstorms), it wasn't thundering at all, and the girls pointed out that "we'll be wet anyway" so we went ahead and got them the water slide wrist bands. It rained the WHOLE time we were there (thankfully there was a covered picnic area by the slide where mom, Little Bit, and I could sit while A&L were out in the rain), but the girls had a blast! There were only a few other kids there because of the rain, so they spent about 3 hours going down the slide, running back up the stairs, and down again. I don't know how many miles (more or less) of stairs they climbed altogether, but they got good exercise and had a ton of fun! The rest of the weekend we mainly just hung out at my parents' house, but the girls always enjoy riding bikes and such there.

If the weather's good on Sabbath, I think we're going to go to the Philadelphia Zoo, so they should enjoy that.