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Esmé's Mom here...

I've been test-driving our super-duper all-inclusive ever-so-thorough school schedule in the past week.  Well, not the school part, just the surrounding parts that enable us to squeeze in "school."  (Which might not look like school to many of you, but it's intentional learning time of a sort.)

So we've been enforcing wake-up, and bed-time, and outside-time, and quiet-time, and chore-time, and all that good stuff.

(Confession:  lately I've just kind of muddled through the day and considered myself accomplished if girlie is asleep by midnight and I've done at least one load of dishes and laundry during the day.  And the living room aka schoolroom is not totally trashed.  Just partially trashed.)

And I've relearned what I always learn when trying to follow a schedule.  There's NO WAY to fit it all in.  Or even a quarter of it in.  My daughter needs less sleep than I do.  And she doesn't DO schedules.

We're working through the issues.  I have high hopes.  I just need to adjust the schedule for the following factors:

• From the start of bedtime to actual sleep takes 2 hours or more.  I should schedule 3 hours to be on the safe side.  After all that time, of course, Miss Esmé is hungry again, so we need to add a 1/2 hour to the schedule for a midnight snack.  And a rebrushing of the teeth.  And at least one more bedtime story to readjust to being back in bed after the snack.
• Miss Esmé does not DO naps on a schedule.  We can work around this, of course.  I do the napping on her bed while she does "quiet time" with a stack of books.  Interspersed with  "Is it time to get up yet?" every 2-5 minutes   seconds.
• I HAVE managed to adjust her wake-up time with all this.  I've been making her get up by 8 a.m. EVERY day (so naps and bedtimes would be easier??? - bad logic) - so now she is voluntarily getting up around 7:30 a.m.
• We should be able to get in about 9 hours of actual "school" time a week.  Not quite enough for all the "curriculum" I had planned - I was hoping for at least another 3 hours.  So I'm working in some double-tasking.  Bible Story during bath-time, poetry reading during lunch, science during meal prep and outdoor time, phonics during art-time, subliminal math with audio CDs during sleep-time, etc.
• Somehow the house looks even worse than it did before I got serious about a schedule.  I need to reevaluate the essentials.  Like take mopping and dusting and window-cleaning and toilet-cleaning off the list, since they don't get done anyway and just make me feel guilty.  Get back to the basics of one set of   clean dishes and clothes!

Yeah, I know all you moms of multiple kids think I've got nothing to complain about.  And yes, I'm truly grateful to get 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep.  There was a time when that seemed like a heavenly concept.

So I think I'll shut up and go take a nap  enforce some quiet time.

Schedules...

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Esmé's Mommy here...

I've mentioned before that I'm schedule-challenged, I think. But I keep reading how important routine is for kids, and I hate that I'm passing on my schedule challenges to her.

(But honestly, folks, I think it's genetic?! Please tell me that's so! Some (lovely) mornings I drag her out of bed at 9 a.m. Other mornings, like this one, she's waking me up at 5 a.m. And it's not like she went to bed early last night. Naps are just as sporadic - sometimes they work, other times we lie around for an hour before I give up.)

Well, with the new year comes a new schedule. I do love making schedules! It's the following that's a challenge.

This time around, I decided to leave MY stuff totally off it. I made a weekly schedule for Esmé, and I'm trying make that a priority and just work my stuff around that schedule. It's sort of going, but there's a whole lot of MY stuff that's not getting done, unfortunately.

Today, I was sort of fed up with Esmé not following her OWN schedule, so I decided to put it down in pictures for her. We talked through the whole thing, and she totally agrees with everything on it. Here it is... (If anyone wants the Word file, I'm happy to share...)Oh shoot - no! That's the one she gave me as her counteroffer! Here's what we both finally signed off on.
Oh yeah - school? It's just fun with intentional learning opportunities, so don't stress over how much it appears on the schedule. And we're not into hard labor, either - it's just on the schedule so Esmé can see that Mommy needs to do it and can help if she wants.

By the way, I looked lots of places online for something like this, or at least clipart in one spot for making a schedule, with no success. I'm not entirely happy with what we came up with, but it's a start. I'd love to have clipart that matched. And I debated whether to run the sequence up and down or left to right - I decided left to right since that's the way we're doing sequencing cards, but it just doesn't feel right to me.

So, if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please let me know!

We shall see how this goes. I suspect I'll remain schedule-challenged... I'm optimistic, but not naive... (And this is just for her two at-home days - we'll wing the others for now.)

School Daze

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Boy, am I tired! I've been buzzzy learnin' lots these days.

Mommy said I should tell you a little about school. Well, I survived my first week and had lots of fun! I like spending time with Mommy doing things, and I am getting used to my schedule. I like snack times and playing outside times. I usually fall asleep right away at nap times, but I don't always sleep very long. Mommy says that's okay. I did get Mommy to stay with me over an hour one night because I wouldn't go to sleep at bedtime.

For music I got to practice the keyboard a lot, plus I learned all about Londonderry Air and Lead On, O King Eternal. Mommy found some fun music CDs that I listen to during playtime as well. I started dancing by myself for the first time to Wiggle In My Toe.

Computer time didn't go exactly as planned. Becuz I am so good at pressing buttons, I'm learning to use the mouse now. But the websites Mommy wanted me to practice on didn't work with the internet down. So I got to watch music videos on the computer instead. I like Humpty Dumpty and Let Your Light Shine and Butterfly Kisses and Anyway.

Every day Mommy picks a theme and we do stuff related to that theme, – books, songs, rhymes, and crafts. Our first day was the letter A and ants. So I made red and brown fingerprint ants – Mommy drew the legs on them while we counted to six. I learned "ant" in Portuguese (formiga) and sign language (it's actually just "bug" in sign language). We learned The Ants Go Marching One by One song and talked about the "Go to the ant" Bible verse, and Mommy read The Cicada and the Ant story. I ate ants on a log (chopped dates on a celery stick stuffed with cottage cheese – but I just ate the dates). Then Mommy and I went outside to feed the ants, but between Groban the dog and I, the ants didn't get much bread. Bread is yummy, and Groban thinks so, too. We did see one ant carrying a crumb. Yesterday when I was walking outside, I saw ants on the ground and stopped to pick one up. They are very tiny.

Another theme was the Tower of Babel. Mommy took out the MegaBlocks (large Lego-like blocks) and made a tower. I had fun taking the blocks apart. I haven't played with them before because they are supposed to be for age 2 and older, but I surprised Mommy by spending lots of time trying to figure out why and how the pieces stuck together. We talked jibber jabber a lot that day, too.

We shredded pink tissue paper and had a cherry blossom blizzard for George Washington's birthday. Mommy made cherry jello too, but I didn't like that very much. On Antarctica theme day we made a penguin from a toilet paper roll, played in ice cube water, made an igloo from blocks (except it did have corners), ate cold smoothies and gave ice cold sodas to some people. On Apple day I turned my fingers into wiggle worms by sticking them through a cardboard apple I helped Mommy color. That was funny. I helped Mommy make apple turnovers by mixing and eating the apple peel, but I never got to eat the turnovers because I had to go to bed before they were done, and they were all gone in the morning. Mommy says plain apples are better for me, anyhow, and I do like those.

So now I'm restin' up for the next school week. Mommy's got lots of work to do to get ready for this week now . . .