July 2020: a recap

I am SO CLOSE to being caught up to real time! I'm writing about July in August...that's not bad at all, right??

We wrapped up our homemade VBS during the first few days of July, followed immediately by a festive July 4th celebration, followed promptly by beginning school...so the first bit of July was really full and exciting over here!

Even though we started school at the beginning of July, we still made sure to continue plenty of summer fun. Popsicles have been a staple (obviously):

Usually we eat popsicles made in our freezer molds, but this was on July 4th, so the girls got fancy gourmet pops from Locopops.

Lots of creative play time (please read "creative playtime" as "I don't have the energy to organize just a whole lot of specific activities, but you have tons of toys and supplies, so go with God, children"):

We continued our weekly staple of pizza and a movie:

Homeward Bound

Dennis the Menace. Claire and Lily both covered their heads at this part because they were stressed over Dennis's antics. Brad and I could NOT stop laughing at that, especially since Lily and Dennis are such KINDRED SPIRITS.

I hauled out our huge Lego stash and let them take over the dining room for a few days of creativity:

We spent time in our homemade water fun:

And poor Lily took a hard fall along the way!

Our solution for keeping an ice pack on her forehead. She was really sad, bless her sweet heart.

I woke up about four times in the night to check on her and make sure she didn't have a concussion. I tried to rouse her and make sure she responded normally (per our favorite pediatrician's advice), and she simply refused to wake up at all. Turned the other way and scooted as far away from me as she could. Which was exactly how she would normally respond, so I figured we were good. This is a picture of her the next morning.

Also: my dad has been in private practice for 32 years, and in that time has developed a collection of maxims that he lives and practices pediatric medicine by. One of his most used is this: If it comes down to concrete or skin, concrete always wins. 

Lily is out to prove him right on the regular.

The girls continued to spend a lot of time with our neighbor and her dogs, which is such a symbiotic relationship, as both parties wear the other out (in a good and helpful way):

Brynn really waffles in her feelings toward the dogs.

Brad continues to be everyone's favorite:

Brad's been working a little more with our risk-averse eldest on her bike skills, as well as introducing Brynn to the balance bike (which has been a roaring success, incidentally):

I definitely used screens as needed:

And one of our biggest July updates was transitioning Brynna to her place in the big girl bunk bed situation:

Overall, it has gone pretty smoothly. Not entirely, of course, because that would be asking far too much. But I really can't complain.

I'll do a post soon about where we are in life and career, as much of that was hammered out in June and July. But there aren't cute pictures to accompany that storyline, so it doesn't seem to fit here. I reached 33 weeks at the end of July and was still not on insulin, for which I am very thankful. I've got really low iron and very high blood pressure but no insulin. I'll take it! There is a very good chance that I'll actually do an August recap in real time! How great would that be??

School rhythms and general chaos

As I'm writing this, We're in the midst of our seventh week of doing school. It's been a learning experience TO SAY THE LEAST. Teaching Claire is not difficult or (usually) trying at all. It's usually very smooth and a good experience. She's a great student and- generally- easy to please. The tricky part is definitely managing the little sisters while trying to educate Claire. Lily isn't too difficult, but Brynn is a real challenge. She HATES to feel left out of anything, and she can cause a real ruckus when she feels like she is. My creativity has been PUT TO THE TEST in the realm of Toddler Distraction Techniques.

I'm very glad that we've done several weeks of a staggered start. For several reasons.

Brynn is requiring a lot more mental and physical energy from me than I anticipated (and I'm short on both of those things currently). And surprisingly, Claire feels a little left out of the fun when I'm focusing on preschool with Lily (and Brynn). Apparently, I've made it look very fun and enticing. I don't have the bandwidth to fully include her in all of our crafts and whatnot, so I've made her my teacher's assistant and assigned her to Brynn. This has worked out very well, praise the LORD.

From our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom lesson. This was a big hit! We don't actually own the book (I'm not sure how), so we watched a read aloud of the book on YouTube before making our own trees (while sounding out the different letters and thinking of example words). I had Claire help cut out the branches (#finemotorskills), I raided my saved tp tube stash, and I busted out some old scrapbooking stickers. These little guys lived on our mantle for a week before I required everyone to bid them a fond farewell. 

I've gleaned and used several ideas from Days with Grey and Busy Toddler for fun, engaging preschool activities. All of the ideas I've tried from these gals have been really big hits with Lily. Hit or miss with Brynn. Here are some pictures of a few things that have gone really well for us (p.s. I've linked their websites, but I actually follow them both on Instagram and gather most of my ideas directly from there):

Letter Match

I wrote letters on post-it notes and stuck them on walls in the living room...

Lily would run and choose a letter and then come back and match it to the letters I'd written on her clipboard. This kinetic activity is a really great one for Lily. We've also done it by having her "hunt" the lower case letters and then match them with the upper case. She's not yet super confident with all of her letter sounds, but she's gaining a lot of confidence in recognition and identification. WIN. This activity also cost me zero dollars and ~7 minutes of prep. 

While Lily did that activity (which Brynn cannot yet do), I had her do Alphabet Unwrap. I spent a little while the night before wrapping (in tissue paper) the letters from her alphabet puzzle. She then unwrapped them before matching them to their spots. She really REALLY enjoyed this activity. It took more prep time, but it kept her busy the whole time Lily was doing her activity. I'm planning to pull this idea out again and also with other puzzles. Hopefully, she'll still like it.

I think it nearly killed Claire to refrain from unwrapping all the letters herself.

We've done this one several times now to practice cutting skills. She really enjoys it. Days with Grey calls it Bear Rescue (because she uses counting bears, but we call it Cuppy-Up Rescue (because we don't have counting bears (yet. I'll probably cave and get some). I put a craft pom pom (which my kids call cuppy-ups) in each muffin spot, make a grid with painter's tape, and Lily rescues them by cutting them out. 

We've done this 2 or 3 times, and it's been a winner for us.

I didn't decide until we got to "E" to start letter books for Lily and Brynnie (so we've played a little bit of catch-up on A-D), but I found this page, and we've been making our own pages. This has been a huge hit with both Lily and Brynnie. Claire or I do the bulk of the cutting (I free-hand the shapes), although Lily has done some, and then Lily does all of her gluing. Brynnie can do a lot of hers (Claire helps as needed). Both of the little girls look forward to making our pages each week, and Lily can't wait until we're finished with the whole thing and turn it into a book. Here are a few samples of our work:

We've completed up through J as I write this. 

My general plan on preschool days is really loose, but currently, it revolves around a letter, a book that loosely goes with that letter, making our letter pages, a fine motor/school skills (cutting, gluing, holding a pencil), and doing some sort of activity or craft. Sometimes we do really fun activities, and sometimes they are very basic. When we did D, our book was Dragons Love Tacos, and we made toilet paper roll dragons.

I have a plastic table cloth I can use for painting projects, but I also save the paper from Amazon packages for just these situations. I also save egg cartons and yogurt cups to hold our finger paint. It makes clean up really easy.

We attached tissue paper so that when they blow on the tube, the "fire" ripples.

As far as keeping the little girls occupied while I teach Claire...I've done a lot. Some days, it looks like holding Brynn on my lap for most of it (although, I don't have much of a lap left currently). Some days, I've had a massive pile of small activities at hand and just slide something new under their noses every time they look like they're about to be bored. One of my best and most productive ideas, though, was pulling out our reusable Melissa and Doug stickers, giving each little a bag of stickers and a glass door to decorate:

Sent this one to the back door with savanna animals...

...and this one to the front with dinosaurs.

And when this one needed to be RIGHT BESIDE ME, she got underwater animals on the china cabinet doors. All of these activities worked out well for me. I have to use these good ideas sparingly so that I'm able to pull them back out at other times. It's a real balancing act...

Lily is quite good at entertaining herself, but Brynn does not like to be alone. Also of note: she and Lily sometimes play nicely together...and often get into spats. So, I can't rely on them to just go enjoy one another's company. Thankfully, Brynna enjoys flipping through books:

And playing dress up. 

I'm keeping a list (an actual list) of the things that are working for me, as well as a long list of ideas to try out. I'll try to document things that work for us here, in case you're ever interested. As well as documentation of how we survived this school year (hopefully...).

And just for fun, here's a picture of a science experiment we all worked on together while Claire was learning about nonvascular plants:

Everyone enjoyed checking in on this during the day, and it was a good reminder that the littles are always absorbing what the bigs are learning. Maybe they WILL all come out of this educated and functioning...