Preschool

Well we have put two days of preschool behind us! I was pretty nervous about the first day. Will the kids in my class cry all day? Will I have enough activities to keep them busy? Will Judah cry in his class? Will I like teaching little ones? All these questions were racing through my mind before we started on Tuesday. It really was a pretty good day. James helped me get out the door on time. The boys played in my room while I got things ready for the day. Asa was excited when I took him to his class. He walked right in and sat down at his place at the table. Judah started the day out pretty well in his class. Two of my six kids were absent that first day, leaving me with one boy and three girls. They were pretty easy to manage. The downfall happened when Judah's teacher stepped out and left him with the music teacher. He wasn't happy. I was taking my class to PE and he saw me in the hallway. I decided to hold him for a while. He was very happy to see his mommy! But very sad when Mommy left again. His teacher said that he never recovered from this sad turn of events. And the most exciting part of the day came upon getting home. I saw that the front door was wide open. Apparently we had forgotten to close it when we left in the morning. I called James to come home and look through the house before we all went in. By the grace of God nothing was stolen.
Thursday was the second day of preschool. I was more prepared than the first day. Judah did great in his class. Asa got to paint. All my kids were there and I kept a bit of order. I've been working on plans for the rest of the month and it's hard to have enough activities to keep 3 year olds busy and interested all day! Let me know if you have any good craft ideas!

Pictures

I finally have uploaded more pics to flickr. Link to the right.

This is the best effort I made at lunch all summer:

More Walking

Judah is getting really good at walking. He just can't stand up on his own in the middle of the room. Asa did that forever before he even started walking. In the background you see Asa sitting on a blanket with a bucket because I thought he was going to throw up when he woke up this morning. Everything has been puke-free so far this morning. Judah tries to play with the bucket and Asa says, "No. My bucket."

The Jungle

For some reason the back yard of our new house wasn't taken care of all summer. I guess the kid who mowed the yard was only paid to mow the front yard. As a result, the grass was more than knee high and there were weeds as tall as me. In addition to the grass problem, there are millions of tiny trees growing along the fence line. And there's an invisible fence line about 5 feet in front of the back fence from trees sprouting up. After we had lived here for a couple weeks James tackled the jungle with the push mower. He successfully mowed down most of the grass. The next step was raking. Two Saturdays ago I was feeling ambitious and went out to start raking. The problem was that there was still really long grass and it was too hard to rake. So we just had to mow again. After mowing, we raked up all the trimmings and bagged it up. (Let me insert here that the garbage company will not pick up our yard waste unless we call and ask them to do it. I asked if this was necessary every time and they said it's not. Maybe they should communicate that to the people who drive the trucks. Frustrating!) After mowing again, the yard is now usable. We still have a lot of trimming to do but we can at least let the kids play outside.