Last full week!

This week is the last full week. My nieces will be here all week, then only 3 days next week, along with their brother (9 and goes to school). The 16yo will be here until at least Thursday. That leaves us tomorrow, Wed. and Thursday to get through his boxes of stuff! At the same time, I've a gift project I need to work on and have done for Friday morning and let's just say the project is going very slowly!!!

Today, we spent the day out at a park at a yearly end-of-year potluck "breakfast" (more like brunch, or even late lunch ;) ). We have not made it out a lot this year for a variety of reasons (weather, H1N1, other illnesses, too much work...) and it was so good to get out, let the kids loose, have some fun in the sun, although I stayed in the shade most of the time. It was a great time!

My nieces, however, started with the crazy goofy interactions this morning. It's been a while since it's been that bad because I was so good at interrupting and redirecting. This morning, though, I was very focused on the need to get ready for the park, as well as some housecleaning, so I let it go. Of course, I couldn't really hear it above the vacuum cleaner. lol. But, tomorrow, I need to nip that in the bud. It would be so much better if I had less going on and could really think about Montessori activities to engage them in. My 2yo niece, for example, really ought to be presented with the Touch Boards. She has started pulling out the Sandpaper Letters and runs her finger every which way on them. Now, she's 2, so it can be a tricky issue to redirect a child determined on doing something, even if that something they are doing isn't quite right. I'd love to start showing her how to do some of the letters--she's a very, very, very bright kid--but she's very clearly not really paying any attention to staying on the sandpaper, which is where the presentation of the Touch Boards, followed by the Touch Tablets, will come in handy. I will probably be able to actually introduce her properly to the Sandpaper Letters in late fall. (She will be with me one week late July, then not with me, then back with me for most of August. She turns 3 in Nov.)

Dd decided to do some German the other night. Unfortunately, her idea was to take some of the kiddy books I'd taken out from the library and try to make sense of them, writing something down (not sure if she was just copying what she understood or translating). It was "unfortunately" because a couple of the books were actually rather confusing and very wordy, so that didn't go over so well! Right now, she is desperately and impatiently waiting for "How to Be a Pirate", the 2nd book in the "How to Train Your Dragon" series. She read the first book, we saw the movie (excellent movie, btw), then found out there was a whole series and put in a request for each of the books from the library. I think she's got every single book now from the library EXCEPT the 2nd one, and she's something like 6th in line for that one and the books that are out aren't due for another week and I don't think she would be part of the batch of people who would get those books; she'd have to wait another 3 weeks before those ones were due and back. She could be waiting a while. So, we ordered the 2nd one on the weekend (no store in town had it from what we could find in online catalogues) and it should be here tomorrow or Wednesday. Good thing she's a fast reader because all of the rest of the series has holds on them (the ones she has out), so she's going to have to read them all in the span of about 2 weeks!

That reminds me: I need to learn how to either track what my kids do and/or train them to track what they do. There is so much reading and other stuff going on that never gets noted and it's so easy to think that nothing is done.

What else? We went to see Toy Story 3 last Friday. EXCELLENT movie! We had a hard time deciding if it was better than the 1st or not.

Enough of my babbling tonight. I'm going to bed.