Summer School

Ruby at Mimi and Papa's house in the desk Papa painted for her.

Elvis playing while Ruby and I have school time. . .I think all of his floor time without Ruby jumping on him has helped him move forward in the milestone department. 

Ruby making playdoh snakes. She also made sausages and a pickle (her ideas)!

Ruby in her "lilo-tard" on her first day of gym. We are at Little Gym now to introduce her to gymnastics, and I am looking for her a traditional gym for the fall when she can join a 3 year old class.

With the beginning of June came the start of summer and the start of our homeschooling journey. Ruby has been showing interest in more structured learning. I had been just waiting for the right time to give it a shot. All of our circumstances aligned. I wanted the beginning of homeschool to correspond with the start of some other structured activity like dance, gym or Sunday school. So, we began Little Gym gymnastics, Sunday school, AND homeschool in the same week. I'm planning on setting 6 month goals for us during the preschool years and getting into more structured curriculum at our start of elementary learning. So, for now we are learning our letters, phonemes (sounds the letters make), counting, shapes, colors, thinking skills, to recognize written letters and numbers, a few sight words...basic preschool stuff. The first week has been wonderful. Ruby LOVES her gym class (see smiling picture in her leotard...she calls the class "lilo-tard class")! I see her follow my directions on a daily basis, but it was really special to watch her follow another person's directions, help the teacher and cooperate with other kids! We did a craft everyday this week that had to do with our letter of the week, "S". We sculpted, glued, cut, colored and stickered. Our "S" subjects were the Sun, Spiders, Scooby-Doo (Ruby wanted to watch a movie one day and I told her she could if she picked one out that started with an "S"... and so Scooby-Doo entered the schoolhouse!), Stars, Snakes (see photo of Ruby with the playdoh snakes), and Spongebob Squarepants. Along with craft time we read books featuring our letter, sang songs. . .all the things you think of when you think of preschool. I think our first week of school gave Ruby the confidence to try out Sunday school again (we had tried the previous week to get her to stay in Sunday school instead of the nursery at church with no success). She did wonderfully, especially since it was mostly older kids (over the summer they have only a handful of kids in attendance so her class is 3-7 year olds instead of 3-4's, but it is going to have her super comfortable once the fall session arrives). All in all, Ruby had a terrific week!

In Elvis news, he has hit a number of milestones at once. . .and they keep on coming. Two days ago he sat up by himself (I think he may have been doing this on the sly before that, but it was the first time I had actually witnessed it. . .and, hello, I have it on video on my phone. . .I have to figure out how to post it!)! He has been rocking on his hands and knees for a week or two now and I know it is only a matter of a short time before he is all out crawling.  Ruby only crawled for something like 2 weeks before she was full on walking. Goodness help me! What am I going to do with both of them RUNNING around the house? Yesterday afternoon E thought it was time to pull an adorable kid classic out of his hat and start waving . . . at himself no less. Melt my heart!  He waves with his little hand and will then proceed to wave his entire arm in utter joy! I'm taking his waving expertise as he is ready to learn sign language now. How wonderful to begin communication as if he hasn't been completely telepathicly linked to us up until now (oh, yes that is was I meant to say...sometimes we just know what he means to say). 

This morning we did some much needed portraits of Ruby and Elvis. I have 52 billion beautiful photos of other people's kids and hardly anything but snapshots of my own. So I made an appointment with myself and told Alex we had to treat it as if we had one with someone else (and were paying them as much as people pay me) so as not to flake on our own kids pictures. I hope there are some good shots. I know there must be of them on their own, but getting both of them to be happy ... heck, I'd take not miserable ... in concert is a quite the task. Ruby just hasn't perfected her self control enough to sit next to baby brother and take her thumb out of her mouth (honestly I think she has plenty of self control and is just hard headed...that is a 2 year old for you, though) and Elvis is a great model, but his timing doesn't match up with Ruby's quarter seconds of serenity. We'll see!

xoxo