Monday, December 1, 2008

Monday

Yesterday was really rough.  I'm hoping today goes WAY better.  I've got a lot of stinky laundry to get through today.  Good thing Monday is my main laundry day anyway!  I've taught most of the children to do their own laundry, so our system for who gets the machines is:
Monday -  me
Tuesday - Thomas (he washes his and Benjamin's)
Wednesday - Stephen (he washes his and Samuel's)
Thursday - Naomi Ruth and Sarah (they wash theirs and Miriam's)
Friday - me, with Rebekah and Hannah as my helpers, I'm trying to teach them how to do it
Saturday - me
The children sort, wash, dry, fold, hang, and put away all of their laundry on their days.  They also strip their beds, wash their sheets, and put on clean sheets.  It's a great system.  :-)  The only person struggling to keep up with their part right now is me.  That's just one of those aspects to having a newborn.  If we suddenly add in hours of me sitting down and nursing during the day, there are things that are going to have to slide for a while.  

The snow is coming down and looks just beautiful right now.  It's not sticking at all, just swirling through the air.  All of our children love snow, but the Liberians find it just absolutely amazing!  Liberia has a tropical climate.

My plan with homeschooling had been to finish up our Thanksgiving unit study by Thanksgiving and start our Christmas unit study today.  We didn't get as much done as I'd wanted to with our Thanksgiving one, though, so I've decided to extend it through this week.  Thomas and Naomi Ruth are really doing a LOT of independent reading as part of this unit study.  Aaron and I had talked about starting to give them an allowance and then we came up with a better idea.  We give them $1 for every 100 pages they do of independent reading related to our current homeschool unit study.  I went to the library and checked out a big bin of books related to Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims, and the Early Settlers. They've learned SO much through those books and are really loving them!  We will definitely keep that up!  We'll start our Christmas study next Monday.  Our Christmas study is an ongoing one that we do each year.  Each child has a Christmas notebook that they are steadily adding to.  It's a lot of fun.

For Susanna's birthday, we decided to go ahead and have her open her presents, but we are waiting on the cake and ice cream part.  We were able to gather everyone down to the family room last night.  We all sang "Happy Birthday" to her and then she sat in her little stuffed rocking chair and opened her presents one by one.  I'd taken the children to the thrift store a little over a week ago so that they could buy presents for her and they were so excited as she opened all of the presents, but especially the ones from them.  :-)  I like that they are learning the joy of giving!

Love, Dawn

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a blessing to have such a large family! I thought I had a lot with 6 kids! You sure have a great system and bless you for homeschooling. I also homeschool and LOVE it!
I'm going to start giving my kids a certain day to do laundry!!
Have a great day and I pray it's as stress-free as possible =]