September for Real, 2015

You'd think from looking at all of these pictures that the only person I hung out with was Brooklyn during September. While that isn't true, Cason, Brooklyn and I spent a lot of quality time together when the bigger kids went to school. I missed the big kids so much, and the "littles" and I tried to soak up as much play time outside as possible. Here Brooklyn is ready for her first day of gymnastics. We have her go Melissa Pett's house, where Melissa has converted her basement into a little gym. It's only $25 a month, and I tihnk it has been good for Brooklyn. It helps her be active and run around with little kids, and it helps her learnt o behave well in a group setting--something that is a challenge for my little drama queen. She can cry 20 times a day about what she wears, what she eats, which bowl she gets, etc. Super cute, and super hingy, this one.

Here she is with her water bottle, posing in the front seat for some reason.

Beautiful Rigby Lake! It is so fun when there aren't many people there. It makes watching my kids incredibly easy.

Brooklyn was a rockstar with her preschool workbook. I didn't know if she'd do a good job with it because she hadn't shown any interest in workbooks before, but she took off with this one. When she completed it, she began a Brainquest Kindergarten workbook that I also really like for her. The kids get rewards when they make it through their workbooks.

This was taken after I taught our neighborhood preschool for the first time. All of the kids had crowns with their names on them. More about preschool: there are seven kids in the group: Brooklyn, Halle Hanks, Avery Kunz, Ember Blackburn, Charli Evans, Morgan Lyman, and Jane Klein. They're cute, and I love the preschool. It's kind of a pain to prep my preschool teaching, but I enjoy the girls, and I only have to teach every 7 weeks. I am so glad I decided not to pay for preschool this time!

This was my fall schedule. I've modified it a bit since then, but it helped keep me sane for several months. The kids are involved in several things. Isaac has piano year-round and sports throughout the year. So far, he has played football in the fall (the team wasn't good and Doug got tricked into being an assistant coach), and basketball two times with Jodi Hoopes as the coach. He seems to like it pretty well, but he asked not to go to his last game, and I acquiesced. It will be nice to have a break between the end of February and the start of April with his sports, but I still want him to be active. He'll start soccer in April.

I took this on my mom's birthday. My whole family contributed to a thread showing all kinds of random birds we had allegedly seen that day. This was my picture of the Cason bird, complete with bird poop on the ladder. You can also see the dutch boy haircut I gave him. Definitely not the best haircut, but he looked so cute!!!!

My beautiful girls making necklaces in their matching shirts. This was another craft I led in preschool. Lucy likes to come home from school and complete the crafts I set up for the preschool kids.

I finally gave away the double stroller I've had since before Lucy was born. It didn't collapse well anymore, the preaks kept falling down, one of the tires went flat all of the time, and I just didn't like having such a huge stroller in my garage that I rarely used because the limo was more reliable (no flat tires). Now that I am expecting another baby, I kind of wonder whether I should have kept the stroller for runs to the park with the boys.

I appreciated Doug's efforts to shape our overgrown pear tree in the front yard. I like the you can see that the leaves were just starting to change. You get so much beauty out of a flowering pear.

One day, Brooklyn laid out all her alphabet books in order. Very cute. She didn't become good at singing her ABC's until the start of the school year. Let's try not to compare that to her cousin Cora who is not yet 2 and can sing a lot of the ABC song.