Finding Happiness in a Day of Chaos

While I've been home on maternity leave from my job I've enjoyed spending some time cleaning up the house, paying bills on time, coming up with menu plans (and even doing a little cooking!). I've taken my boys to their schools and then come home and taken a wonderful nap with my new baby girl. I've really enjoyed spending time with my kids and seeing everyone interact.

I'm dreading the hustle and bustle of getting out of the door on time with 3! kids. Getting everyone dressed and fed, including myself, seems like it an insurmountable task. I'm not sure how I'm going to pull it off.

Today is my last official day home. My oldest son has a vacation day from school and my youngest son is recovering from an ear infection. I was hoping it would be lovely and sentimental, but it has actually been total chaos. I know my boys are learning so much from each other. They are learning how to get a long with others. Taking turns and learning conflict resolution is one difficult thing! I'm trying not to get involved so much (which means yelling less), and let them try to figure it out on their own a bit. They do ok, but boy is it hard to be around.

I'm trying to find the beauty and happiness in their chaos, because I know there are important life lessons to be learned (and FUN to be had!), but it's really hard sometimes.

Teacher Thank You's

Our oldest son is wrapping up his last days of preschool. After two years of preschool, he'll be headed to kindergarten this fall. As a little thank you to two of the great teachers he's had, we came up with a little thank to the women who have welcomed him three days a week. They have help instill the confidence and love for learning that we had desired for our oldest boy.

I ran across this great idea and thought I could possibly get something like this done. Some of the great ideas for Thank You's call for a great deal of preparation and craft ability. Juggling three children under 5 1/2 has made my days full of ideas and inspiration, but often not a lot of accomplishment. My expectations have been forced to be readjusted just a bit.

I hadn't meant for these little gifts to have such a patriotic theme, but while browsing the aisles at Target, I kept coming across red items and the star napkins and plastic drinking glass were some of the best items I found that would working with the red Izze soda.

The contents of these:

2 - Sparkling Pomengrante Izze Sodas

1 - package of red plastic cutlery

1 - plastic drinking glass

1 - box of sidewalk Pop-Its firecrackers

1 - package of paper napkins

1 - package Lindor Truffles

1 - sheet of scrapbooking paper with star theme

I then just printed out a note that said:

To My Super-Star Teacher

Miss _______

Thank You for making preschool a Blast!

Love, ______

If I was doing these again for teachers I would probably look for something a little less star-spangled, but this theme would work great for 4th of July party favors or hostess gifts.
Our son was excited to give these to his two great teachers so I'm feeling pretty good about getting something relatively creative accomplished for a change!

An Interesting Sight

My husband's grandparents live a couple hours west of us in a town of about 25,000 people.
They live on a picturesque boulevard near a local private college.
Their neighbor is a well-to-retired industrialist who takes great pride in his home and yard.

He has some beautiful Linden trees lining the street in front of his house with little wrought-iron fences around them. Twice a year he hires arborists to come and prune them. This isn't the typical tree pruning that I've ever seen. The arborists bring huge metal frames that they put over the tops of the trees and then they prune around them so the trees are shaped just perfectly. The trees are impressive to say the least!

Something I've never seen before!

Inspiration

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Strawberry Season / Growing Boys

Today officially marks the opening day of our favorite local berry patch.

We recently stumbled across a local grower of strawberries, raspberries, peaches, apples and pumpkins. We visited there for the first time last summer just in time for raspberry season. Today they are opening for strawberry season. Hopefully we can visit there next weekend for some fresh local berries.

In the mean time I ran across a pretty good sale at the local grocery on strawberries. They were from California, which is half the country away, but they looked good and the price on 4 whole pounds was pretty good. I thought I was probably overdoing it by buying so much, but these growing boys went through them in no time at all. I bought another 4 pounder about a week later, and those too are gone.

Our oldest son is now 5 1/2 and our youngest is 2 1/2. We have managed pretty well on not noticing their food intake very much, but all of a sudden they are eating supper and then following that with bowls of cereal. They are looking for snacks left and right, eating lots of apples and pears, string cheese, yogurt and more cereal. I suddenly realized that our grocery bill is probably going to take on a whole new meaning with these two boys!

So, local strawberry patch -- here we come! Hopefully that will sustain these two guys a little bit.