Changes

Josh is about as busy as usual and we see about as much of him as usual. Not much to report there. We're still exercising together in the mornings and enjoying that time together. Definitely appreciate Hannah's willingness to babysit that early in the morning.

Hannah is loving her basketball. It's a great thing for her. She's also working hard at Odyssey of the Mind and piano. Her piano concert in the Bay Area is this weekend. Looking forward to that.

Brynne is doing great in school. She is also in Odyssey of the Mind. She just found out that it involves performing in front of a large group of people and she's quite freaked about that. She's learning the recorder at school and I love to hear her practicing!

Logan is thoroughly enjoying playing basketball in the driveway. He's reading like a banshee (2 chapter books in 2 days this week!). I can't believe how fast he's growing!

Kenna is driving me crazy. She has been waking up a lot at night. Last night I decided to just let her cry. So she did. For 2 hours. She was doing this before we moved her into a big girl bed. And now that she's two, it's past time for her to put herself back to sleep when she wakes up at night. I've actually tried just ignoring her in the past. And she'll go for awhile where she'll sleep all night. But then she slips back into bad habits, as do I. With two children waking up at night I'm exhausted every day.

I've tightened up our chore system. We use tickets and each chore is assigned a point value. At the beginning of the day I pull out the chore tickets and we take turns selecting our responsibilities. Every child has a number of points that they must earn. I've broken down some chores (so clean the bathroom is actually several separate jobs), and added more. And I took out all the meal clean-up jobs. I'm going to try having us do that all together with whoever was around for that meal. For awhile. At some point I'll go back to assigning individuals. But for now I want to have some teaching moments where we work together and I can show how to do the job properly.

Here's something fun. A high school friend posted this photo from 1993. It's our band class. Funny to look at these old photos!