Balance

...is the hardest thing to find.

There are days when I am truly Super Mom. But most of the time I fall far short of that title.

Yesterday afternoon was a blast! We made a Helping Hands wreath, where we traced the kids' hands and made a bunch of cutouts, each labeled with the name of the person it belonged to. Then we glued them to a construction paper wreath while talking about things we can do to help keep our community's environment (our example was our home) clean and a nice place to live.

Beau said that doing our chores was a good way to keep our community clean. Then we did all our chores at once, which turned out to be a whirlwind of fun, with even Xander doing his chores without whining or fighting every step of the way. We hung our helping hands wreath on their bedroom door (finally replacing that old diaper wreath that I hung there when Beau was a baby! I'm embarrassed to admit that I just kept forgetting to take it down!)

We marked our chore charts with X's and check marks and tore the strip of construction paper off the bottom of our chore tracker that represented one day of chores. When they've finished all the days of chores (five weeks worth), they will have earned enough money (throught their allowances - Beau $5/wk., Xander $4/wk., and Bella $3/wk.) to buy that Playstation 2 they want (a printed picture of the game console is posted right above their chore traker, so they'll remember what they're working for). Here is the chore tracker with the thermometer that will be filled whenever they've saved on their allowance. I'll let you know how they do...the colorful strips of paper at the bottom are to be torn off every day when the chores are finished. There were 35 (for five weeks), and now there are 32.

Beau and I tallied up the number of days it was going to take to earn the $60 to order the PS2 off of eBay, which turned into a math exercise as we practiced addition and counting to 60.

After that, Xander wondered why the air conditioner vent pushed a scarf up into the air but not his Thomas train. So we talked about moving air (wind) and why some things are easily moved by it and others aren't. Beau practiced with his penmanship dry-erase board while I talked. When he was done, he helped Xander and Bella run around and try to find things that were light enough to be pushed by the air.

We brought out the math beads, which turned out to not be as frighteningly messy as I had feared. Xander surpised me by being able to string the beads even though technically he's not "supposed" to have the fine motor skills to do that yet. Beau strung 20 beads on his string with no problem. Next time I'll ask him to do thirty, and so forth and so on.

Bella and Xander practiced separating the beads into different groups based on color and shape. Bella is learning her colors slowly but surely...I'm trying to restrain myself from actively teaching her them by reminding myself that her brothers learned them by themselves just in everyday life and I don't want to rush her. She knows her favorites - pink and purple.

Through all of that, though, I managed to miss my window of opportunity for making a nice supper, and Steven was home as we were finishing putting the beads away. We ended up with hot dogs and chips...not too shabby, but it didn't quite hit the spot, either. Ice cream for dessert!

The point is, I didn't balance well enough. Sure, we had a great time with "school," even though I was tired after my own day at college, but I didn't allocate enough time to fix supper. I need to work on finding that balance! Lord help me! :)