Home Office

Jordan sent this to me this morning from his home-office-for-the-day :)

Yesterday he and Landon spent the afternoon hiking up to this spot and discovered that it had pretty great internet...so this morning Jordan woke up early and set out again with all his gear and set up a little office for himself where he got to work for the first half of the day. (He even had a few hangouts scheduled and a team meeting, so he got to show off the scenery to his NYC co-workers :)

We sure love this place we live, and Jordan is sure great at getting out and enjoying it!

First Summer Days

A few things from these first few summer break days:

+ The kids discovered the card game "Authors" and have played it probably a dozen times in these first 3 days of summer!

+ Two trips to Whittier park to play (in connection with cello rehearsal for Ellie)

+ A library trip (so many good books to bring home!)

+ Summer school (and such a happy surprise when the kids recognized the boxwood plants at the library that we'd learned about the day before!)

+ Some fighting, some grumpiness...

+ More searching/researching/working/helping to find a place for my Mom to live before an upcoming deadline

+ Kid made lunches of chocolate chip pancakes and pita pizzas (hooray for this remembered tradition from last summer!)

+ Young women's, scouts, cub scouts, activity days

+ Starting new summer jobs of taking care of the garden, and morning exercise (I love how the kids have been creatively completing their '15 minutes of exercising' job -- bike rides, runs, sit ups, running laps around our front room loop, a dance party, walking/jogging in place while making pancakes...)

+ Lego playing, hammock swinging, slow afternoon fun.

Here we go! (+ Summer School Plans)

after lunch lego time

Today is our first day of Summer Break! I've been excited to be prepping routines, job schedules, and summer school plans. And it was great to see everything work out pretty well today so far. Here we go!

Things I will miss about this school year: 

+ Porter and Isaac's morning playtime. While I'd do my morning jobs, they'd play close by in such a sweet, happy, imaginative way -- but in a way that I know won't happen with the energy and presence of all the older kids.

+ Helping in Porter's class. Kindergarten is the best.

+ Quiet time! :) We were all ready for Summer, but still, summer for me is definitely more work. More work that I love, but also just more!

Things I will NOT miss about this school year: 

+ School mornings of trying to help/encourage/persuade the kids through their morning routines

+ School mornings of trying to help/encourage/persuade the kids out of the car to go in to school (phewph - I'm glad this is done!)

A few things I'm excited for this summer: 

+ School time! We had our first day today and it was a success -- We had fun and everyone was happy -- hooray! :)

We're doing a nature theme this year with one of us introducing a new plant, flower, tree, or bird each day along with some kind of activity.

Then the kids have rotations:
1. Read with Mom (I'm excited about all the great books I get to read with the kids and for this scheduled in one-on-one time. Here are our books for now (oldest to youngest): Far North, The Wheel on the School, Frindle (then Justin Case), Nate the Great)
2 . Play with Isaac
3. Writing (with these penmanship and writing workbooks - we haven't used these before, so we'll see how this goes.)
4. Tech (keyboarding/code.org/duolingo/reflex math) and
5. Piano practice (or Portuguese for Porter)

+ Good routines -- sometimes it takes a while for these to fall into place, but I feel like we're off to a pretty great start. (The kids were halfway through morning jobs before I was up, so that's a good sign!)

+ Morning walks

+ Summer programs at the North Logan library

+ Swimming

+ All the fresh fruit! And planning dinners around 'what's good with watermelon?' :)

Brazilian Dinner

One of our family's  favorite traditions is making Brazilian dinner together. The coxinhas are the most labor intensive -- Jordan preps the filling and the outer layer, then all the kids help roll, shape and dip them, and Landon cooks them in the fryer. We make beans and rice, and I help (along with whoever doesn't have a job at the moment) with all the odds and ends -- pineapple (lately I've been loving roasted + chilled like I tried at Whole Foods recently - yum!), pão de queijo, and Brazilian limonada (with plenty of ice).

If I ever ask the kids for dinner recommendations or requests, Brazilian dinner is always on the list. If we ask the kids for 'fun things to do' recommendations, Brazilian dinner is almost always on the list too. :)

Yesterday, Jordan got started early and had all the coxinhas ready to roll by the time the kids were all home from school. Then he turned on How to Train your Dragon, and everybody watched  while they worked away, and it was a happy afternoon and evening.

(And a funny thing: one of the kids asked (with some level of silliness) something like this yesterday -- "What if for my next birthday, we just had a Brazilian dinner? And instead of cake or cupcakes, we had coxinhas!")

green and growing

With a few weeks of rainy, rainy days, our world is so green and lovely! And, today is our first sunshiny day with no rain in the very near forecast so it is bright and beautiful. I've been helping take take care of a friends' garden and since it was so rainy, I hadn't really checked on it that much because it wasn't needing to be watered at all. When I finally looked more carefully, everything had grown and grown! (Even to the point that I couldn't recognize several things and had to ask another friend to come help me figure out what everything was! :)

Mostly, there was tons of spinach needing to be used up, so this morning I made spinach muffins and spinach pesto (this was cups and cups of spinach and there is still so much to pick and use!) and some dill bread (in the breadmaker -- there is also a lot of dill and the only other dill recipe I know is gyros, so maybe we'll have those soon too!) We are going to have some spinach salad (me) and arugula salad (Jordan) for lunch in a few minutes. And I'll need to think of some dinner plans with lots of spinach and lettuce for the next little while! This is the first year I've tried any greens in the garden (ours are just barely sprouting now though ;) but I'm excited about it after seeing how well all of this grows! 

First lost tooth

One day last week Porter came into my room to show me his so-loose tooth. I paused sorting out some things from Isaac's changing table, and Porter sat down up close beside me on the floor. "Look!" he said as he wiggled it, just as he'd said and done several times over the last few weeks. "Look, It wiggles all the way... " And then, out it came!

And it was such a delight to be right there, to share the sweetness and wonder of that first moment, to be paying attention and feel the excitement of this little first right along with this little boy of mine. 

(Also notice: Porter's second favorite shirt - "Awesome Dude" and the handle of his just this morning made lightsaber :) I sure love this kiddo. :)

Wind!

We have had pretty solid springtime storminess for the last little while. Today the wind has been wild -- Ellie's district fun run was cancelled (she was going to be in the fastest heat with the goal of not coming in last place :) I was so proud of her for doing her best and working so hard on her timed runs in P.E.!)

Also, I've been back and forth to the school a bit today, and coming home this last time after taking Porter to kindergarten, we saw that this huge tree at the park had fallen! It looks so crazy too because there are no roots pulled up or anything, it's just like it was balancing barely under ground and then just tipped over - Yikes!