Starting School

Friday was our first day of school!! It is hard getting back into the routine! We are in a new town, new house, new curriculum, new planning tools, new everything... Things went good though!! We had a few bumps, but nothing serious. The new planner we are using was a little difficult to figure out at first, but now it is soooo easy to use! It is easy for both me and the kids to see what we have completed and what we still need to work on. It has a button for the kids to click when they have completed an assignment and another button for me to click once it has been graded!! It makes report cards, tracks progress, and so much more!! It took me several days to watch all of the instructional videos and read the manual, but now I have got it up and running. I love that I can reschedule anything with just a click of a mouse!! Yippy!!

We are excited about our school year and all of the fun field trips we are going to go on this year!

Monday we are going to the Orlando Science Center. I thought the field trip was on Friday, but then I checked the website and the kids were bummed that I mixed up the days!! Oh Well!! We went swimming as our field trip for the first day of school!! I have a feeling that swimming will be a regular "Field Trip" for us!! It was fun though!!

I have share a great discovery that I just made.... the kids will do ANYTHING for computer time. Even chores!! I made a new rule that they only get 30 minutes per day on the computer, well let's just say that went over like a load of bricks!! They kept asking how they can get more time... then it hit me....

CHORES!! For every chore they do "with out being asked" they get an extra 10 minutes on the computer!! My house is spotless!! They cleaned the bathrooms (and since we have 4 bathrooms now that was a blessing), they vacuumed downstairs, upstairs, and THE Stairs, they did laundry & dishes. It was AMAZING!! It was like "cleaning Elves" moved into my house!! I would turn around and they were cleaning something else. Stephen even vacuumed the sliding glass door track!! He was on his hands and knees vacuuming under the table, baseboards (which gets them bonus minutes!!) I was amazed!

I picked the jobs I hate to do, like dusting and baseboards, and gave them double bonus minutes for doing those jobs!! At this rate I wont ever have to dust my house again!! This was definitely shown to me by God himself!! I am so thankful!!

It has been great!! Things have been going really good in the new digs!! We love the neighborhood. The kids have made lots of new friends. There are TONS of kids on our street and there are even several "homeschool" families in the subdivision!! We met a really nice homeschool family with 4 kids... the boys are Stephens age and they play baseball!! Not only do they play, their dad is a coach, and Stephen is going to be on his team. We signed up for baseball and softball yesterday and found out that Stephen was on his team!! Isn't that great?

The kids are siked about playing ball!! The ball field is about 5 minutes from our house. This will be really good for me since I will probably be at the ball field several nights a week, with both of the kids playing this fall! I am not looking forward to Detto missing the ENTIRE season, but I will take lots of pictures and video for him!!