Day 37

Back to school. I am so grateful that for the most part the kids don't fight me on their school work. Grant was not loving his reading today, but he got it done. We even bookmarked those google hangouts so we are good to go now on that! As far as Monday mornings go it was good. They get up and get dressed and get started and know what they need to do. It also helps that the afternoon was nice and it is always extra motivation to get work done so they can have outside time. Poor Auggie has to get her naps in the morning because the afternoons are just too busy and she doesn't get a moments rest! She basically has her breakfast bone and then curls up on the couch for a morning snooze!

Around lunch my parents came over to help with some outside work. My mom has special rose gloves and she helped show me how to trim my rose bushes. Every time we turned around there was another rose bush. It took several hours. Of course there may have been a few other distractions like reorganizing the lawn ornaments (or scaling back). Once you have moved a gazing globe five times and it still doesn't look right, take the hint.... I was able to order herbs from the greenhouse for curbside pick up so I am excited to get those tomorrow.

Ordering herbs online - that is a lot of Thyme!

The kids spent much of the afternoon debating the point system from the previous day's fitness challenge. Grant would come out and complain and I just put his muscles to work - moving some of the heavier yard ornaments! At one point I had a pile of rocks that needed to be moved and I told them they could each pick out 1 rock to paint if they loaded them all up in the wagon. Before they started they said, "how many rocks do we get?" I caved and said two. They loaded the whole wagon and didn't complain once....for 2 rocks each. I am convinced this manual labor and outside work I make them do is starting to work - building some work ethic!

At 5:00 I thought it was quitting time...we had been trimming and hacking and rearranging the yard for almost 5 hours. Dad had been grinding on the fence and B had joined him after his day had wrapped up. Pops announced he was ready for his primers. (Fence project: grind, wipe, prime, wait 24 hours, wipe, paint, paint again - I should make a song out of this project). I looked at the kids and the chicken breasts that were thawing. Our standing joke is that eat dinner at 8:00, which is a poke at my family's traditionally late dinners! "Hey kids do you want to play Chopped? You have two chicken breasts and anything else you can find!" They really wanted to climb the tree in the front yard some more. It was making me a bit nervous. I don't want a trip to the ER for broken bones. I looked right at Elizabeth and said "Ms. I've broken 3 bones!" She started tell me how none of those were her fault. And this would be the tree's fault. Go play in the ravine. I've never let them play in there before. Last year there was too much water. Today seemed like a good day to go explore. Apparently it is pretty steep. Elizabeth slid going down and caught some roots on her hip and they weren't sure how they were going to get back up, but they figured it all out and still managed to make us dinner! We had chicken tacos and homemade dinner rolls. We ate at 8:00 and we watch the LegoMasters finale while we ate. We don't ever have the TV on during dinner. They did such a good job. More sunshine ahead.