Melanie Mae–2 Months

Melanie turned two months!  This little baby girl has been with us for two months and has done more then any of the other two did in their first two months!  Amazing how much more relaxed you become when it is the third. 

She has been sleeping great.  Going to bed about 10pm and waking between the 2am – 3:30am hour.  Then at about 5:30am – 6:00am she wakes up to grunt and fill her pants.  Then up again when the big kids wake up.  Also sleeps great during the day.

I’ve been trying to get her on a bit of a schedule (during the day) to help us get ready for school.  But I haven’t been so successful with that.  I want her to start taking naps in her crib and she can only sleep about 30-45 minutes in there and she is up.  She wants to take her naps right in the middle of the chaos.  She sleeps the hardest (during the day) if she is in her little bouncy chair in the middle of the kids while they are yelling, running, and playing. 

She has some great grumpy eyes!  While awake and while she is sleeping. 

She is making great eye contact now and starting to smile.  She makes the best contact with Mallory.  Jesse and I were kind of worried because she did not make great eye contact with us.  Not even me!  I would get right in her face and she would look away.  Well no baby of mine is going to look away.  So I kept getting in her face.  Mallory comes around starts talking sweetly to her and Melanie looks right at her and won’t take her eyes away!  Oh yeah!  That doesn’t fly with this Momma.  I got in her face a lot and now she looks at me and smiles!  Mommy win!

Nick Names: Squawker, Squawker McGee, Menie, Melie Mae, Sugar

She got Squawker because she doesn’t really cry.  She just kind of gives out a little squawk here and there.  She can cry.  But she only whips it out when she needs to.  Otherwise a squawk is enough to get her point across to us that we need to either hold her, talk to her, give her a blanket, give her a nuk, feed her.  She pretty much has four servants that bend over for her and give her anything she wants. 

We decided that green is her color when she wore this.  It looked so good on her!

Homeschool Prep

I talked in passing real quick that we decided to homeschool the kids.  I’m starting out with Mallory in Kindergarten and Max in Pre-Pre-School. 

I have always had this high interest in home schooling.  I thought about it years before Mallory was school age ready.  So I have been following home school blogs and home schoolers on instagram.

When we finally decided to do it – I felt some what prepared.  I had a ton of on-line resources.  However not a one of these knew me personally and could answer some of questions.  We found out that one of our pastors homeschooled all of his children so we went to him and they told us everything they knew and gave even more great resources. 

I felt totally prepared and ready!  These are the books that I picked for us to work on this year.

Then one of my home school blogs was having a sale on her site and I couldn’t pass up her Kindergarten Curriculum.  So I bought it.  It is a downloaded curriculum and I have to print and laminate and cut and… totally fun stuff!  I’m loving her curriculum.  She has a pre-school one that I will get for Max next year. 

It has been a lot of prep work getting this curriculum ready so I have been storing it in this binder so when it gets handed down to the next child it won’t be so much work.

This blogger is one of my favorites so I went a bit hog wild during her sale.  I also purchased her lesson planner.  Went to Office Max and found a binding kit and printed the planner at home on the special paper.  Otherwise I’ve heard you can print it on regular paper and take it to a printing place to have them bind it for you.

My goal was to get 4 weeks pre-planned before we started.  It didn’t happen. I was only able to prep out 3 weeks.  I bought an accordion file folder and I store each day’s papers in side here.  I’m hoping that I’ll get a night or weekend morning to keep prepping through out the year.

I’m an office supply / school supply geek!  So when it was time to get their supplies I was giddy!  Mallory highly dislikes shopping so I went by myself.  It was more exciting for her to come down and see it all in her special little area. 

Of course Max had to get one too!

A daily notebook for Mallory to work on each day.  She fills out a calendar each day.  Counts to the 100th day of school.  Writes her name each month to see how she improves.  Learns about tally marks.  Keeps track of the weather each day and charts it.  Also the three sheets on the right that are laminated and she can do each day.

This is Maxwell’s area for Mother Goose Time.  I had it all set up and the Friday before we started his lesson arrived with a whole new display for the year.  So it no longer looks like this and I haven’t taken a new picture of it.

I still ordered Mother Goose for Mallory too.  They have lots of good projects and Mallory still enjoys it.

Here are some of the books we will be reading together. 

Our first book is Stuart Little and (on my favorite blog) I found lap books for most of these books. 

I’m feeling prepared and ready and excited for the first three weeks.

My goals for this year:

~ Be prepared.

~ Relax.  I want to have a schedule yet if the schedule needs to be broken – I don’t want to freak out about it.

~ Enjoy it and have fun.  I’m sure there will be moments where I will feel more stressed then anything else.  I need to stop and enjoy the moment we are in.  This is something totally special I get to do and I need to remember that and let loose with the kids.  

Bay Beach / Anniversary

Our anniversary was coming up and I was feeling a need for a family get away.  I had a few thoughts but when I thought about them a bit deeper it usually left me on the side lines with a baby.  Then I thought about Bay Beach in Green Bay.  Which is a super cheap kids amusement park!  Something I could participate in all the while having a baby!

Standing in line for the carousel with the kids… Max says I want to ride the horse with the gun.  Huh?  I didn’t even notice a gun.  Sure enough some of the horses had guns painted on the side.  Mallory and I let Max pick the horse with the gun and we rode next to him.

I really wanted to go on the swings.  I had never been on them before.  Mallory wanted to go too.  She is a huge fan of swinging.  So she was all in.  Her and I are standing in line and I’m starting to think that maybe this is too much for her.  I asked her a few times if she really wanted to do it.  She said yes.  She wasn’t even nervous a bit.  Mallory is the 4th swing from the front and I’m right behind her.

Holy cats!  The swings are kind of intense!  But she had a smile on her face the entire time!  I got extremely dizzy!  Apparently I can’t do spinny things like I use to. 

Max almost too little yet.  There was stuff he could go on but it was almost too baby-ish for him.  He wanted to do some of the bigger stuff like Mallory got to. 

While Mallory & I were standing in line for the swings – Jesse took Max and Melanie to do a ride that Max would like.  It left Jesse in kind of a situation because he had a big double wide stroller also.  So he couldn’t really stand in line with Max.  So he talked Max into standing in line by himself for a ride.  He did it.  (Max can tend to have social anxiety in big crowds – so standing in a line of people by himself is HUGE.)  Then he got to his ride and walked up to the one he wanted and just stood there and stared at it.  Again Jesse was in a perdicament because does he leave Melanie in the stroller and go help him for a quick second?  Thankfully another parent seen him and asked him if he wanted help getting in.  Max froze.  He didn’t move.  He didn’t speak.  He just stood there.  He never rode.  He turned around and came back to Jesse.  Poor buddy. He did the really hard part of standing in line, but he just couldn’t get on that ride.

Melanie slept the entire time!  We got there about 12:30 and didn’t leave until 5… She slept.  Not a peep out of her.  Never even woke up to eat!

Jesse and Mallory went on the bumper cars.  Max was too little and he was pretty upset over this! 

He really wanted to go play the shooting/hunting arcade game so we did that for him.

Oh and then Mallory and I had a craving for ice cream.  I attempted a family picture.  But Melanie was still sleeping… so we still don’t have a family picture of all 5 of us.

Hit up a few more rides and we had enough.

Most of the rides here were a quarter!!  We decided to spend $10 in tickets (each ticket is a quarter).  We were not thinking at all.  We came home with tons of tickets left over and we went on a lot of rides.

We will have to go back again when Max is bigger… and Melanie.  Melanie doesn’t even know what fun she missed!!