Missing Teeth
I seem to be revisiting that stage of life when I have to cut my
children's food into small pieces. Monkey is missing 4 teeth, Bug is missing 3, and neither of them have any front teeth. In fact, Bug lost her front teeth pretty spectacularly: The girls were riding their scooters to the neighborhood community center when Bug took a fall. She came up screaming with her mouth and hands covered in blood. I panicked internally until I realized she was holding her two front teeth and had not actually cut herself. Fortunately, the teeth were already very wiggly, and once we got her cleaned up, the bleeding stopped quickly. She was initially a bit shaken by the incident but soon embraced it as a great story that she told everyone we ran into.

Run! Run! Run!
Goose participated in another fun run a week ago, and this time she decided to make it a personal challenge. Daddy said she didn't talk nearly as much this time, and she took 3 minutes off her time! Her PR is now 31:44. As usual, her answer to "How was the race?" was an enthusiastic "I passed lots of people!"

New and Improved Routines
I'm a creature of habit, so routines are very important in our house. However, with three growing little girls, those routines occasionally change, and we've made a number of changes in the past month or so.

The biggest change is that I finally gave in and acknowledged that nobody naps in this household anymore. The girls were playing, not resting, and whatever I was doing was therefore constantly interrupted. That hour wasn't helping anybody. New routine: a 30-minute, silent reading time in the living room after lunch. The three introverts are happy because we get a bit of actual silence, and the single extrovert is happy because she still has everyone in one room. Bliss. Sometimes I also let the girls plug in their headphones and listen to talking books online thanks to websites like Storyline Online, Tumblebooks, and Starfall.

I also realized that we have a whole bin full of games (several additions were made at Christmas) that we very rarely find the time to get into. The skills used in game play (reading and following rules, good sportsmanship, logic & problem solving, etc.) and the application of academic skills, plus just the sheer fun of them, were worth making them more of a priority. New routine: Thursdays are now game days--no formal lessons. Thursdays were already busy with other activities, and I was stressing out trying to get lessons done too. Now Thursdays are much more relaxed and fun! Recent favorite games have included Tenzi, Bendominos, Xoom Cubes, and Cookies. Goose is also a big fan of some of our solitaire games.

The last couple of changes that come to mind are really just administrative additions to the existing routines that allow the girls a bit more independence. Each girl now has two dry-erasable tags on ribbons--one for getting ready routines and one for bedtime routines--that feature check lists for those things that have to happen everyday (which to be honest, I just got tired of admonishing them to do). Things like get dressed/in PJs, brush your teeth and hair, etc. It may just be the novelty, but so far it's helping those difficult times of day go smoother (and involve a lot less of me yelling up the stairs to verify that things are happening). I also recently added assignment sheets to the big girls binders. Each sheet contains a table listing the subjects by row and the days of the week by column. I highlight the cells for what lessons they need to cover each day, and they check them off as they go. I plan two weeks at a time, and the bottom of the page has several lines where they can list "Personal Projects." This helps me keep track of what outside-the-curriculum things they're working on, and it lends a sense of importance to the things they're more individually interested in.

Personal Projects
Bug in particular is a fan of the personal projects designation because she has so many! She's been a little less interested in just playing lately and has been working on some of the following things:
-Learning to play the Imperial March on her violin. She was just working it out by ear, but she told her teacher about it and they found some actual sheet music for her.
-Sewing clothes for Scrappy, the rag doll she made months ago, and sewing little drawstring bags
-Whittling a stick from the backyard into a wizarding wand
-Painting and building the dollhouse and furniture she bought with her Christmas money.

Monkey has a few personal projects too:
-Planning her first blank canvas painting. She received several small blank canvases for Christmas. She plans to paint a landscape on the first one, and she's spent time sketching out the design and experimenting with colors using her new pastels (realizing that a field of grass isn't just green--it's also yellow and brown).
-Painting and building little wooden animals from a kit she a kit she bought with some of her Christmas money.

New Weekly Outings
Their gymnastics session finished in December (it was just a short-term, try-it-out activity, not a long-term interest). Now Tuesday afternoons are for Math Club at the library! The timing is perfect: they had their first meeting this week, and it ends a couple of weeks before we move. The girls had a blast! This week they were creating 3D shapes using styrofoam balls and glowsticks. They were even more excited about this group when they walked in and discovered two of their friends were also signed up!

Our other new weekly activity is Friday afternoon playdates at the park. How this came about is the perfect example of why I love milspouse friends: When my Bible study group restarted last week, I was introduced to a new attendee--a fellow military wife who's homeschooling girls of similar ages to mine--and the friendship chemistry was there. Despite the fact  we move in three months, we agreed: We should totally be best friends! Before we left, we'd exchanged contact info and planned a playdate for later in the week. By the end of that playdate (and after befriending yet another military homeschooling mom at the park), we decided this needed to happen every week! I've also invited another friend from a previous location who recently moved here. This is the joy of milspouse friends: we connect instantly regardless of how little time we have left and enjoy every moment we can, and when we have the opportunity, we reconnect just as quickly.