Learning - All about a Rebekah

I've toyed with the idea of Homeschooling my children on and off. As previously mentioned, I did a program called Joy School - a Mom co-op preschool - with some friends and their children. It didn't work out, but that's okay! I learned from it. I had another option and turned it down because it seemed like more work than I was willing to take on at the time. Since then I've priced places, and had places price me (ie we don't qualify for any of the 'free' programs in our area because Daryn is awesome and makes good money). I bought Rebekah some work books for Christmas, and my MIL Jeanette gave us some more for Easter.

At first, Rebekah wasn't very interested. She wouldn't even follow a dotted line! But... I still haven't decided if that was because she just didn't want to follow the line, or she wasn't sure what I meant (because I know she's capable of drawing a straight line). It's irrelevant now, since she's getting pretty great with her work. We practiced some of the "follow the dotted line" worksheets a couple of times before I had her move on.

Then she decided she knew better than me what she was supposed to do on each page and mostly just wanted to color. This wouldn't have been too bad, except that most of her coloring is still scribbling, so I didn't want the page completely scribbled on. We took a break from the books for a few months, since I figured she wasn't really ready.

NOW, though, with the new books from my MIL, Rebekah has a renewed interest in school (she really calls it that) and she even did an entire booklet (like, 30 pages!) in less than 24 hours. Granted, it was the "Colors" book, and she's known her colors for a while, but it was just right to get her interested in other activities. The colors book started with a page dedicated to a color and it went through red, blue, yellow, green, purple, orange, black, brown, gray, pink and white.



If you look at the pictures she colored, you can see that Rebekah isn't terribly concerned about coloring inside the lines. I asked her if she would try to stay in the lines, and she told me that she didn't know how, but when I tried to show her she shut down and didn't want to watch. I was a little concerned about this - I couldn't tell if she just didn't care or if she really couldn't or if she didn't understand, but then I saw her "coloring" a picture on the computer using the finger pad to control the crayon and she did very well at filling in the entire picture and only going outside the lines a little bit, so it's not a concept problem - more just an issue focus and physical development, which will come in time. In fact, when she CARES and is focused, she does pretty well!

Something I absolutely love about Rebekah is her sense of humor. On the pages where 2 colors were being addressed, Rebekah purposefully switched the colors, and wouldn't stop sticking the book in my face until I laughed at it and told her how silly she was for switching the colors. I think I managed to convince her to do it "right" on ONE page like that. That's okay though, because it's clear she understands the concept AND she's still asserting her independence and that's certainly not something I want to squash!

The progression of skills was really great, and I loved that it had a place for Bekah to trace the letters. I showed her how and she took to it very well! I was surprised and pleased - it means I can work more on letters with her!

Way better than before, isn't it?! :)

That last picture is from the "counting" workbook. I'm not super worried about her ability to write, but I know that giving her opportunities to try will only be beneficial. We're working on recognizing the numbers 1-10, so I decided to make flash cards for her. One side has the number, and the other has that number of little apples, so if she doesn't have the number memorized we flip the card over and count the apples to help identify the number. While I was at it I made a card of capital letters and lower case. I might have her match upper and lower case as well as have her identify different letters. Sometimes she watches a few Leap Frog movies that go over letters (upper and lower case) and a few of them go over their sounds, too, so there are endless possibilities in the future of those cards! Depending on how well they work for her, I might have them laminated. I think I'm going to buy a box to start filing away things like these to use with my other kids. :)

I love Rebekah so much. As much as this post is about how much SHE is learning right now, you can imagine that I'm learning a lot too. With academics going smoothly right now, Rebekah is certainly challenging me emotionally right now. My sister, Amy, seems to have fabulous timing when it comes to posting things on Facebook, and this one actually came to my mind today:

http://abundantlifechildren.com/2012/04/18/honoring-the-emotional-child/

See, lately Rebekah has been having meltdowns like Cuh-RAZY. ANY tiny disappointment is the end of the world for her and she bursts into tears and yells and often collapses into a heap onto the floor. Other times she'll be literally hopping mad (and still have tears and screaming). Depending on the time of day, my personal mood, and the importance (or lack thereof) of the event upsetting her, I might just giver her what she wants, try to bribe her with something else or flick her mouth (for yelling at me) and send her to her room. With the room thing, sometimes she falls asleep (we're in the middle of napping/not napping) or scream for a while before quieting down - at which point I go talk to her - or sometimes she starts playing with her toys and gets distracted.

So at lunch today, I only had the heels of bread left with which to make a sandwich. Rebekah did NOT like that and started yelling at me about it, so I flicked her in the mouth for yelling, at which point she screamed more, so I turned off her TV show and put her in her bedroom. She yelled and screamed about how I was a bad mommy for at least 30 minutes. Every time I had decided she'd calmed down and I could go in and talk to her, she'd start yelling at me again, so eventually I knocked on the door (she stopped yelling immediately) and asked if I could come in her room. She said yes, and I came in and said hi, and told her I loved her. Then I told her that I could tell she was unhappy about the sandwich I made her, and that I had turned off her show, and I was sorry for making her so sad. Then I explained to her that I was sad that she was yelling at me and telling me I was a bad mommy, and could she please apologize. She did, and gave me a big hug. I told her that I didn't have any more bread for the sandwiches, but if she would eat the one I made -even though it wasn't the best sandwich - I would turn her show back on. It was all very sweet and polite and we haven't had any more issues today. :)

What I need to work on is consistency. I know that sometimes I can't forsee that she'll make a big deal about something (at which point, I might capitulate because I don't feel the fight is worth it) BUT she she throws a tantrum, I have to make sure I don't give in at that point because she needs to know that tantrums are NOT okay, and they don't give you what you want. Putting her in her room until she's ready to talk nicely is working for me, and I need to commit to that, and not try to bribe or distract her.

Now that I put Josiah down for his nap, Rebekah is asking that we do more school work, so I'll be off! But, I'm sure you'd love to see my darling daughter's face an not just her school work:

This is back from February, but I guess I don't have too many great photos of her smiling right now! I need to fix that...

More about why Daryn is Awesome :)

Just wanted to note that Daryn has been doing an awesome job with going to school and work. He hasn't done any in the last 2 weeks, but there are times he also works extra doing the books for a business in town. These last two weeks he's been gone on Saturdays for church activities.

Daryn is 1st Counselor in the Young Men's presidency (for those who aren't Mormon - he's 2nd in charge of the church program for the 12-18 year old boys). Every Tuesday night he spends 1.5 hours at the church working with the boys. Much of the Young Men's program is tied together with Boy Scouts, and so Daryn helps them to earn their merit badges and things. Two Saturdays ago, the General Young Men's President (head of the world wide Young Mens Organization), President Beck came and spoke in Tucson, so Daryn went to that. This last Saturday he volunteered to teach the First Aide section for Eleven-year-old Scouts up on Mt. Lemmon. It was a day long activity where the boys focused on advancing their ranks up to (I think) 1st Class.

I am SO proud of all the work that Daryn does for us, and for other people. He is constantly giving service, and I love that my husband is such a great example for my children to see.

(Even if it does mean he's not at home as much as I'd like!)

Schedules

Right now, schedules are a little crazy at our house - mostly for Daryn, but it has its impact on me as well. Remember, I'm a math major and have a bit of an obsession for explaining things so this will probably be boring for most of you, but it has a huge impact on my life right now, so it's going into this 'journal' of sorts! :P

Daryn is working on finishing some classes for school. There's one class in particular that was giving him a lot of trouble as an online class (online classes are so difficult sometimes!) so after MUCH deliberation we decided that he needed to take the class in person. Well, the catch is that they (NAU distance) only offer this class in person in Phoenix!

This made it a little difficult.

First, the class was offered only on Wednesdays - at noon or 7pm. Daryn has a full time job, and to work around his schedule he would have had to drive straight to Phoenix after work on Wednesdays (praying for light/no traffic the whole way) and then drive home at night getting very little sleep before going to work the next morning. No good!

So he sent in a request to have a schedule change. This was the tricky part, because even though there are some co-workers of Daryn's who work on a 4-10's schedule, one of the bosses didn't like it and is trying to get everyone on a 5 day work week. Daryn went in and requested 4-10's, with Wednesday off, so that he could take this class. Fortunately, Wednesday is the day with the lightest workload, and Daryn's boss is quite impressed with his work, so they approved the request. :)

Daryn's schedule gets a little complicated because his company serves a lot of people outside of Arizona. Because of this, work times change with Daylight Savings. During the spring and summer, his shift starts at 6am, and in the fall and winter his shift starts at 7am. So his possible hours of being gone from home (including a 30-40 minute commute both ways) looks something like this:

Spring/Summer 8 hour shift: 5:30 am to 3:00 pm
Fall/Winter 8 hour shift: 6:30 am to 4:00 pm

Nice, right? Yes. I loved those shifts! The kids don't get up until around 7, so I don't even feel like Daryn's gone for 8 hours a day! The down side is with the early start time, he has to go to sleep relatively early, but we've managed to figure out a good bedtime routine for Rebekah and if we remember to start that routine on time, Daryn can go to bed right after that and then I stay up with Josiah until he's ready for bed.

But, then we changed to 10 hour shifts.

The 10 hour shift is something Daryn LOVES. He feels more productive with a 3rd day off every week. He had this when we were first married, and I loved it too. I might like it now if we actually got that 3rd day off together, but I don't know if we'll actually see that happen. Right now, Daryn's schedule looks like this:

Spring/Summer 10 hour shift: 5:30am to 5:00pm on M, T, R, F
Wednesdays: 10am to 10pm - Phoenix (including travel time)

Seeing as how Daryn tries to be in bed by 9pm the nights before work, and leaves before I get up in the morning, I see him for maybe 4 hours a day, on Mondays and Thursdays. Wednesdays I see him for maybe 2-3 hours in the morning, and 5 minutes at night as he comes home and goes straight to bed. Tuesdays aren't terrible; we usually stay up late after he gets home from working with the Young Men at church, so there's probably 5 or 6 hours of time together, depending on how late we're willing to stay up. Friday is the best night, unless I have Pack Meeting for Cub Scouts - which happens once a month. Sooooo.... I just don't see enough of my husband during the week! I'm sure there are others of you who feel my pain, and maybe I see mine more than some of you see yours, but this is not a lot of face time for me, seeing as how for a year he was home ALL the time! Add that to the fact that this job started up right when Josiah was born. I was barely getting a handle on taking care of one kid, now I have 2 AND I've taken over all the duties of being at home. It's been a big adjustment.

With Daryn driving to Phoenix every Wednesday, I've tried to join him now and again so as to visit my friends and not spend too much gas on drives to Phoenix on the weekends. That hasn't worked out very well, because certain events on  the weekends, and times where I or the children were sick. I had hoped to see a lot more of my friends. (Sorry ladies! :( )

And now we're suddenly down to the wire! Daryn is 2 weeks away from taking his final for this class, and he's going into it with a very good grade. I'm glad we decided to go this route, even though it's been difficult on my nerves! (Not just from being away from him too long, but also worrying any time it takes him super long to get home - hearing about wrecks on the freeway drive me crazy!)

I'm looking forward to seeing this time end. Daryn says his boss will put him back on 8 hour shifts after the class is over. I'm hoping for that to take a little bit of time, to see if 4-10s is something we'd like to have again in the future. Whatever happens, I'll be happy to increase the amount of time my hubby gets to be home!

Interesting

Interesting how I've completely changed what I do every day and still can't manage to update this. The frustrating thing is that I'm horrible at keeping a real journal, too. I'm hoping to fix this and post on here more. I think the first thing I have to do is accept that I shouldn't try to "catch up" because it's been nearly a year and a half since I've told you what I've been up to, and nearly a year since my last attempt to catch you up!

So - I worked the rest of my year as a teacher. There are so many things I would want to say about that, and I wish I'd kept better records while I was teaching, but some of it would never have been public anyway and the rest of it, well, I talked to people in person and on FB, so you probably heard about it a little bit. If not, feel free to ask me sometime about my stories! I really enjoyed teaching my students. I loved the math. But, it was very very difficult and ended with me having my son, Josiah James Wright, 2 weeks before the school year ended. I learned a whole lot of 'stuff' and it was quite eye opening. My sister, Amy, and her husband, Sean, were a huge support for me, since he is a teacher and Amy homeschools. They had a lot of pointers for me.

Daryn started his job working as a contractor for CSC the day after Josiah was born. (Yes, that was super hard!) He'd been a contractor before but had left to work on school. He's still working on school, but things are working out better now. Just a few months into this contract, CSC hired him on full time (he was full time before, but didn't get employee benefits - like PTO). He's been impressing his boss right and left and we're currently hoping for a raise after yearly reviews are finished.

Rebekah is flourishing! Looking back at what I wrote in October '10, I see that I said I LOVED how she talks all the time. Ha! I want to say I still love it, but it does make things difficult sometimes. She's adorable and is constantly amazing me. I'm pretty sure I keep a decent record on FB of all the funny things she's said, and I actually spent hours one day combing through FB to collect all my old day-to-day comments, thinking it would be a great way to make a bit of a makeshift journal. Not sure if that's gonna work out for me... I actually did something similar back in High school with old IM transcripts. I have hundreds of them saved and think of it as my journal - though I know it's much easier to read a journal than those transcripts! Hence my efforts to get back into putting up posts!

So, Rebekah welcomed Josiah rather excitedly. There have only been a few small occasions that she expressed unhappiness with having a brother, but not much. I was intrigued that it took her a couple days to WANT to hold him, but after that she was VERY lovey with him - and even climbed into his crib to read him stories once or twice. :)

Josiah is amazing. He's smart and has a sense of humor and he's only 11 months old! He was very clingy when he was young, and actually still has some trouble sleeping without me, but I'm a rather attached parent so I brought that on myself. I know everyone says that CIO is inevitable, but I didn't really do it with Bekah and I won't with Josiah, either. Josiah's been learning to walk this last month and has started to initiate walking more by himself now. He loves to have a little walker toy, and will push a chair around the kitchen. The only problem is that he will get VERY angry when he can't push an object the way he wants to! He's been crawling basically since he was 5 months old (scooting then, but army crawling for sure by 6 months). His first teeth didn't come in until he was about 8 months old - which was a big change for me since Rebekah got her first at 4 months and had a full mouth at 11 months. Josiah is only just now getting his 3rd tooth! That makes feeding interesting, but after getting very frustrated I've taken some advice from other moms and relaxed a little and let him explore food options of what we have at the dinner table. Most of it can be cut up into a manageable size for him - I'm impressed at how well baby gums really can break things up!

With Daryn working and me staying at home life has improved greatly. The end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 were very difficult for us as a family, and how well things have been this last year have really been a testament to us that this is how we should conduct our lives. When I decided not to continue my teaching position, Daryn had not yet secured his job with CSC, but we did it because we knew it was the right thing to do. It was the day after my "please let me work another year" letter to the district was due (that I did not hand in) that Daryn got the call saying he was being offered a job. Blessings! It was pretty awesome that it came that quickly, too!

Now that I'm home, I'm learning a lot about being a SAHM! I did a semester of Joy School with Rebekah and 2 of her friends. It went okay, and Rebekah loved it, but 3 kids wasn't really enough and there weren't others in the area who wanted to participate. My friend, Carrie (Cairn's mom), was doing preschool on the other side of town - a co-op like Joy School - but 1) I didn't have a car for some of that time (fall of 2011) and 2) I was TOTALLY sick of lesson planning and was never the crafty type to do little kids activities anyway. I'm thoroughly impressed with what Carrie has done with Cairn at this preschool co-op, and a little sad I didn't participate, but Carrie is always one of those moms I'm thoroughly impressed by. I just have to be grateful she's my friend and if I want to do things like her get off my lazy butt and do them!

As for Preschool for Rebekah, we have some work books now, and we're thinking about enrolling her in a preschool. It looks to be more than we're willing to pay, though, so I will try to do better at sitting down with her and working in our little work books. I'm also thinking about enrolling her in dance or gymnastics or something. There's no "thinking about" putting her in soccer - that's pretty much a done deal. :)

I'm not currently playing soccer. I picked it back up for a season or two after Josiah was born, but then my sister and her husband stopped playing, and while I love soccer, it's not as fun without family there. Plus, the games were pretty far. Kati recommended I try to find something else to help me keep in shape if I wasn't going to play anymore, so I invited my friends Joyce and Michelle (same friends I did Joy School with) to go on walks with me M-F mornings. That has been great! We don't manage to go out every day, and sometimes we go a week without going out, but I've enjoyed the exercise, the increased social interaction, and we've been going places instead of just around the neighborhood, so I don't feel terribly confined to my home. We walk anywhere between 1 and 3 miles a day, with the 3 milers being round trips to the Library or the mall. I also participate in a play group sometimes with moms from my old ward/stake. It's nice to have options.

The most difficult part of staying home has been taking over the meal planning and making. I kind of hate it. Daryn likes to cook, and I don't. I mildly enjoy baking, but that's about it. BUT, we're doing our best to be responsible and get out of debt etc and that requires a careful budget. The easiest way to cut back our expenditures was to stop eating out, so we're doing our best to limit that. Daryn still cooks on the weekends, and sometimes during the week, but I am slowly taking over more nights as the weeks progress. Yes, I know it's been nearly a year, but just pretend this is my first year being the cook (it is) and think about how I can make FANTASTIC hamburger helper, but I am instead  trying to make real meals! The last time I was in charge of cooking, we didn't have children, AND we basically had different kinds of hamburger helper, suddenly salads, or Daryn would cook b/c we were inviting friends over and he loves to cook for company. So now, here we are 5 years later and I'm trying to learn how to cook while caring for my 2 children. I actually called my mom a few months ago to ask how to boil eggs. She told me I was pathetic - and I am! But I'm getting better. One day I'll even take charge of ALL the cooking. :) And by then hopefully it will be great. :)

So, how about all of you? How are things going? What's the challenge you are focused on right now? How are you currently working to improve yourself?