Cleaning Out the Old Brain

I used to be a really good journal keeper. For most of high school and in college up until I got married, I wrote in a journal pretty much every single day. For some reason, after I got married it just got harder and harder to find the time to do it. But I missed it terribly. I love to write. I feel like it's a way that I can clean out my brain from all the thoughts that are constantly swimming around in there. For me, writing is a stress relief. So, when we lived in Texas, and I randomly stumbled upon the blogging world, I was all for it. And I'll say that I've been fairly decent at it since. Blogging is good for a lot of reasons, it's a great way to keep in touch with family that is far away (as all of our family was when we lived in Texas), it's an even better way to do your family history as you go, instead of having to go back and do it, AND it gave me back my writing outlet.

For anyone that reads this, you will no doubt notice that I spend quite a bit of time writing about my kids. But, they pretty much consume my whole life right now, so I think its reasonable that I spend so much time writing about them. Besides, I want to remember them how they are now forever. Because they won't stay small very long.

I also spend a good deal of time writing about the things we do as a family. That's because I love my family. I think family is the #1 important thing in our lives. And I want our blog books to reflect that, so that even when I'm not around to give it personally, my kids and future grand kids and on down will know without a doubt that I had a testimony of the family unit.

I've been trying to be better about including my thoughts about different aspects of the gospel in my blog posts as well. Family Home Evening is one of the areas I've been trying to hit hard. It's still a work in progress.

I also try to put as much of my own personality into the posts as possible. I could be better at this. I think my voice comes through pretty strongly, but I could do a lot better at expressing my thoughts, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, bad days, etc. But I get a little apprehensive about that sometimes because I realize other people read this, and I have a hard time giving pieces of myself away so easily. I am also not an argumentative person, so I have a hard time writing anything that I think might offend anyone, even if it is what I think.

If you can't tell, today is a "cleaning out my brain" post. I have no idea what will come out. And whatever it is, I doubt it'll be organized.

I want to be working on the baby's quilt right now. But in order to do that, I have to clean the kitchen, because I sew at the kitchen table, and I don't have the energy to clean the kitchen right now. I did the dishes and wiped off the counters while the boys ate lunch, so it's not a disaster or anything, but in order for me to be in there sewing I'd at least have to sweep the floor and pick up the toys, and probably put away all the cluttery junk off of our washer/dryer so I could set up the ironing board on top. I'd have to get down on my hands and knees and crawl under the kitchen table to plug the sewing machine in, and if I got that close to the floor I'd have to either mop it immediately or be super disgusted with myself. Never mind that it already has been mopped once this week. My kids have been eating in there. Sometimes I wonder if getting a dog would solve this problem, of the floor being a constant food magnet I mean. Anyways, that's why I'm not sewing today. My boys are asleep and I am sitting here listening to the rhythmic swish of the dish washer and enjoying the peace and quiet.

I've been thinking a lot about preschool lately. As many of you know, the plan is to home school our kids. We do a lot of educational activities as it is, but in the fall after Lincoln turns 3 I'd like to do something slightly more structured and call it preschool. He's only 3 so it's not going to be anything major, and definitely not an all day endeavor, but I would like to do something. I also realize that I'm about to have a baby, and that my life after the first week of August is going to get hectic and crazy trying to have any kind of a schedule. So I'm trying to approach this preschool idea very realistically.

Most school years start at the end of August. I don't think that's gonna happen around here this year. So I was thinking about officially starting at the beginning of October. That gives me a couple months to get that hang of things with the baby, and maybe she'll be on a nap schedule by then, who knows. The things I want to really focus on are the letters of the alphabet upper and lower case, the sounds they make, some very basic beginning handwriting, and a little bit of math and science and arts/crafts. My thoughts about it so far have been to take an entire week and focus on, for example, letter A. I like the letter days we've been doing already, but instead of cramming a whole bunch of things into one day to introduce the letter, I think I want to spread it out a little bit over a week...the goal this time being repetition.

I'm still debating the idea of having a specific theme for each week, like A is for alligator, and having all our activities revolve around alligators some how, of if I just want to do whatever A words come to mind for different activities, like maybe learning about alligators for science, but sorting red and green apples for math, or something. I haven't quite decided yet, maybe we'll do a little of both. 

Ideally I'd like to spend an hour each weekday devoted to preschool. Give or take some depending on Linc's attention span and our schedule. But in my mind I picture it going something like this: First we'll have an upper and lower case A displayed somewhere. So very first thing each school session we'll point out the two A's and talk about what they are and the sound they make. Then we'll read some kind of short book together that is in someway related to the letter A. And Linc will sit by me and help me pick out all the A's on the page and we can talk about any cool vocab words we see, etc. Then we'll do "handwriting" which at this stage is going to be a very loose term. Handwriting might be something like making the shapes of the letters out of play dough, or tracing them in flour with our fingers, or feeling the texture of some sandpaper cut out in a letter A shape. Something like that. I don't think we'll focus too much on Linc being able to actually write the letters with a pencil until he's a little older and has more developed fine motor skills. Anyways, those are the things I want to do with him every day. Then for math, science, and arts/crafts we'll rotate.

Math, science, arts/crafts are fun at this stage because they can be anything. For math we can count things, sort things, match things together, use the different shapes to make something, and so on. For science we can learn about an animal or plant, go on a nature walk, cook, play with magnets, anything with water, etc. As long as we are exploring the world around us we can call it science. Arts/crafts are very easy and diverse as well.

So that's how the plan is going so far in my head. Spend an hour each day focusing on upper/lower case letters and the sounds they make, and then using that letter to explore different areas such as math, science, and arts/crafts. Feel free to give me feedback on this, especially you Lisa (my homeschooling mentor) if you read this. But I would appreciate any feedback anyone has.

It feels good to have all those ideas out of my head. :) On to the next thing, I guess. I'm tired of eating. More specifically, I'm tired of thinking of things to eat. At this point in pregnancy I can't eat a lot at one time, so I find that instead I'm just constantly snacking, and I'm tired of trying to come up with something that #1 sounds good and #2 is not just the easiest junk food to pull out of the cupboard. I've been trying to eat healthier this pregnancy, in the hopes that my baby will not be bigger than Ivan was (8 pounds 3 ounces), because I'm convinced that the bigger they are the more painful they are to get out. And if eating healthy things will make her healthy but not fat, than that's what I want to do. But I am getting tired of making food choices.

Speaking of the baby...I think we have the name issue resolved, which is a huge relief. One night while Aaron and I were discussing it I said, "Well, we could get out the baby name books and start looking again." And Aaron replied, "But I like Adelia. Don't you like Adelia?" I could have kissed him! (Ok, so I might have.) I love the name Adelia, and I didn't want to change it. But I wasn't certain how Aaron felt about the name, and if he didn't like it then I'd rather find out now than after delivery. So, we're agreed on Adelia. I couldn't be happier with it. I explained again to Aaron that I really wanted to name the baby's middle name after my grandma, but that we didn't necessarily have to use the exact name Maxine. It's the woman that I love, not so much her name. So we spent the next little while searching on the Internet for alternative forms of Maxine and nicknames for Maxine. We did not find any we liked. So I suggested again that we just create our own form of Maxine by taking out the xin and having the name be Mae. We would all know that Mae stood for my grandma. We were both leaning towards that, and decided to look up the name Mae on nameberry.com to see what it meant. Here's what we found:

Sweet old-fashioned name that hasn't been on the national charts in forty years, but is definitely sounding fresh and springlike. One of the prettiest middle name options. May makes it more of a month name, while Mae is more of the antique nickname name.

Perfect isn't it? I think it fits so well with Adelia, since both names were popular around the same time. I really like the descriptive words, sweet, fresh, and springlike. Those are all characteristics I would like our daughter to have...none of the Princess, Diva, Babe, connotations that I hate. I'm also really please that it hasn't been on any of the popular charts in 40 years. That means no one is using it, and that it's unique. :) Anyways, ya. So I think we've solved the debate, Adelia Mae Swan. Plus, it's just cool that she'll have the same initials as her daddy. I'm dorky, I know. I can't wait for her to get here.

Oh, and while we're on the naming subject. There has been a little bit of confusion as to the pronunciation of Adelia, so I'm just going type it out phonetically.  Uh-dale-yuh. Not Uh-deal-yuh. It does not rhyme with Amelia. Dale, rhymes with mail, like farmer in the dale. :) Thanks.

Also, sorry, just one more thought...we have always thought that we'd call her Adi for short. And we still might, but we aren't 100% on that anymore. We are also considering the options of Delia, Deli, and Del as well as Adi. But this decision won't be made until after she's born and we just start calling her whatever we call her for short. :) It's not imperative that the nickname be picked out before hand, we can roll with the flow on that one. Especially since we'll mostly just call her Adelia anyways, and only use the nickname occasionally like how we sometimes call Lincoln, Linc, but still mostly call him Lincoln.

Okay, my brain is feeling much cleaner. Time to go see if I can catch a quick nap while the boys are still sleeping. :)