For almost a month now Scarlett and Leon have been going to public school. I love homeschooling and eventually plan to homschool them again. But right now I just don't feel like I have enough time to teach them all. This whole thing kind of started because Scarlett got behind in reading. I wanted her to get extra help from school for just reading, but the school was not willing to let her (even though it is in the DODEA policy that they will). I decided to go ahead and enroll her so she can get caught up in reading. I also enrolled Leon for a couple of reasons, I didn't want to send Scarlett alone, Leon is the only one who has never been to public school, and because it is more time consuming for me to teach the children who cannot read well.
Leon is in first grade and is loving it. I had a parent teacher conference with his teacher and wasn't surprised one bit. He is right on track and doing great and he has even made friends. Leon was great at homeschool and in general he is pretty easy to parent. I knew school would be a breeze for him.
Scarlett is having a little bit of a harder time. But she is also doing just as I expected. She struggled with school at home and she struggles with it at school. She just really doesn't like reading...yet (I'm determined to change that). She is also very tired all the time. We have to leave for the bus at 6:45. That is super early for us. Scarlett used to not wake up until 7:15. It is honestly hard to send her to school everyday and then she comes home really tired and grumpy and I'm supposed to get her to do homework.
Scarlett does like her teacher though and I know that she does have fun at school. Sometimes she says that it is terrible, but I think that she enjoys her school day for about 75% of the time. It is just easy to fixate on the hard times. Here she is after school showing me the spoon and ketchup she scored from the cafeteria.
We took a couple selfies waiting for the bus on Halloween.
The bus is the worst part about it. School doesn't start until 8am but they get on the bus at 6:45. It is normally a 20 minute drive to their school, but morning traffic adds to that. Then after the kids arrive at school they sit on the bus for over 30 minutes! It is horrible. Basically they use one bus for all the kids in our area. So they ride with high school and middle school kids who's school starts 30 minutes earlier. Then after dropping the older kids off the elementary kids just sit on the bus. I think it is crazy that that is allowed. Another major issue I have with the school is that there is only one recess! The elementary school is gigantic. It has about 1,200 students. I think there are 10 first grade classes this year.
Both kids got to go on a field trip Mikan picking. They really enjoyed it.
All last week the four older kids went to Missoula Children's Theatre and put on a play. They auditioned on Monday and went to practices all week then had two performances on Saturday. The audition on Monday was pretty scary for the kids. They didn't need to have anything prepared ahead of time, but the directors would ask them so say specific lines and do a couple different things. I was really proud of my kids for just doing that. It was hard for some of them to say lines in front of people. I heard from others that in the past lots of kids get cut, but thankfully this year they had room for everyone who tried out. I hate the idea of kids getting cut from activities they want to do.
Scarlett was a Winter Wind Worker. Penelope was a Blizzard Bringer. Tucker was a Grinder, and Leon was the cutest dust bunny ever.
Practices were at different times for different kids so it was a lot of back and forth to and from base for me. Leon also had the least practices so we got some time together without the older kids. I had most mornings all week with just Beatrix and Calista. Having only two kids at home was soooo easy. I got a ton done!
Another cool thing about they play was that everyone had speaking parts. My kids each had three lines and they were nervous. But they didn't forget them and I could even hear them! Great job guys.
I told myself I'm going to get all the kids yearly videos done this summer (except Penelope who's birthday is in September) so here you go. One down four to go.
Where better to take pictures of a six-year-old boy then his neighborhood park? We snuck out Saturday morning while everyone else was doing chores to take pictures. Leon was pretty easy to get to do a natural smile. I just had to pretend to tickle him or tell him not to smile and it worked every time. He is really such a happy little guy.
We made sure to do lots of playing pictures between posing pictures. They might be my favorites because they show how Leon actually is. He never just stands still and smiles.
He is always playing. Either by himself or with one of his siblings. Usually Tucker. They wrestle around quite a bit. But he isn't against playing with one of the girls either. Leon can even be pretty helpful with Calista.
True to most six-year-olds Leon can get pretty upset over what seems like small things. I think he has little brother syndrome because he is always so loud. He has to be loud to insist he gets a turn or his fare share. I feel like I'm always asking him to calm down or quiet down.
I made Leon wear jeans for these pictures. He usually always wears sweats and a t-shirt with tennis shoes. It is almost like these shoes go by the front door instead of by the other shoes because he cannot remember to put them away, and he is always taking them off and on to run outside.
Leon is very sweet and likes to give me lots of hugs. Like lots and lots of hugs. Ok, probably just a couple a day, but they seem to come out of nowhere and sometimes I have to resist pushing him off of me and asking what he is doing. I have to slow down and remind myself that he is just trying to give me a hug and he is not trying to make me spill the food I'm making for dinner.
These we Leon's favorite pictures. He just played on the bar for a little bit while I took photos.
It is cherry blossom season here in Japan meaning his birthday pictures will probably always be near the pretty sakura trees.
I caught up on all the kids yearly videos. Wahoo!! Here is Leon's 4-year-old video. I now have a couple months before I need to do his five-year-old video.
It was funny because about a month back he was upset and telling me that his tooth hurt. At first I was like, "wait, we just went to the dentist and you don't have any cavities." My next thought was that he didn't hit his mouth on anything and so his tooth shouldn't be hurting. Then I realized that he must have bumped it while eating and that he must have a wiggly tooth. I tried to tell him that it was just a tooth getting ready to fall out, but it being his first one he wasn't so sure. After a while of it getting wigglier and wigglier he was ready for it to come out.
I don't know exactly how it happened but a couple hours after the picture was taken the kids were at the park and the tooth came out. They rushed into the house so excited while Leon held his tooth up in the air and loudly let me know that his tooth fell out. They were all so happy. I love that all the kids were excited for Leon to loose his first tooth.
Leon had his first modeling job back in March, but I wanted to wait until the pictures were out for me to post about it. He was pretty nervous for the whole thing.
But all the people were so nice and helpful for him. They tried really hard to make him comfortable. This was the most organized shoot I've ever been to. He modeled more clothes in less time than any of our other shoots.
Go here for the website and scroll through the pages to see Leon. He has quite a few more pictures than I am posting, these are just some of my favorites.
I love these!
Oh man, he is so cute!
This took place right in Harajuku so we stopped for a crem brûlée crepe afterwards. I think the top of it was pretty yummy, that was the part that was burned. The rest was just ok.
Tucker fell asleep on the train ride back.
After it was over, I talked to Leon about what he thought about the whole thing. He said it was ok and doesn't really want to do it again. Even when the pictures came out online he wasn't very thrilled about it. I don't think I'm going to sign him up for more jobs unless they are with his siblings or something else fun like that. He had the experience and that seemed to be enough for him.
After two months of twice a week practices and weekly games the baseball season is winding down for these boys. Coming off of basketball I wasn't sure how this was going to go but I'm really glad we did it. Having two children in sports is much more manageable then four. They had back to back practices so that really cut down on the number of times we had to drive back and forth. Penelope and Scarlett even made friends with other girls who had a brother on Tucker's team. In fact I think they might have enjoyed playing with their friends during baseball equally as much as the boys liked playing. Not once did they regret not signing up for baseball.
I enjoyed the weather and sitting an chatting with the other mom at Tucker's practice.
Leon did awesome at his games, I'm so glad I took this video of his very first time up to bat.
He has came a long way since then. He now touches all the bases and doesn't pass his own teammates. But he does run home as much as he can even though they are really only supposed to run one base.
Tucker's games were so different than Leon's. An hour and a half felt like forever sometimes. The pitchers in general had a hard time getting the ball over the plate, so it was just like watching walk after walk after walk. There was a game where Tucker didn't get the ball once, and he was walked both times he got up to bat, and everyone after him walked as well.
Baseball is just a lot of pressure. It seems like the game just rotates who is under pressure the whole time. Where as other sports seem more like a group effort.
Tucker really wanted to pitch but the coaches didn't choose him to do that this season. I think in the end he was ok with that. On this last game he got to play first base, which he was really excited about. Even when playing first he only got the ball once. I think there was only 2 or three hits from each team the whole game.
Even though sometimes I was bored I really could see the value that this game was bringing to Tucker. Their team lost most games, and not all the boys took it well. Tucker also struck out one time and during that same game he missed a big ball that gave the other team a home run. It was a rough game for him. I was worried about him emotionally, but he handled it ok. He didn't cry or get angry like he could have but I know he was feeling bad. It is important for the boys to learn how to deal when they make mistakes, when they lose, or when their teammates make mistakes while the stakes are so low like this.
During this last game Tucker was the very last batter and the bases were loaded. I could tell he was nervous but excited. We really encouraged him to swing at anything he thought he might be able to hit and it worked. He got a nice hit. In fact he made it all the way to third, and brought in three RBI's. Their team won! Wahoo, he was excited.
