Lorelle Family Memories: September 2013

Captain Dommie to the rescue!

Ah, back to school! Or, in our case, back to the kitchen table, and the backyard, and field trips, and sneaking off in the middle of a grammar lesson to Dairy Queen (and then quite possibly to a toy store if Mommy is really really is sick of teaching about possessive nouns).

Somebody put me on this thing!

Oil-pasteling a tree at the park.

We started last Monday with a few tweaks to our schedule from last year. The biggest one is the addition of "project time" to our daily curriculum. This is when the kids can pursue their own interests in their own fashions. Catherine is currently fascinated by horses, so we've had lots of horse drawings and paintings -- in oil pastels, chalk pastels, acrylics, markers, and crayons -- coming out of her project time. Vincent uses a lot of his project time as play time; he and Dominic dress up as spies, harness themselves together with dog leashes to climb Mt. Everest, or rush around the house putting out fires with full sound effects ("FIREMAN DOMMIE, THERE'S A FIRE OVER HERE! BRING THE FIRETRUCK! NEE-NEH, NEE-NAH!"). The other day I told Dommie to please stop screeching, and he smiled and said, "Okay, Mommy. I will stop screeching. ROAR!"

That's not to say that they don't spend plenty of time doing academic subjects, because they do. But we build in plenty of time for play, and I've promised them one field trip per week this year. Last week's trip was Marbles, the children's museum in Raleigh, and based on the pictures I dare say they had a pretty good time.

Oh, and Dommie got a Mohawk. For about 2 minutes, until we all stopped laughing and cut it off. Looked good!