The First Day of a New Beginning

The day has finally come...the day I've been waiting for since July. Today marks our first day of homeschool :) The worries I had last week were definitely from the devil! Today has been so wonderful for both me and Maddy! It is 2:25 p.m. right now and we still have a good bit of school left to go, but that's how it will be. She is napping...or, supposed to be napping right now. She is still awake, but hopefully she will fall asleep soon. This morning I did not make my 4 a.m. wake up time. I forgot that my clocks are still on the old time, so when I set my alarm for 4 I really set it for 3 am. When I realized it was really 3 am I fell asleep to only wake back up at 5:22 am. I am thankful I started getting up for work early last week because this week I was used to it. I have been a little anxious over how today was going to go, so that helped get me up as well. Maddy slept until 8:00 a.m. She started to ask if she could stay home, but that question turned into a statement that said, "I get to stay home today!" We did our usual morning routine, except I worked while she got herself dressed. We had tv time for about an hour and a half. After tv time I turned on my Pandora Christmas station and played music while she played. I had a few centers set out, but it was really just putting a few toys in spaces. She's been worried about not having centers, so I will be working hot and heavy on creating centers here at home. I need to get some trays and items for a sensory station and a water station and then some more blocks and puzzles. I also realized today that I had no incentives for when she does a great job. At school she got stickers for listening. She has not pitched one fit today and without me telling her she knew she had to clean up her "center" just like she did at school. I went into my scrapbooking box and found a sticker for her. She was pretty excited to get that sticker.

Here is her city she made. She was so proud of it. 

I do plan to make a quick wal-mart run to pick up some things we need right now..such as paint and stickers. At 10:30 I had a meeting and whenever I have a meeting I send her to her room with her computer and games...that sounds bad, but it's not a punishment by any means. She knew after my meeting was over we would be going outside to play. My meeting was pretty quick. I clocked out for lunch and then I fixed her hair and off we went!

I can already tell I will get SO much more time with her. I think she was in disbelief that mommy was working but could still go outside and play with her. She only wanted to swing while we were outside and then after about 30 minutes she wanted to go inside to finish playing.

After playing a few more minutes it was time for lunch and for me to go back to work. We had chicken noodle soup that I made last night. I let her watch a little more tv before turning it back off. I reminded her she had play dough that she hadn't played with. That sparked her interest.

She kept saying she was going to make a butterfly, but she also had gum in her mouth that she kept focusing on on top of the fact that she was getting sleepy. She did real good with gum. I feel more comfortable letting her have it now because she just sat there and chewed up a storm on it. I had to cut her play-dough time short because we were cutting into our "afternoon meeting" time. For our afternoon meeting we talked about what day it was, she put up the number for today, and we talked about what the weather was like today. After doing the calandar stuff I introduced our theme of the week...Thanksgiving and Turkeys and the letter Tt. I read her a book called "What is Thanksgiving?" It talks about how Thanksgiving is a day that we give thanks to God for His love. She had a hard time paying attention because she was so tired, so I may need to just move all learning until after nap time. I will be done with work at 4:19 p.m. today, and that's working 2 hours OT. We have a total of 4 hours OT to work for the week so I will work another 2 hours over tomorrow to be done with it, then I will be done with work around 2 p.m. unless I can get up at 4.

This is the book we read, but the picture cut off the What is part. We have the same kind of book for Christmas and Easter. 

Maddy ended up taking a pretty long nap. I ended up waking her up at 5:10 p.m. because I needed to get some art supplies at the store. She was in a great mood when she woke up. We got home around 7 p.m. from the store and we read the "What is Thanksgiving" book again and then discussed how Thanksgiving and turkey start with the letter Tt. We are going to make an alphabet book by the time we are done, so we worked on our Tt page. I found the template at ABCjesuslovesme.com. Ideally we would have decorated it with things that start with Tt, but I am already going way over budget just trying to get started so we used some of our new supplies. She really enjoyed this activity. I didn't know how much fun it would be for her even though she did this at daycare, but she really enjoyed picking out her decorations and gluing them on her Tt. 

She wanted to do more art...I wanted to do more art, but by this time it was close to 8:00 p.m. and I was getting sleepy. I still have to clean :( I decided instead of starting a new art project we would work on writing. It may be a little early to start this for her, but  I figured since she knew how to make straight lines we would work on making Tt. She did VERY well for her first time!

She struggled with the little t, so she only wanted to try it once. She needs bigger lines to work with, but I was still proud of what she could do. She found all the t's on the bottom on her own.

There have been several times throughout the day that she would tell me she loved me on her own and out of nowhere. She used to tell me she loved me, but this was different. She was sincerely happy. At the end of the day she asked if I would teach her some more things when she woke up...melted my heart. I thought the hardest part, aside from teaching her, would be waking up. That is definitely a struggle for me, but today I found the hardest part is wanting to give her a full 8 hours of fun things throughout the day, instead of just a few hours. I want to give her more of me. I want to be able to do several art projects throughout the day. That's the thing with us humans is no matter what we're given we always want more. I can tell you me and Maddy have prayed for a year that God would give us more time together. As we prayed I really had in mind that I would be able to be a full time stay-at-home mom. I know without a shadow of a doubt that God called me to pull Maddy out of daycare and homeschool her. I have been on cloud nine today and have thought all day about this and I really think God needed me to go through everything I have with daycare and me longing for her to be with more, so that when this day came I could fully appreciate it. I also know that God must be up to something good with this homeschool thing for the devil to try to mess with me over it. I can tell that this will not only be a fantastic bonding moment for us, but it will also allow us to really study the bible together as a family and give us prayer time together.

The only thing I have to really figure out now is when to clean. I used to spend my lunch time cleaning up around the house, so it was pretty easy to stay on top of. I now take my lunch time to give Maddy some time outside. I guess I will have to do some before bed and then finish the rest up in the morning. I know I am completely exhausted, but it's something I wouldn't trade for the world!! I hope you all had a great weekend and a great first day back to work :)