Maddy Turns 4!

I hate almost two months have past since Maddy's 4th birthday party, and I am just now getting this up. This year we had Maddy's party on Sunday September 22. We rented our church's indoor playground called Playside from 2-4. Her theme this year was Dora. I knew I would not be able to decorate at her party like I would want to...actually how SHE would want me to lol, so I put up some decorations at home while she slept. I had to juggle a few close calls to her waking up, but I managed to get them hung all around her room. 

 I couldn't capture her room the way it looked in person, but you can get the idea with these pictures. She was so surprised when she woke up. We still have these hanging up today. We will probably leave them up for a really long time :)

Since we were going to be doing a lot of playing and running around I didn't want to get her a dress or an outfit that was dressier, so I ordered her shirt from Embroidered Shirts by Monica. I ordered it very early on September 11 and went with standard shipping. My thought process was when you order it asks you when you need it by and I said I needed it by Saturday September 21. I felt that was plenty of time to get the shirt done and shipped. For a $10 fee you can rush your order and it will be done within 24 hours. I did not want to pay the fee and again felt like it fell within her 7-10 days turnaround time. After ordering I began to check back with a shipping update. The week it shipped it told me it would not be here until Monday September 23. I was SO upset and mad that Maddy would not have her special shirt in time for her party. Yes, she would have it on her birthday, but it just wasn't what I wanted for her lol. After a day of being upset I moved past it and began frantically searching for a Dora outfit. Dora clothes are not as common as they used to be years ago. We checked Kohls and Target and they had nothing. I browsed around online and found Wal-Mart carried some. The day before her party we went and sure enough they did. Once we got home something told me to check the mail and to my wonderful suprise...her shirt had arrived. I was BEYOND ecstatic to see that package lol. I will probably use Embroidered Shirts by Monica for all my custom shirts. Her prices were lower than other stores/boutiques and the fact that she tries to get your package to you when you need it without having to pay a fee, unless you need it right away. Just to clarify I am not being paid to write this, just sharing my personal experience :)

 This is the outfit we found at Wal-Mart...it was just not what I wanted her to wear for her party

This is the shirt we ordered. I was very pleased with it. The day of her party I believe it was supposed to be in the low 70's weather wise. I figured she would get hot in pants, so I went ahead and put her in shorts.

We had church the morning of her party. After church her Pops took her along with my nieces back to his house to feed them and let them play while me and her Nana got the place set up. Maddy wanted cupcakes for her party, but I also wanted a cake so I asked my mom if she would do both. For the cupcakes I just ordered ring toppers of Dora. They weren't exactly what I wanted, but it was all I could find. I bought a cupcake stand to put the cupcakes in.

 Without realizing what she did, my mom chose pink and brown for the colors of the cupcakes...those were Maddy's nursery colors :)

 She was a bit shy as everybody sang happy birthday to her...

 I have no idea what I was doing here, but it definitely looks like I was having fun...and maybe chasing somebody lol

We let Maddy open her presents first, then sang happy birthday, then let the kids run wild while everybody else ate. It was a lot of fun and Maddy seemed to really enjoy herself. After we left she asked me how many more days until her next birthday. Looks like she is mommy's girl and loves to celebrate her birthday :)

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 :)