The Jones Girls

Today Savannah shared her show and tell for the letter “D”.   Today, she brought our dog, Teddy, to school for her letter D. 

I bathed Teddy early in the morning before I took Savannah to school.  Cliff took Teddy to school separately at about 11am.   The kids just loved seeing Teddy.  Savannah was so proud!!

I planned a fun activity for the moms and kids with my La Habra Moms Club at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.  We had a huge turnout, about 30 kids and 15 moms.

This time it was mom’s turn to have fun – making caramel apples!! The kiddos got to do their all time favorite dip their marshmallows in chocolate.  Rocky Mountain as always, was very gracious to us and offered us a steal of a deal buy 2 caramel apples, get 1 free!!

Every Monday, Savannah has to bring something that starts with the letter they are learning about that particular week, for show and tell.  She has to give the class some clues  and they try to guess what she has in brown bag.

Today she brought a bag of baby carrots and after they guessed what she had, all the kids enjoyed eating the carrots she brought.

They all liked Savannah’s show and tell today!!

Today we enrolled all 4 girls in Ballet classes at Adagio Dance.   Savannah used to have ballet classes here, but when Amanda’s surgeries came up in the past year and a half, and with the current economic crises, we put ballet on hold.

I got a letter from Adagio recently that waived registration fees for all girls and Miss Jennifer, the instructor, gave us an incredible deal to allow all 4 girls to take ballet lessons.   

The reason why I enrolled them in the class is to benefit each of them in the following way:

Miranda: to teach her to follow directions and sharpen her listening skills

Amanda:  to help her with her balancing issues and strengthen her overall core of her body

Maryssa:  to help her with her pigeon-toed-ness and to help her follow directions and sharpen her receptive language

Savannah: to help her with her mild muscle tone and coordination issues

The girls are having a blast and look forward to getting dressed up each week for class.   It is a lot of work for me, but a thousand times worth the effort!!

This is the true joy of having girls…seeing them float and prance like little princesses in their pink tutus and ballet slippers. There is nothing more precious…

I received some awesome coupons from Party City and it prompted me to go online and check out their costumes. I went to their store today.  Boy did they have tons of costumes to choose from. I wound up purchasing some “kits” and I am going to be making their costumes and adding the kits. I had some awesome coupons and wound up saving $30 on the costume kits.

My girls are big time into bugs these days…lady bugs, bees, butterflies, centipedes, worms, ants, etc. They originally all asked to be monkeys and then they changed their minds and asked if they could be bugs for Halloween.

This is what they will be:
Savannah will be the Queen Bee
Amanda will be the Butterfly
Miranda will be the Bumble Bee
Maryssa will be the Lady Bug

The outfits will have leotards, tutus, tights, wings, antennas, boa fur on the cuffs and neckline and a puffy ball on their dressy shoes.   I will be doing some sewing and using my creativity to make their costumes.  I priced the pre-made costumes and they are outrageously priced.  So I am going to hand make mine and I think mine are going to be even cuter and 100% better quality.  

The girls saw their costume kits today which consist of the wings and the antennas.  They loved them and are so excited.

So I am stating to cut the 50% off coupons from Joann’s Fabrics and that will be a huge savings for me to do the costumes.  I can’t wait to get started!!

Savannah made the late bird class – yay!! She goes from 10:10am-1:30pm. This works great for me because I have more time in the morning to get the girls ready for their day plus get a little house cleaning done.

We do lots of flash cards and practice writing her name and other words. She is learning to read site words now. She knows 2 word colors by sight now – RED and GREEN. We are working on upper case and lower case letters and she knows them all by sight and sound. I have flash cards with all of our names on them and she now knows them by sight. I then have her write each of our names down, including her last name too. She is doing very well at this.

She knows all of her numbers up to 30. 1-10 by sight and most of her teens but gets a couple confused and most of her 20’s up to 30.

I ordered some books from Scholastic from her school. They had a packet of 20 books that focus on sight words so I ordered them for Savvy. We do reading every night together. She loves to read together and so do the triplets.

She has a tendency to talk without raising her hand so we are all working on teaching her to learn to raise her hand and wait her turn to speak.

They get one snack at 10:30am and she loves her cheese and crackers and orange juice.

I LOVE her teacher, Miss Tarbell. She is a wonderful Christian and is very patient and kind.

Savannah’s Kindy curriculum is high academic and we get about 1-1.5 hours of homework a night. Reading writing, sorting, grouping, coloring, cutting, pasting, and flash cards every night.

Can you imagine what it is going to be like with the triplets go to Kindy? YIKES!!  I hope they get Miss Tarbell.

Homeschooling Preschool for the triplets is going well.  The tuition was over our heads since Cliff took a 50% pay cut at the beginning of the year. I have a tutor come in for an hour on Mon and Wed. I give her the assignments and she does them along with allowing them to take breaks and play. This gives me an hour to run errands or get caught up on housework. It is only 2 hours a week, but that is all I can afford and it is a good way to begin introducing the triplets to someone else teaching them. If our finances are better in January, I will put the triplets in preschool for 2 mornings a week for 3 hours each day. I am not too worried about preschool because they just turned 3 last month. I am going to make sure they will be in PreK next year 3 days a week for sure.

The triplets know most of their colors. Maryssa knew her ABC’s by sight and sound since she was 18 mos and the other 2 have known for about 6 months. They know most of all of the shapes and know most of the primary colors. They can count to 10.

I am going to start taking all of the girls to the library once a week. The triplets are just about finished tearing up and damaging books and they understand to respect books so I think we are ready for the library. I have a pretty extensive home library since Savannah was in preschool the last 2 years before Kindy. I was able to order her books through Scholastic at Preschool so I have built up quite a library of classics and popular kids books. Over 1/3 of them are damaged from the triplets ruining them in the past couple of years so I will be replacing them this year through Scholastic.

So we are plugging along here.

Maryssa is now going to a speech therapist once a week on Fridays for an hour at Jordon Elementary School.   

It was really stressful trying to get there.   There is no parking as all of the teachers park in the parking lot and leave no room for guests or parents to park.  Really frustrating.   I have to take all3 girls out of the minivan because I can’t leave them in there by themselves as I can’t just drop Maryssa off at the front office.  So we go to the main office and sign in and get a Visitor badge.  Then I walk the triplets across the entire school to Room 9 .  It is a looooong way.  

So I am a nerve racking 5 minutes late.    The teacher tells me I have some paperwork to fill out and take me and the 2 girls outside of the class and fill it out.    Maryssa is in class with another little boy and they both receive speech therapy from the teacher.

So I am outside of the class filling out the paperwork and Miranda and Amanda are running around like little banshee monkeys.   I tell them to be quiet because the classrooms are in session and we need to be quiet.   I am quickly filling out the paperwork and I hand it to the teacher really quick and try to scram.   Maryssa saw me and started bawling…Mommy no Mommy don’t go!!   Broke my heart…

I quickly walked with the girls back to our car, buckle them in the car seats then drive over to Savannah’s kindy class and wait for her to be dismissed.   They took longer getting out.  They were supposed to get out at 11:50am but didn’t get out till almost 12pm.  I had to be back at Jordan school at 12:10pm and I was still waiting in the pick up line at 12;02pm!!   Finally Savvy gets in the car and her Kindy teacher, Mrs. Tarbell, wants to have a quick chat with me and tell me Savannah will be a late bird…Yay!!  That will make pick up and drop off much easier now…whew!!  

In the meantime I am looking at the clock…it is 12:08pm!!  Oh my gosh!!  I safely scadaddle and get to Jordan at 12:15pm and arrive at Maryssa’s class at 12:18pm.

I am met with the teacher with her arms crossed, pissed off as all hell at me and tells me this is unacceptable.  I tried to explain, but she said it can’t happen again.  Ugh…  What a terrible way for us to start Maryss’a 1st day of Speech Therapy.  I tell her I have to run because I left the girls in the car (which I didn’t want to do but I knew I was so late).   Totally sucked…

The teacher did tell me Maryssa did very well and was attentive the whole hour.  My hope is that Maryssa blows through this speech therapy and will graduate by Christmas.  She has come so far since starting private at home speech therapy last November.  She has had continuous Speech Therapy since November of Last year.

One good thing is that Savannah will be a late bird ( as long as her behavior is good and she can keep up with the more advanced Kindy students) and I won’t have a tight timeline between picking her up and picking Maryssa up.  Savannah will be going from 10:10am and I won’t have to deal with the crazy madness of the 8:30am drop off chaos.  I will be with 10 or 15 other cars and will be able to drop off Savannah right in front of her classroom – yay!!  I will pick her up at 11:30am.  This means the mornings won’t be so chaotic for me and I can breathe a little…whew!!