peelosophy

Many changes are on the Fall horizon for the Peel family….

• JJ will be in school all day- man I miss him.

• Henry will be going to preschool- JJ never went so preschool is all new to us.

• Emma will be joining George at Kids Day Out once a week.

• My sister Katie and her family moved back home- not only to STL but into our neighborhood!!! AND Tootie, my niece, will be going to Hudson with JJ.

• Kara, whom I have babysat 2 days a week since she was 9 weeks, is starting Kindergarten and won’t be a part of our Mondays and Fridays anymore. Totally bittersweet.

• I started watching my niece, Rosie and it is going so great! Her and Emma are BFFs..check out the picture.

Wow, I didn’t think it was a lot, but writing it out it is ALOT!  My current mental status is Monday -Friday I’m fine, it’s the transition to our weekends I have a hard time with lately.   Weekends we try to balance getting things done with relaxing and I’m not good at the latter.

What do you do on the weekends?  Do you find it hard to balance?

We had an end-of-the-summer water gun fight in our backyard last week.  It was great fun – 11 boys, 100 degrees and everyone of them armed with some sort of water artillery.

We did a couple of games which just meant a slightly more organized chaos.  They were:

• Freeze tag – the person who was “it” tagged by shooting their water gun at the person.  And, subsequently, a player could unfreeze another player by shooting them again.
• Alka Seltzer Tag.  We strung Alka Seltzer tablets on a string that the boys wore around their neck and you had to shoot the other players Alka Seltzer tablets. The object of the game was to keep your Alka Seltzer from disintegrating.  We referred the Alka Seltzer to your “life” like on a video game…it seemed to make sense to the boys more.
• Target Practice.  We set up empty soda cans on the clubhouse deck and the boys shot their guns to see how many they could get down.
• And then we played “zombies”.  This was tag but when you got tagged, you turned into another it.

Today was JJ’s first day of 1st grade!!! I always get undue stress about things like the first day of school.  I thought I had to have a lot of silly stuff ready or perfect… like this was the first day of the rest of our lives or something!

On the other hand JJ was the normal one, he usually is,  just calm,  cool and collected.  Although he did get upset because I was rushing him out the door and he still wanted to tell John about the dream he had last night…which explains the sad pictures.  Honestly, I didn’t have any compassion for his case,  but John did and decided that he would drive him so he could hear all about his dream- good dad.

New school year resolution #1…This year I will try my hardest not to be a stressed out Drill Sargent trying to get the kids to school in the morning…ahem

Here’s another post about what we have done to pass the time until dinner.  Like I said before, after 4pm over here is more often meltdown city, so I’ve been trying to come up with things to get through it.  It’s funny though the unplanned things (or acts of desperation) we do tend to do end up being the real winners as opposed to something “planned”.

For example, a couple of days ago, I put some cardboard, masking tape, crayons and paddle sticks in the middle of the table and ask, “What can you build with these?”.  An HOUR later JJ is done and here’s what he came up with…

He grabbed the Army and space guys when he was done and played with his camp set-up until dinner was ready.   He’s amazing.

One of our new favorite time killers family activities lately has been obstacle courses.  Especially in the 4 o’clock hour, my least favorite time of day – it’s usually melt down city around here, but lately we’ve been doing some fun stuff.   JJ loves putting the courses together and then I time the boys to see of they can beat their last times.  Here’s our latest one…

Go under the chairs…

Across the “moat” via cushions…

Across the tightrope…

Slide down the little slide and shovel 3 scoops of rocks into a truck and push it to the other side…

Hop over the bricks to the clubhouse…

Run through the clubhouse and down the turbo slide…TIME!

Now another dozen times until dinner.  I love my backyard.

The best afternoons here are when the boys all collaborate, with minimal fighting, on some sort of project that takes hours to reach completion.

Yes, I said hours.  I promise you, it doesn’t happen very often. But when it does it usually happens outside.  And lately, it involves the construction of some sort of “habitat”.  Whether squirrel, roly-poly or a Claire habitat, they have taken the philosophy of “Build it and they will come“.

This day it was a daddy long-legs habitat and the poor daddy long-legs was already inhabited inside during construction.

“DO NOT TOUCH DO NOT GO IN THIS AREA PAST THE STICKS BEWARE”

In junior high I transferred from a private all-girl school to a public co-ed school. That is a heck of a transition for a junior high girl!

By God’ grace, I became instant friends with a group of girls, of which most of them also had transferred from all girl schools. We were called The 6-Pack because their were 6 of us and we were inseparable. I don’t know if this name was given to us or if self-proclaimed, but it was junior high – if you had a place or a name where you fit in – it was half the battle.

I’ve been thinking of my junior high 6-pack lately, especially when I stop and realize that we are now a family of 6. Even writing that,  it is crazy to me. Don’t get me wrong, we wanted a big family and I’m from a family of 6 — this should not be that crazy to me!

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At the beginning of the summer, our Thursdays became free all.day.long. (I used to babysit three days a week and now I’m down to two).  I decided we needed to reserve this day for some special excursions.  This was especially the case because JJ is going to summer school and I’d hoped this would give him something fun to look forward to at the end of the week.

I sat down with the boys and explained my idea to them.  We plotted out the Thursdays for the summer and each boy got to pick where we were going to go – they were super excited.  We decided it had to be places we didn’t usually go on the average week.(a.k.a. Larson Park, Warson Woods Park, etc)

So far we’ve gone to the Science Center, the Rocket Park and Kirkwood Park.  The Coaliers have been doing them with us (Sadie is in Summer School with JJ)  and the Olivers joined us for some wet fun at the Rocket Park.

This past Thursday, we went to Kirkwood Park and just when we were leaving we spotted the Kirkwood firetruck watering down some camp kids and we managed to join in fun…how often do you get to do this?!?!

I admit,  I have been lazy with pictures and the ones I do take are on the iPhone, so forgive my poor quality.

Today we had  Make-Your-Own Ants on a Log for snack….

I provided the cut celery, peanut butter, cream cheese and Craisins and the kids went to town making their own snack.

What the picture doesn’t show is when they got creative.  They got out peanuts and red hots for optional toppings.  Yum?

Does everyone always have red hots in their pantry or is it just us????

My sister Katie lives in Colorado with her husband Carl and two girls, Tootie and Brooke. Over the past few months, they’ve probably visited the ER every week with one of them being very sick and the fire department has had to come out a couple of times because of sickness or crazy kid mishaps.

This week it was the fire department, which they are now on a first name basis with them. Brooke (2-1/2) managed to get her finger caught in a Starbucks cup and they couldn’t get it out. I know right?!?! How does that happen and why couldn’t they get it out?!?!

I wasn’t a disposable cup, I tried to find a picture of it on the web but couldn’t. It was a reusable glass cup that had a glass domed lid and a hole for the straw. The hole is where Brooke’s finger got stuck. She put it over her knuckle, Katie and Carl tried several things but they couldn’t get it off.

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