Fun, with a side of crazy

Sometimes things get a little nutty at the School of Mommy. I have only one official pupil. Abby's the only one who's really supposed to be playing Pre-K this year. But Caleb pretty much has to do everything his big sister does, so I have to prepare two of everything when it comes to crafts, activities and experiments.

And Jacob, though quite advanced for his 10 months, is not quite old enough to play quietly in the corner by himself while I instruct the older two in the fine arts of scribbling and crafting.

So we do our best, and we squeeze in school time whenever the little guy is napping, or when the big kids start to get out of hand and need some calm sitting still activities to keep them from killing each other.

Abby and I butt heads often. We're still working hard on her perfectionist tendencies and trying to come up with some frustration-management techniques that don't involve sobbing whenever the letter she tries to draw doesn't look exactly like the example. I've explained to her that we have to practice before we're able to do something right, but she has a stubborn personality (mine) and she wants to do it right the first time, or not at all.

Honestly, I am in awe of how well she really is doing. She's doing phenomenal with her letter writing and phonics and I'm looking forward to diving into our reading curriculum soon. The coloring, shape and pattern recognition activities we do are mostly a review for her, and she usually takes the time to instruct and assist Caleb since, as she points out, "I already know all this stuff, Mommy."

She loves to use our set of wooden train tracks to play a pattern recognition game she calls "What comes next?" and her complicated patterns of straight and curved pieces yield some odd polygons that she insists on knowing the proper names for. I'm not sure how many people know that a seven-sided shape is called a heptagon. My 4-year-old does.

Most of what we do rates pretty highly on my kids' fun meter. But every once in a while one of my craft ideas just doesn't pan out. Like this rainy-day craft that I was so looking forward to.

Dropping food coloring on construction paper and letting it get rained on to make a cool tie-dyed picture might have been a lot more fun to watch if we were getting more than a mist. Eventually I sent the kids inside and dashed out to hit our artwork with the hose when they weren't looking. I achieved the same effect in the end, but it wasn't nearly the attention-getter I thought it would be.

After listening to me gently remind Abby to try to stay in the lines, Caleb is catching on to the fact that this must be pretty important. So his coloring is a lot more meticulous these days, and not nearly so erratic as it was a few weeks ago. He insists on only ever using a blue crayon, so I broke down and bought one of those enormous Crayola boxes so that he could mix things up a little with colors like blizzard blue, aquamarine, denim, manatee and wild blue yonder.

With fall just around the corner, the weather has been just perfect for spending lots and lots of time outside. We're loving our Berenstain Bears' Big Book of Science and Nature, and learning plenty about the world around us in catchy little rhymes. I wish all science curriculum was this fun! We've memorized the seasons and months of the year, identified signs of summer and fall, looked for wildlife and pretty plants like the ones the Berenstains talk about, and we took the opportunity to do some leaf rubbings when the trees started to provide us with some good material in the backyard.

Abby pretty much thought leaf rubbing was the greatest thing ever, and colored about a thousand pink leaves that she insisted I needed to cut out and laminate for her. We bargained down to nine, including the one blue one that Caleb made before he lost interest, and the kids agreed to let me hang them in the kitchen so my walls would be prettier.

I'm really enjoying school this year. I think the kids feel the same.