first days

You know it's complicated when you juggle THREE different "first days of school".  Bonus if you have multiple house guests going separate directions and somehow find yourself many days behind on laundry put-away.

We are currently rocking this system where I put folded laundry (my house helper does most of the folding.... bless her!) in rows on the kitchen table, one row per child.  Girls are easy... they each put their own row away.  Lydia sorts and puts away girl underwear and bathing suits and other extras.  The boys stuff I divide each row into stacks of shirts, shorts and pjs.  Isaac also gets a pile of underwear (he and JP share).  Isaac and John Paul put away their own stacks.  Luke is "in training" - he puts away his own stacks but with some coaching from Julianna!

It only takes me a quick minute to lay out the stacks and then I'm off duty :)

{I can't even think about winter when we'll be wearing 2-3 times the clothing!  For right now I'll celebrate that laundry is an easy victory!}

So our first first day?  Home school!  We started Tuesday morning and just such a sweet sweet day!  One of our house guests stepped in and helped with the little boys which meant the morning work went super fast! Few distractions!  Great attitudes from the girls and I'm filled with gratitude for a good day.  Will be remembering this one when the going gets rough later this fall!

[no pics. whoops.  I'll get them on the next first day.]

Next up in the first day series?  Isaac's first day of preschool - he's technically Kindergarten age but in China that means it's his last year of preschool.... Isaac and Matt went to school on Sunday afternoon to finish registration.

And then started today (Wednesday).  He's now going five mornings a week (this feels like a lot to me but we'll stick with it for now).  Isaac didn't seem to loose much of his language while we were home - or at least it came back fairly quickly - but I'm still expecting him to make some big strides this year in local language.

Isaac with the sibs at pick up!  He is definitely my most likely to balk when leaving Mommy - this little guy likes to be with me!  But he did so well this morning (after a 9 month break from preschool!) and was still smiles at pick up!  whew.

And our final first day is September 1st - first day of local elementary school for the girls.  We still have some kinks to work out with the administration on their hours of attendance, hoping we can figure out a schedule that is healthy expectations for them but also smooth for the school.

In the meantime they have started working with a tutor who is drilling them through much of the grammar they missed last spring.  The girls are in a strong spot with spoken language (so thankful!) but need plenty of help with reading and writing.  Those pesky characters are just so complicated :)  I'm already encouraged by their work with the tutor (and she'll continue once school starts - moving through the school material but at a bit slower pace and focusing on certain skills while ignoring some of the other work!).

Surely this will only get more complicated as the little two get older.  We would love to start John Paul at preschool but feel like he needs to focus on English (not comprehension, but clarity of speech) for now.  He and Luke are definitely picking up some language as we settle in here and speaking a bit more (real simple stuff) but our experience shows that they will need to be in a full immersion environment before we really start to see them operate comfortably in their second language.  Thinking about starting them in the spring....