Parent-Teacher Conferences

I love the Thanksgiving weekend holiday! Yes, it's great spending time with friends and family, and eating lots of yummy food. But, mainly I love it because it means I'm done with fall report cards and conferences! I just feel SO relaxed after finishing this very stressful part of my job. Conferences went fine this year. I ended up with three no-shows that I wasn't able to reschedule. Oh well! I held 25 successful conferences (that's 12.5 hours of actual conferencing on top of the approximately 14 hours of doing report cards!).

The most exciting thing this year was attending my first conference as a parent. Marley's teacher decided to hold conferences this year to share what they have been learning, and how he is doing in school. Her goal was to identify his strengths and challenges, and to tailor his experiences at school to meet his needs as a learner. Wow - sounds familiar!

Anyway, the cool part was that she used video evidence to show examples of his cognitive, social, motor, and language development. She told us that he's fitting in really well there, gets along with other kids easily, and has picked up all the daily routines. I hope you enjoy Marley's conference video as much as we did!

Field Trip!

Marley and Reid, the two oldest Beetles, got to join the centipedes yesterday on a trip to the Seattle Children's Museum to see the Sesame Street Body exhibit. It sounds like they had a great time. When prompted, Marley reported that his favorite part of the day was, "Reid and the fire engine." Enjoy Jena's photos and videos from the trip!

Unhappy Halloween

Marley's mood improved considerably once he realized that dressing up in strange costumes would result in lots of candy!

Adventures in Michigan (finally)

Feeding the animals with Aunt Cyndi at Apple Charlie's

More Apple Charlie's. We had fun drinking cider, eating donuts, feeding the animals, and of course, buying APPLES!

Playing frisbee with Uncle Pat at the cool wooden playground.

Watching the backhoe work next door to Patrick and Cyndi's house.


Carving pumpkins with Matt and Alicia.


More to Come...

Playing with the old school toys.


Learning how to make our favorite childhood snack: Ants on a Log!

The Incredible Naptime Trick

School is going great for Marley. He is going five days a week now, and totally loves it. One of the hardest things for me to imagine has been how naptime goes there. It's hard enough for me to get my one child to sleep at home. I can't imagine trying to get ten of them to nap at once. Yet, the Amazing Jena does it, and has shared this video as proof. Just in case you can't tell, Mars is the 6th kid lying face down with his arm draped over his bear:)

Being Sick Stinks!

Well, Marley went to school today, but I stayed home. I started feeling terrible yesterday and it just got worse and worse. Mars, on the other hand, was totally fine yesterday. Besides having a stuffy nose, I'm feeling much better now. I'm planning on going to school tomorrow as long as no one is puking tonight. Keep your fingers crossed.

Here's the Beetle Daily Note for today:
Naps-
Reid- 1:05- 3:30
Marley- 1:10-3:30
Finn- 1:00-3:30
Grace- 1:20-3:15 (woke at 2 but fell back to sleep)
Layla 1:30-3:30
* We woke all the boys up so they could eat snack! They must be tired from busy weekends!

Today we sang lots of new songs during circle time and the Beetles are starting to remember the fingerplays that go along with them. They really enjoy "The Firetruck Song" and especially like the handshake at the end. They also like the "Clap, Clap, Clap Your Hands Song" and laugh when we clap our hands slowly and then quickly. For our classtime we painted our body tracings with watercolor brushes and paint dobbers.

During outside time, we played in the sandbox; building sand castles and then smashing them down. We counted together "One, two, three" as we poured each shovel of sand into the bucket. We also set up the tunnels and tents in the yard and enjoyed climbing in and out and peeking our heads up out of the hole on top. After lunch we headed upstairs to the living room and rode the cars around to get all of our energy out before naptime.

Jena

And the Puke Goes On

So Thursday night was a long one. Marley continued to throw up on and off until about 3:30 am. His tummy was pretty empty after the first couple of times, so it was mostly dry heaving. Poor baby. Jeff was already planning on staying home with him on Friday (as he will every Friday), but I still had to go to work on, like, 3 hours of sleep.

Friday and Saturday he seemed totally fine. Then, it started again. Saturday night was like a repeat of Thursday. This time it was about 11:00 pm when he woke up puking. *Sigh* I don't know what's going on, but we suspect that we just rushed him back to his normal diet when we should have taken things a lot slower. He just seemed to be so much better. We'll see how he does on Sunday, but we may decide to keep him home from school on Monday. 'Tis the season, eh?