Fall is Looming

Summer already feels like it's on its way out, and in fact it is time for the rush to get ready for Fall. Tomorrow I'll talk about what I'm preparing for the church this Fall, but today I need to think about getting my own kids ready for Back-to-School.

There are three areas for this effort:

1. The "stuff" they'll need for going to their two schools - private preschool and private Sudbury school

2. What we will do at home for our Afterschooling

3. Getting them set-up for their extracurriculars - two each

In the first area (Stuff for School), I am in pretty good shape. Carbon is still pretty well clothed by some hand-me-down clothing he got years ago from his cousin. He's just now growing into some of the jeans that we've had up in our attic. He has new shoes we got in May, and his rubber boots and coats still fit. He's got a good backpack and water bottle already, so all we needed was a new lunchbox. I ordered one that will match his backpack.

Hypatia wasn't as well set up. I knew she needed a backpack and a lunchbox, and we ordered a matching pair from ebags.com. She has a little metal water bottle, but she doesn't like it much - we'll see if I end up getting her a different one. Clothing wise, she refuses to wear pants anymore, so I ordered four pairs of tights so she can stay warm under those skirts in the Fall. I've never seen good tights at the thrift stores, but the rest of her clothing I should be able to find thrifted or just whip up on my sewing machine myself. Skirts, especially, are so incredibly easy to make. She'll still need a new pair of shoes, but she has rain boots and a rain coat already.

I got her vaccination records from the doctor and I need to get her paperwork all filled out. Neither school requires any other "stuff" - no list of pencils or paper or anything to bring.

That brings me to Afterschooling. Hypatia isn't doing much in that area - she's doing the Primer Level Math-U-See that Carbon already did (I'm erasing his pencil marks out of the book as we go, and then we'll hit the part of the book where I started photocopying the pages out and then she'll have blank pages), and she's participating in the Sonrisa Spanish program with Carbon. We also have plenty of ABC type stuff lying around the house, left over from Carbon or from when I did daycare.

Carbon will be working on Book Two of The Story of the World for history, continue with the Alpha Level of Math-U-See, and continue the Sonrisa Spanish program. For reading, I ordered Explode the Code and a Reading Rabbit game for his nintendo, and we'll also just keep having him read easy-readers out loud to me. As a treat, I ordered the Sum Swamp boardgame for math and a science experiment kit.

Finally, The Extracurriculars. The local dance studio is offering a free boys dance class, so I signed Carbon up for that. He's old enough now that we want his other extracurricular to be music lessons, and he wants them to be ukelele. I need to look around for a teacher. Hypatia's two things will be ballet - I signed her up for pre-ballet at the same dance studio - and swim lessons at the YMCA. I'll have to get both kids dance attire.

How about you? Are you ready for the Fall?