We're gearing up for a new school year!! Kindergarten starts in just a few days and preschool will follow in about two weeks. Will and Sophie are super excited and I'm super excited for them! Lots of anticipation is in the air and I'm just trying to get as prepared as possible for this shift back into structured week day schedules for the kids. So many things on my mind!
I'm stressing just a bit about bus safety. Not so much about him getting on the right bus or getting to and from his classroom, but just about him waiting for the bus driver to signal him to walk out to board the bus and also just being very observant of other cars on the road as he gets on and off. We took some time to read through the bus safety handout that came with our visit to the elementary school on the preschool field trip day. He listened to the bus driver on that day and seems to remember the "rules", but I'm still feeling a little anxious about it. I'll be with him on the first day and then Craig is planning to watch a couple times after that to make sure he is being careful. After that, he'll be walking with his buddy Jagger to a house just two doors down from our sitter's where several neighborhood kids will be picked up. We know the family who's house the bus stops at and she will be out watching as the kids get on and off.
For her turn, Sophie began working on the coloring page that came home with a newsletter from her preschool. She is to bring it on her first day with her name on it... if she ever finishes. She didn't get very far this day. :)
We've got all our school supplies purchased and are prepared to take them to the school on open house night this Monday. Very brand specific items on the list! Even after three different store checks, I was unable to find Mead brand pencils. What the heck? I thought that was the most popular! We got Ticonderoga (high quality, made in America) and are hoping that will be okay. Only thing not pictured here is an old t-shirt of Craig's that will serve as a paint shirt for art class. ;) Will is so excited to go check out his classroom and meet his new teacher, Mrs. Mullen!!
Sophie's only school supplies are paper towels and tissues. Easy peasy.
Backpacks are ready to go. Sophie LOVES having her very own, just like her big brother.
Lunch bags are ready to go. Sophie got her own PlanetBox just like Will too. She will be needing lunch packed just one day a week this year, but there's nothing else I'd rather send her with than this awesome system. You can see the carry case has changed slightly with a larger, sturdier carry handle. It also came with a shoulder strap and you can kind of see the clips on the side for that.
She's got a Sigg stainless water bottle to tote in the outside pouch too.
Inside, the only notable difference is that the mesh pocket for the ice pack is slightly smaller to keep it from sliding and there are elastic bands below the pocket to slip eating utensils as needed.
Sophie got fairy magnets, which she loves. When her lunch system arrived, I let her open it all up and check it out with Will showing her how to zip and latch everything. She was ecstatic to be "big like Will" now with her own things. :)
The PlanetBox itself is nearly identical with just slightly different stamping and edges. Mechanically, thought, it's identical... and awesome.
Cloth napkins for both kids. I ordered Sophie's (among others) from this seller on Etsy.
We have been using cloth napkins for awhile for meal times at home, but it's helpful to have some extras for when laundry gets backed up. The neutral colored cloths on the bottom are our dinner napkins, although often the kids will use the same ones we will pack in their lunches.
Here's a better look at Sophie's. These are a soft, cotton, flannel material.
I loved the different bicycle fabrics the seller had so I ordered some cloth napkins for my own packed lunches (the aqua ones) and the some others for Will or anyone really (the white with blue and green bicycles). So cute! We are definitely not getting rid of paper towels - I still use those far too often in general kitchen functioning/cooking/cleaning up to part with them - but we've at least gone a little greener at meal times.
I've been gearing up for a new year of lunch packing again and, this time, it will be five days a week instead of three for Will. I'm fully expecting the winter time rut when the "fresh" produce is monotonous and I'm no longer excited about a fresh start to the school year anymore. (Just keepin' it real!) But for now, I'm enthusiastic about it. I've had school lunch on the brain pretty much all summer as I work on consulting with the cook staff and other school staff regarding cafeteria lunches that are served in our school system. (Eventually I'll write more on that later.) So... creative, enticing and healthy lunches have been on my mind for months!
I've borrowed a few books from the library on the subject and found a couple of them very helpful. Here are two of my favorites. (Please excuse the Search Ohio sticker on the covers. They weren't available in the Toledo area and I had to request from other libraries.)
Bean Appetit: Hip and healthy ways to have fun with food by Shannon Payette Seip and Kelly Parthen. I originally saw this in Family Fun magazine and have been meaning to borrow it for months. The recipes aren't anything real special, but the many ideas on how to make meal time special for kids and how to celebrate eating. There's even a brief suggestion on how to throw a cooking themed birthday party, which I am definitely considering for Sophie next year! Lots of great conversation starters for encouraging family bonding and discussion at the table. And a very clever suggestion of taking an empty spice container and filling it with flax seeds and wheat germ and perhaps a smidgen of cinnamon and/or colored sprinkles and labeling with some sort of magical sprinkle name for kids to sprinkle on things like oatmeal, applesauce, cereal, toast, etc. for an easy boost of fun nutrition. Genius! Turns out this book is just an extension of a kids cafe and cooking school called Beansprouts, whose partnership includes a philosophy of "sparking children's appetites with yummy good-for-you food and delighting parents with a happier meal time".
This next one was my favorite. So much so that I've already ordered it and own my own copy (since taking this picture). The Lunch Box: Packed with fun healthy meals that keep them smiling by Kate McMillian and Sarah Putman Clegg. TONS of awesome pictures, lists, ideas, substitutions and recipes. I LOVE THIS BOOK!!! I will definitely be using many of these ideas for my own packed lunches as well as so many of the twists and clever variations of the typical packed lunch for the kids. If you ever get in a rut for packing lunch, look this book up at your library. Instant inspiration. I promise.
Armed with some new ideas and the determination to have some early bird preparation in my corner, I've gotten to work the past couple weeks making some freezable baked goods to be able to pull out individually for easy packing. I've just tackled a couple recipes at a time on several different occasions and now I have a decent variety! I'm hoping if I can do this a couple times a month on a weekend, I will make my life a heck of a lot easier during the week. And I'll just look at lunch packing the same way I do dinner planning: making my grocery list for the following week based on what I plan to serve. We'll see how these high aspirations hold up... ;-)
One of the first recipes I made were these fruit and veggie mini muffins from a new blog my friend Kelly shared with me. Two and a half cups of interchangeable fruit and veggie puree + one grated carrot + some applesauce = a power packed grain! Perfect for my little carb lover (Sophie) who takes forever to eat anything that isn't some sort of grain... or yogurt. ;) I'm going to have get really creative with planning when it comes to Sophie's lunches with the knowledge that she will get bored and distracted and quick to ignore certain sections of her lunch. I need nutrient dense foods that I know she'll eat paired with the right presentation that will keep her interested. Whereas with Will, I can load him up with large portions of nutritious foods... as long as it's exclusively a fruit or a vegetable. They're very predictable that way: Sophie goes for grain or dairy first; Will for fruits and veggies. Almost ALL THE TIME.
For my fruit and veggie muffins, I used broccoli, yellow squash, apples and bananas to create my 2.5 cups of puree. (Plus the grated carrot and applesauce as the recipe calls for.)
Voila! Into the freezer bag they go with a label and date.
Also on my list were Weelicious fruit and seed bars. I love recipes that are done almost entirely in a food processor before baking. Such a fast and easy preparation. I didn't get any pumpkin seeds to make these, so I just used a whole cup of sunflower seeds instead of a 1/2 cup of each. Also I used a whole cup of dried cranberries even though I meant to mix dried cranberries AND raisins. Whoops. And finally, I made my bars with natural, crunchy peanut butter instead of the sunflower butter it called for. So technically, my bars are called fruit and seed and nut bars. ;)
On my day off last week, these are the foods that I added to my deep freeze: brownie bites, fruit and seed bars and spinach cake muffins.
They joined the fruit and veggie muffins from earlier, as well as some zucchini cornbread and sweet beet cookies.
Since taking this picture, I've also made a batch of sweet potato biscuits and mini sweet potato muffins.
School clothes!
Considering I said that Will "didn't need much", he sure ended up with a lot of new clothes! But in the end, it was good because we tried on a bunch of too small things that I thought still fit him.
Lots of red stuff because it's his favorite color.
Lots of blue stuff because I seem to always gravitate to blue when shopping for him.
And lots of grays and neutrals because those are my other favorite colors on Will.
Orange is his second fave. Oh, and since taking these pics, both kids got two more pair of jeans since that's mostly what both will be wearing on a daily basis.
And finally, a couple pair of new kicks! I dig the skater look. He's already got a couple pair of regular looking Puma tennies, so these will round out the wardrobe nicely.
I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm completely disappointed with the selection of girls clothes out right now! I really haven't gotten much for Sophie at all and she started out with far less than Will! A couple of pair of leggings and yoga pants were purchased and I'm thankful for the jeans and khaki cord hand-me-downs from Charli!! I did get her two more pair of jeans besides.
A few ruffly items from Old Navy.
A couple dress/tunic and legging sets.
Some aqua and polka dots from Target.
An adorable pea coat from last year's clearance sale at Company Kids online.
A couple more (clearance only) items - a dress and a smocked top - from Tea because they always have such unique and cute things... that I am not willing to pay full price for. ;) Love these!
And a couple of hoodie sweatshirts. The left one from ON and the right one from Charli (Gap, I think).
Will's weekly clothing organizer is stocked for the coming week. (We haven't used this in months.)
Moving on...
Another topic on my mind is what in the heck we're gonna' do with all the incoming paperwork that's sure to come home in backpacks every night. We don't really have an office or desk space and our fridge and counter beside the fridge (the "drop zone") get very quickly cluttered with mail, invitations, phone messages and whatnot. I don't want to misplace papers that need to be signed or homework or important schedules or newsletters. We needed a system!
Additionally, there has been a huge stack of preschool and homemade artwork on the floor in the corner of my closet that has been a silent burden for the past two years, and I wanted to get a handle on it before another year hits us.
And finally, there would surely be special non-artwork mementos from each school year that I would want to keep. I'm not CRAZY sentimental about everything - I'm good at pairing down and weaning out the non-necessities - but inevitably there are memories that I won't want to part with. Right? Right.
So what to do about all this???
I remember seeing various ideas floating around on Pinterest as well as a blog I pop onto from time to time called iheart organizing. So last week, I looked them up, made my list and then hit up Office Max on the way home from work in a frenzy to get these projects done ASAP.
The first accomplishment were the long term memento storage boxes to organize special things from each of the individual grade levels - one box per child. I purchased two large, sturdy, hanging file boxes with latching lids for this task.
Then 14 hanging files went into each labeled with Preschool (just one file to cover both years), Kindergarten and grades 1-12.
There's plenty of room to grow in these boxes.
My boxes and files don't look exactly like Jen's from iheart organizing, but I did use her free printable cover sheet to stick in for each year.
I made up the first one for the preschool file.
And then I printed 27 more on white cardstock that I already had, to stick in each of the 28 hanging files.
Inside the preschool file, I put his Frog Friend name tag, both year's progress reports, both of his photo journals from our weekends with Clifford, the incredibly hilarious recipe book that the teachers organized by the word-for-word description of each child's favorite recipe and how to make it, a couple other cute Q&A papers by the students, his All About Me poster, a couple of my Mrs. Riedeman name tags that Will colored on my special helper days and his preschool graduation program. Tear. Sweet memories...
Oh also, the file folders I purchased are a clear poly with colored tops and tags. So with the cardstock cover sheet at the front of the file, it looks like a nice file cover that you can see right through while it's still protected by the file. Perfect! I'm very happy with this solution. The boxes are neatly stacked in my closet until I decide on a permanent location for them, but even those are far better than the huge, sloppy stack of art work that used to be there.
And where is the artwork? In under-the-bed storage totes beneath each of the kids' beds. They both had room under their beds so why not? I weaned out a bunch of stuff and found that many of my favorites were things we made at home. :) For each new school year, I'm planning to save it all on the emptier side of the box and then sort through one year's worth of stuff at the end of each school year. Maybe I'll divide the years with layers of tissue paper between or something?
Okay so special mementos and artwork are out of the way.
The final - and most important - part is what we're gonna' do with the daily stuff. And also how we're going to keep very young children on a semi-regular routine to keep our evenings flowing smoothly. I found and loved this "After School Flow" sheet on Pinterest and printed out a copy. I'm going to laminate it and keep it hanging in the kitchen for awhile until the kids get into a routine.
I loved the idea of the Action Boxes in that flow sheet and wanted to create some of our own. But there's really no great spot to put them in our kitchen. We have a "breakfast nook"/pantry off of our kitchen that's semi out of view from main household traffic and in it are our mail slot organizers. You can also see our very small counter beside the fridge along with the side of the fridge that serves as our most frequent drop zone and message center.
So I decided that the corner below our mail slots would probably be the best locale for our "Action Boxes". One tray for Will, one for Soph and one for Mom. Anything that the kids bring home that requires "action" on our part (stuff mom or dad have to sign, do or make) goes into my Action Box (tray) and anything that requires action on the kids part (immediate or future assignments) goes into their own action boxes. Ideally those will remain nearly empty if the kids get started on school work immediately, but for example on karate nights, we may empty the backpack before karate and finish the action papers after. Or if there's a project that's given more than one night to accomplish, it can be stored in that child's tray. I know a lot of parents prefer to open the nightly folder, sign whatever they have to and stick it right back in the child's bag so that there's no losing it at all. And maybe that will happen for us too. But even if they're not always used, I'm happy to have a specific spot for school papers that's not just on the counter by the phone.
And finally, there will probably be some things that I want to have at easy access for the entire school year or maybe just a large part of it, but that don't require immediate action. Maybe they're just for reference or maybe they'll be spread out throughout the year. For those things, I grabbed a couple of poly expandable folders from my internship days (they're still like brand new) and placed them between the wall and the action boxes. Red for Will and purple for Sophie. Currently inside Will's folder are his school handbook, the school map and teacher directory, the papers that came home regarding transportation schedules, student identification number, class list, etc. And inside Sophie's are her preschool handbook, the school year curriculum and holiday schedule, the list of our special helper days and her monthly tuition slips.
So here is our school paper organization corner in the kitchen. The lone paper in the tray is Sophie's All About Me poster that we'll have to create before her first helper day. ;)
I'm going to get back into using our dry erase calendar since this is the first month in awhile that I've filled it in. (And I'm going to invest in a finer tip marker for the future - haha!) Hopefully that will help us keep track of immediate/upcoming things for the month. And thank God for iPhone calendars too! :-)
I meant to have Will write good luck cards to friends for their first day of school like he did last year, but we never got around to it. And I still want to print off some of those "interview" questionnaires to capture a glimpse of each child's thoughts and favorite things as they begin each new school year. Thinking of doing 28 of those too and just sticking into their file folders to pull out at the beginning of the year. That probably will stop being cool after about 3rd or 4th grade though. ;)
