First Day of School

I can't believe our baby is in school.  Well, really I can because he was so ready to go.  School begins after labor day here and his school starts so early in the morning - the AM class starts at 7:45.  Geez that's early!!!  Matthew has a lot of friends in the afternoon, but I wanted him in the morning for 2 reasons.

1-We live too close for him to ride a bus, so I would have to take AND pick him up.  By sending him in the morning Jordan takes him to school on his way to work. 
2-Isabelle takes her nap in the afternoon.  I would have to wait until we picked him up to get her to bed and that is stretching nap time late every day which I didn't want to do.

It was in the 90's which is unheard of in September during the first week of school so Matthew got to wear shorts for a few days.  It has already started cooling down, but I'm hoping to squeeze in a few more shorts days before we run into full-blown yucky weather.

So handsome!

Like usual he wanted a silly pose.

We all went to school with him and of course Isabelle wanted in on the picture action.

Matthew has a hard time not talking and he is a wiggle worm, but for the most part I think he's doing really well.  They get either green, yellow or red smiley faces everyday.  He had a job chart at home and every day he gets a green sticker at school he gets to add a sticker to his job chart at home.  If he gets all 5 green smileys for the week then he gets a bonus sticker too.  He got all green last week except for yellow on Friday (for poking someone with a pencil) so we'll be working towards a bonus sticker this week.

We started the job chart as a way to reward behavior and get him to choose good choices, help out easier around the house without fighting, going to the bathroom without us reminding him and to earn money.  Every chart is worth $ (we still have to decide how much) so he'll also be learning about saving money and paying tithing.  The first chart he finished was used towards a plants/zombies game he wanted so that was a good incentive and worked really well.

He's so cute everyday when I pick him up after school.  It takes a little prodding some days, but then he blabs like crazy about everything they did at school.  He has a gym teacher named Mr. Twig - cool!  He also went to music time and LOVED it.  It's so cute hearing about everything and about all the things he doing and loving.  I will experience brief freedom next year when he's in school all day and Isabelle goes to Preschool 2 days a week.  I'm on the cusp of freedom!  I really think another baby is NOT in the works for us.

Facepainting fun!

We have been so busy this summer and with the start of school.  I can't believe I haven't blogged for so long.  I'm hoping to get some more pictures posted soon from our summer fun!

I am having a few moments here and there to myself with Matthew being in kindergarten - really 7:45-10:35 doesn't give me much time.  I decided to scrapbook some cute pics this morning that we took at Jordan's summer work party.  His group had a family picnic/BBQ in August.  It was at a lake and had facepainting, BBQ food, bingo and a jumpy house...and other things that we didn't participate in.  It was really fun and we got there relatively early and decided to take advantage of the face painting (free!) before the lines got too long.

Matthew knew he wanted a batman face right away.  All black is a little complicated to see any features so I suggested the batman mask and he was all for it.  For a pretty wiggly kid he sat perfectly still and did whatever she asked while he was getting painted.  He looked so awesome and I cracked up everytime I looked at him.  He loved playing bingo (he thought just five squares total was Bingo and so yelled Bingo 1 time and I had to yell he was just kidding) he was seriously so cute looking to see if either of our boards had the right numbers.  He loved the jumpy house and was so disgustingly sweaty and dirty by the time we left.  I wiped off his whole mask before we drove home.  He looked like he had eyeliner on, it was so cute!

I have the say that the face painter artist was so amazing!  She could create anything.  There were a lot of little girls that were getting butterflies, unicorns and other girly things so of course Isabelle wanted a butterfly.  I was so impressed that she stayed completely still while the girl painted her face.  A lot of the bottom portion of the butterfly came off while she was eating so I wiped off the rest of the bottom off and she wore the top part the rest of the time we were there.  She was a sweaty mess by the end of the day from jumping in the castle so I wiped off the whole thing before we drove home.

All in all a really fun day spent together and a good day for Jordan to be out of the office.