Sunday, February 21, 2010

The Valentine Weekend Read-a-Thon

Its Scholastic Book Fair time at Msters school. Normally, I'm generally frustrated with all the fundraising that goes on throughout the school year. For the most part fundraising through the school envolves one of these principles:

1. Get the kids super hyped to sell a bunch of junk to their friends/family in the hopes up winning prizes.

2. Get the kids to buy crap at a ridiculous price to give to other people as "presents".

3. Sell crap at a ridiculous price.

But this post isn't about fundraising...its about the Book Fair (another attempt at fundraising which I've decided to support. Books are not crap.) As part of the hoorah of the event the students are invited to participate in a Read-a-Thon. Students from each grade are competing with each other to see how many books they can read in a certain amount of time. The winner of each grade gets to have ice cream with the principal. Mster thought this was a pretty cool idea so I decided to go all out and help her win.

Over the past 2 weeks we've gone to the library twice (we used to go weekly but we've been slacking) and took out loads of books. After we read them all and there was just the weekend left I started to think of ways to encourage reading and not have to check out the entire library. That's when I came up with the idea of reading all of our kids books in one weekend. I wasn't sure we could do it but I figured it was worth a try. Mster was excited. It seemed like a great idea.

And we had a super fun weekend reading. There was fort building, hot chocolate drinking, popcorn popping, Olympic breaks, pizza dinners, and all in all we read 147 books over the 2 week period (probably 110 of them this weekend). We didn't read all of our books. We probably still have 30 more to go but I'm pretty proud of us. Nobody said "I don't want to read anymore". They just kept listening to the stories and Mster even read a dozen or so books herself. I told her if she wanted to count board/easy books she had to read them herself.

And so the weekend o' reading fun is done but what I think is awesome is that winning the competition will just be icing on the cake because we truly had a great time. The house is trashed beyond belief but we had a great time.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

9 Days

Its been 9 days and I'm still sick. I'm done. Seriously. I feel like I haven't gotten a break.

Csters been super busy coaching a mock trial for high school students. He's been gone the last 2 saturdays and was gone 3 nights this week too. Thats leaving work to go straight to the events. 3 kids when you are sick, sucks. And then when the trial was finally all done yesterday and I was going to have my support back a stupid restaurant gave Cster food poisoning.

So I should probably stop whining now.

The good news is that Lster is well on his way to saying goodbye to diapers. This is VERY exciting news. Being home all week has been good for something. :)

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Sick Little Baby

It seems that I have a head cold. It sucks. At the same time I was getting my head/chest cold Mster and Lster decided to get the stomach flu and couldn't keep anything down. They are done and healthy but I, sadly, am still living in a big daze.

What is super sad is that I seem to have infected my sweet Kster. Everytime he coughs (and its a yucky cough we have) he gives off this little pouty face and cry and looks at me in a way that says..."why, mama, why." I feel the same way when I cough. But with him it makes me sad.

Today I am finally feeling like I can get vertical after an almost full day of horizontal yesterday. Part of this is because poor Kster is sleeping. Yesterday he took a 3+ hr nap and last night he slept for 12 1/2 hrs without a feeding. I woke up at 4am and had trouble getting back to sleep but that was still 6 hrs straight sleep. I finally did get back to sleep for another hour and was ready to get my baby when he woke up at 5:30AM. It may seem early to you but 6hr of uninterrupted sleep was heaven.

He has already woken up from his morning nap and it was only just over an hr so I'm not sure we'll get a repeat tonight.

But until then...6hr!!!!

(he has slept for more than 6 hr before I just was poor at timing it with my sleeping. I put him to bed at 5pm, because that's when he wanted to go, and then I went to bed between 10-11 and he woke up at 1AM for a feeding. My issues of late with his getting up was that they were even more frequent than the 1AM feeding. A 12 hr stretch is exactly what I need :) )