This summer has been a blast so far. I'm back in the saddle again, babysitting for the Adams family. This is my fourth summer with them, and it's proving to be the most entertaining yet. After babysitting them for a little while, I kind of thought that all children were funny, but I've realized over the years that these kids are definitely unique in their ability to make a regular situation hysterical. Here's a little documentary of how we spend our days.
A lot of changes have been going on in their house, so we've been doing a lot of purging. Austin and I decided to go through his room and clean out anything that he didn't use anymore. About a thousand Pokemon cards and McDonald's toys later, Austin and I filled up the entire trunk of my car with bags of stuff to donate. We took it all to the Church of the Resurrection garage sale and then got him a grape slushie from Sonic and me a cherry limeaid from Winstead's. A beautiful day it was.
The big new addition to our regular summer activities is the Adams' Reading Chart. Now, of course, I am an English teacher, and I've seen how kids can fall behind in school because of lack of learning during the summer. Supernanny style, I created a reading chart where each kid receives one sticker for every ten minutes that he or she reads. There are different prizes for different goals, prizes which they helped me pick. Five stickers is a cool pencil; thirty stickers is a video game, etc. I did very little to promote this reading thing other than to put the chart out and let them pick the prizes. You may notice that Austin has something like 36 stickers on his chart in this picture. This was two days after we started the chart. These kids have become reading fools. I had no idea that the promise of a pencil would shut off the t.v. and video games for a week. Even Sydney is looking at books and making up stories, pretending to read. I highly recommend this method to anyone trying to get kids to read. Meriahna actually begged me today to give her an extra ten minutes to read her book...how can you say no?
One thing that's really important to me when I'm with them is to have family dinners. They usually help me make the dinner in some way. Tonight, Meriahna, the nine year old, helped me make beef stew. She used a big knife and cut up all the vegetables. And because she helped make it, she was much more willing to eat the new food. One thing that we always do around the dinner table is say the best part of our day and the worst part of our day. The kids always say nice things like, "The best part of my day was making stew with Rachel." But thanks to Sydney, after you say the best and worst part of your day, you have to make up a fake one. So tonight, the best part of Sydney's day was when she jumped off a cliff, and the worst part was when she had an alligator in her hand, and it ate her as she was falling off the cliff. And so it goes.
Today was also a big day in the English household. My baby brother turned 14. It's difficult to see in this picture, but he's walking around the house collecting presents from the birthday string. For every one of our birthdays growing up, my dad would string some string all over the house, and your presents would be placed along the string. You follow the string and pick up your presents. I plan to have the birthday string for my 23rd birthday on Tuesday. Mitchell is clearly very excited to be collecting his presents on his 14th birthday string. It's very odd seeing him as a teenager with the deep voice and his 5'5"ness. I remember holding him when he was only 2 hours old. Sigh. I guess growing up is a good thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment