Ahhhhh. What a weekend!

Yes, I took the whole weekend off. It was a very successful weekend! I did try to keep up on the Basics, and I did make time to really relax, not just vegetate in front of the interenet as I'm wont to do so often. I helped E practice riding her bike, M and I played hair salon, I sorted shapes with A, had a friend over for dinner, enjoyed a family movie night and I actually watched a grown up movie with my spouse! (If you click on movie you can see what we watched. I give it 3.5 of 5 stars. It was funny and simple, but predictable.) I even sat down to read a book - in the sunshine no less! It was crazy satisfying! I really needed a weekend like that.

My plans for today start with getting E up and off to school. Then I'm going to jump right into my schedule - which I haven't posted on the calendar yet... When all is said and done today I'm going to sit down and update my calendar. Last week was the first week I've really had all our dinners planned out and it was SO nice! I'm definitely doing that again, and I'm going to try to plan more of our fun times in advance, too. Getting organized really has simplified and improved my life. Between the planning and the routines I'm not going to recognize myself! Fortunately, my routines are routine enough I know what I want to do this morning, calendar update or not. No reason not to just get on with my day!

My fun plans start with refilling the bird feeders with M and A.
(Aren't empty bird feeders kind of sad?) M really loves helping pour the seeds in and stirring the hummingbird solution. Hopefully full feeders will quicky attract some birds because I've been meaning to break out one of my old school books with the kids all summer. I think we'll have fun using it to find out just who we share our trees with. If you've never watched birds with kids before, you really should. Kids aren't very interested in a lot of the super-scientific information like when the birds migrate, but they like to know the bird's names and are fascinated by the variety of physical details between birds. I'll give M a camera so she can document our visitors. I'd also like to see M's artistic interpretation of our bird neighbors, so I'll draw the birds with M today, and E if she's into it after school. Drawing the different shapes that birds come in is really neat, and finding just the right colors is also fun. (Here's a very basic guide to drawing birds to help us get started.) If they're really into it we can start a Backyard Birding Journal. That's just a simple list of birds we've seen and it's a fun way to keep the kids looking around them when they're outside. If you want to get serious about birding, this site is cool. It has lots of tips for improving your birding skills, bird knowledge as well as links to other informative sites.