Flying solo

Amine is starting a new business venture.  He has been in Toronto for three days and now that the end is in sight I can reflect.  I survived, the kids survived.  Our house was a bit of a mess when we left for North Carolina and it didn't really recover last week.  Amine had a busy week at work and next thing I knew it was Sunday and I at least managed to get many loads of laundry washed and mostly put away.  I went a little nuts and picked up most of the first floor yesterday.  Last night I saw the state of the playroom and my office area, so the house has a ways to go still, but some order and sanity was found in clearing the first floor and the kids' room.  Both Tayeb and Aya were a little under the weather yesterday, so that didn't help matters, but both seemed better today.  Iman has been "mommy" to Adam which is very sweet and I think helping him with the fact that he isn't the baby getting all of Mama's attention anymore.  Today I overheard him soothing her and being incredibly sweet with her.  I miss that it isn't shown to me as often, but I am glad my 'love bug' and 'cutie patootie' are still inside that little boy.
  We got more Montessori materials in the mail today and I need a crash course at this point.  I know whatever I do is something positive for them, but I would like to be more than a half step ahead of them which is tough when I am opening boxes and we are both seeing the materials for the first time.  I have to say there is something enticing about the simplicity and quality of materials.  Even as a forty year old, the tactile nature of the counting beads and wooden boxes with wooden materials neatly placed inside makes me want to sit and play and wish I was a kid again.  Part of this I am sure is about my own learning style, I would have loved math introduced more visually as it is in Montessori.  I loved it anyway, but I think I would have really gobbled it up if I had seen these materials when I was a kid.  I see that in Tayeb.  Today he counted the beads as I introduced skip counting/ multiplication and even getting into the square and cube of a number.  The materials made it so easy to explain and show what I was talking about.  When Iman came over, I asked her if she wanted to sit and learn too, she said no and continued to play with Adam, dressing him up as a prince with a blanket cape.  I value her free playtime as well and don't want to force any of our little school on her.  Our mornings can be pretty great and as I get in the frenzy of whipping together lunch and racing everyone to the car to bring Iman and Tayeb to school, racing home to get Adam down for a nap while Aya is still resting in the car seat so that they will be somewhat rested when I have to throw them back in the car for school pick up 2.5 hours later, it is then that I get homeschooling.  Freedom and flexibility are good.  Not having to race around for those school hours would be nice.  I think next year will be different with Iman and Tayeb in a full day of school, Adam starting Montessori preschool and Aya not being as physically demanding all my waking hours.  Yes, the fall will look totally different than life now, but then I will miss our chaotic house with everyone buzzing around, learning complex math while fielding requests for nail painting, ponytails and more milk.

"Real" Montessori math materials

Benali Montessori-day 1

I got it in my head that we should make an abacus with dowels and copper pipe pieces, so after breakfast I drove to Lowes with the littles.  We bought dowels, nuts instead of pipe because it was much cheaper, PVC pipe pieces because it was fun to put together a la Blue Man Group, finish wood pieces for the edges of the abacus because it had perfect slots for the dowels, cork board for mats to sit on and sandpaper for sandpaper letters.  I bought a montessori math kit and a few other supplies I will have to wait for Amazon to deliver.  I also grabbed three sets of colors from the paint samples for color theory.  When we got home I started to set things up and the kids got right to work.  We crammed in lunch and brought the twins to school.  When we got back Adam went down for a nap and I worked on the alphabet tiles.  I had to wake up Adam and Aya for school pick up.  When we got home the kids got right to work, Tayeb worked the longest, until 5:30, but Iman and Adam did a good job focusing as well.  Tayeb skip counted by tens with the dimes ( I also have jars of pennies, nickels and quarters for more skip counting, addition, making change etc.).  They built with the PVC pipe making sculptures/ pretend phones and marble mazes.  They counted with the marbles and by adding the nuts to the dowels.  They built with the magna tiles and the rainbow cubes.  We organized the letter tiles by singing the alphabet and Iman and Tayeb spelled their names with the tiles. They learned about Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Complimentary colors by sorting the paint samples.  I reinforced this by painting a color wheel in watercolor and Tayeb made his own color wheel.  All in all an awesome day one!

Montessori

Adam and I visited a small Christian Montessori School today.  I looked past the prayer and saw a nice little program with a diverse student body, the pricing seemed fair and I was happy to see Adam quickly come out of his shyness in the new surrounding and join their circle time and get straight to work after just like the other students.  I was then essentially slapped in the face when the director told me that it was too much work for them to take on a new student who would not continue with them in the fall.  While I appreciate that they would like students to continue at their school, it is unfortunate that it means Adam cannot attend this spring.  She said "it's March and there are only two months left in school since we only go for one week of June".  Maybe I don't want Adam to learn math from her anyway if three and a half months is seen as two months in her mind.  She has convinced me to purchase Montessori materials and resources on my own and teach my kids myself.  Bravo educator and businesswoman.

On a positive note, Iman has asked to wear undies to bed and has woken up dry for the past two nights.

Benali Montessori-Day 1

Invincible

When you are the parent of multiples you start to see yourself as a superhero or at least a super parent.  You leave the house with twins, you keep your cool in public most of the time.  You are so cocky that three kids seems reasonable and you elevate to new heights when you 'master' your new self imposed level of difficulty, then four kids seems possible.  Heck you are already down the rabbit hole, you again shift, adjust and manage most of the time.  Onlookers (ok, Grandpa) assumes you 'need help', you scoff, and Amine's new, very flexible schedule has given you a false sense of confidence.  You manage shopping with four, school drop offs and pick ups, extracurricular activities, most of the time observing what is a reasonable challenge and what is too much.  All this leading up to just that, the huge, probably crazy challenge, the road trip to North Carolina.  Clearly the confidence has gone to your head.  This kind of road trip is just what you need to set the world right again, to see your limits.  I am seeing flashbacks of our ridiculous drive across Morocco with four month old twins.  If that weren't enough why don't we send mother nature out to bury our route under a fresh coat of snow and ice, especially across areas that have no clue what to do with it.
It should at least provide some stories to recall upon 'for better or for worse'. Giddy up.

Balance

Thanks to Amine watching the kids I was able to go to a yoga class this evening.  The third class in four weeks, not bad.  The teacher was a sub, Susan, who was one of the main teachers in my teacher training.  She is awesome, tonight was a fun class with three different arm balances and two versions of headstand as well as the more typical vinyasa asanas.  Great class, however tonight I realized I rock a more important pose.  Lamp pose, not seen in yoga magazines and please don't google it, I am coining new poses for mama yoga.  Baby Aya had fallen asleep on my chest while I was watching TV  as is the case most nights and I was the last one up, as is the case most nights.  I rose without waking baby, walked over to the lamp, raised my right knee until baby's lower half was supported with my thigh.  This freed my right hand so I could switch off the lamp.  Now if only I could master bassinet pose where I could seamlessly transfer Aya to the bassinet without waking her, I am definitely not rocking that pose yet
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On a somewhat unrelated note I have read several heart wrenching articles lately.  One about a father dying of cancer who writes napkin notes to his daughter and puts them in her lunch box and is writing 800+ notes for the sad if and when so she will continue to receive notes until graduation.  Another article was about a mom with young kids who is dying of breast cancer and how she wrote letters to her kids for them to read at future big life events and how she crawled up the stairs when she could no longer walk to be able to continue doing bedtime routine for her kids.

Life lessons, don't sweat the small stuff, appreciate how awesome your kids are and let the people you love hear it, know it, feel it all the time, because time is unknown.  I started my version of napkin notes this week and  am trying to be more present with them.  Balance in life and yoga, Om