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She only makes $10 an hour, so no way can I charge what I deserve for the grand total of two extra kids and a baby. But I'm chalking it up to charity.
My rule is that we keep doing some level of academic work during the summer, just to keep their heads above water, as it were.
This was fairly easy when I just planned for two kids. It is a little harder with four kids, and harder still when there is also a baby to watch. I am spending this next week regrouping and figuring out a way to, say, manage a weekly science thing without neglecting the baby. It doesn't have to be terribly educational, it just has to be a *little* educational.
More seriously, the two older ones don't have the largest vocabulary. Since I have them off and on through the summer, I thought I'd make a concerted effort to work on improving that. My normal method of vocabulary improvement is to tell a secret word story to the nieces, but the whole attraction of secret word stories is that they contain ample opportunities to attack and tickle me (every time I use the pre-defined secret word, which I inevitably define while also giving the etymology and a few tangentially related words, because honestly, why not shoot for the stars here*?) and... NO. Just NO. Not with four kids. (And a baby.) It's actually very effective, but still - nooooooooooooooooo!
There has got to be another way. Somebody, please - tell me another way!
* Actually, this is the one useful side effect of a. getting a baby name book when I was six or so and b. studying Latin. I wouldn't claim that I remember much from Latin, but even outside of word stories I am really pretty good at chunking up words into their component parts, giving a few words with a related bound morpheme like -struct, and making the nieces guess what that part means before continuing on with the point. I'm not sure if they're learning anything from these digressions other than "seriously, don't get her started!", but at least one of us is having fun.
My rule is that we keep doing some level of academic work during the summer, just to keep their heads above water, as it were.
This was fairly easy when I just planned for two kids. It is a little harder with four kids, and harder still when there is also a baby to watch. I am spending this next week regrouping and figuring out a way to, say, manage a weekly science thing without neglecting the baby. It doesn't have to be terribly educational, it just has to be a *little* educational.
More seriously, the two older ones don't have the largest vocabulary. Since I have them off and on through the summer, I thought I'd make a concerted effort to work on improving that. My normal method of vocabulary improvement is to tell a secret word story to the nieces, but the whole attraction of secret word stories is that they contain ample opportunities to attack and tickle me (every time I use the pre-defined secret word, which I inevitably define while also giving the etymology and a few tangentially related words, because honestly, why not shoot for the stars here*?) and... NO. Just NO. Not with four kids. (And a baby.) It's actually very effective, but still - nooooooooooooooooo!
There has got to be another way. Somebody, please - tell me another way!
* Actually, this is the one useful side effect of a. getting a baby name book when I was six or so and b. studying Latin. I wouldn't claim that I remember much from Latin, but even outside of word stories I am really pretty good at chunking up words into their component parts, giving a few words with a related bound morpheme like -struct, and making the nieces guess what that part means before continuing on with the point. I'm not sure if they're learning anything from these digressions other than "seriously, don't get her started!", but at least one of us is having fun.
