Everyday Learning

I haven’t been blogging or tweeting much these days. It’s just been so busy.  Work has been busy, but so has my home life.  With all this busyness, my learning has been going strong.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks.

1.  It is going to be uber-challenging having 3 kids with birthdays within 4 weeks of Christmas!  Oh my!  My youngest son turned 1 on December 30.  My other son turned 4 on January 7 and my daughter will be 7 on January 21st.  Yikes!  To say it has been busy at home is an understatement. What on earth was I thinking when I planned this?!?

2.  Having big birthdays with 20+ children is expensive and will not be happening every year!  We will have to find an alternative to these big birthday bashes where we try to invite all the kids in our child’s classes.  It’s not the cost so much though, it’s that we can’t end up inviting everyone. As they get older, their number of friends increase exponentially, it seems.  So, instead of just inviting all the kids in my daughter’s class, she wants to invite children from her class AND the other 3 grade 1 classes as well (children she went to kindergarten with last year). Oh my. That’s tough. It difficult to decide who to invite. You really don’t want to leave anyone out (I often felt left out as a child), but you can’t have 80 children at a birthday party so you must limit it somehow.  Tough. (If anyone has answers to this one, please let me know).

3. I learned how to make marshmallow fondant.  Why would I want to do that, you ask?  Well, to make cacti for a Cars cake my son wanted for his birthday, of course.  Take a look:

My son loved it and that’s all that *really* mattered.

4. When baking cakes, make sure you remember to put in the baking soda. Apparently it is very important!  tsk tsk (Take a look at the photo to the left.)

5. I learned that it drives me crazy when I waste my time (see above).

6. I learned that my study group is awesome.  I always feel so energized after we meet.

7. I learned how to set up Posterous, with the help of Heidi Hass Gable (@HHG).  Now, I can have teachers and students (and even parents) email a special email account that will post directly to my posterous blog, but ALSO, and more importantly, post directly to our Success Blog.  They can even attach photos or add youtube links and Posterous will automatically format the photos and embed the video directly into the post. What a big time-saver!

8. Over the last two weeks, I learned how to sync iPads.  I also learned that only getting 4 hours of sleep each night makes the learning curve quite steep!  A little extra sleep goes a long way when you are trying to learn something new.

9.  I’ve learned that I’ve really missed blogging the last couple weeks, but sometimes you just don’t have time to do everything you *want* to do.  I need to give myself permission to be okay with that.

10.  During the past couple of weeks, I was reminded what wonderful kids I have (which, of course, I already knew), and how I love being their mom.  I am so very fortunate to have my children and husband. They bring me such joy and laughter.

What have you learned lately?