Home improvement

I recently heard about a local private school that was going out of business. Today, they had a HUGE sale to get rid of most of there stuff. I told my mom I wanted to go, but didn't expect to come home with much, because I expected everything to be too high priced. Boy was I wrong! I bought all kinds of stuff and could have bought a lot more if I could have figured out a place to put it. I got an easel, some blocks, a huge box of tempra paint, a big box of paper, a paper rack, two rolls fof easel paper, 2 whole bags of small things (headsets, extension cords, etc), a large pop up play house, a sand table and a large water table, several packages of markers, a jar of sorting bears, 4 preschool sized chairs, some tumbling mats, a big wire rack, a nice book shelf and several other things for less than $50. I got so much I couldn't fit it all in my van. I had to drive home and drop a bunch off and go back and pick the rest up! Other than large furniture (tables and one desk) I didn't see anything priced over $5 and most of it was $1 or $2. They had chalk boards and white boards and desks and tons of other things that I just couldn't figure out where to put so I didn't get.

Since I got all of that stuff, I've decided to move stuff around in my house and set things up better. I've always wanted to set my house up with stations like a preschool but never had all the stuff before. Now I do. I've begun an art center where I put the easel and paper and paints. I'm going to get a small table and put out crayons, stencils, stamps, etc. I'm also moving all my books around to create a library (previously all the books were crammed on the shelves with our books and they were hard to get to, with chairs. With the new wooden blocks I bought, I'm going to create a block center where I'm going to put all the wooden blocks, as well as all the Legos and other misc blocks we have. I'm also planning to clean off the train table (which we've had forever and no one plays with) and I'm going to layout a track (no on plays with it because they have to set the track themselves) and nail it down. That way, they can play and have bridges and things but not have to be setting stuff up all the time.

I'm going to make us a schedule and do "preschool at home" with Lizzie. dh keeps telling me that if I don't want to go back to work, I don't have to. The choice there is to get my stuff together and teach her myself at home or go back to work when she is 3 so she can go to preschool. It isn't like I'm not qualified to teach her. I mean, her age group is where I started out. Plus, I already have a pre-,ade list of topics with the week to study them (they made up a curriculum at PoP and I took a copy when I left) and I have over half a year of lesson plans. Should be easy enough to modify things to her interests. We'll still see what happens with going back to work, but at least now I have the beginning of a set up that should be easy enough to maintain.

The problem is going to be fitting this all in and actually leaving the house most days. Dh is going to be working late nights so our plan is to get up, take C to school, come home, feed Liz, go do something for a couple of hours (Rugrats, Library, etc) come home, eat lunch, take a nap and then pick C up from school by 2. I guess, he'll have some homework stuff and we could do stuff then or we could start 2 days a weeks and then move to 3 later on. Right now, I think I'm just going to have stuff for her to do and work on actual preschool later.