A relationship of attention

Usually, when I walk in the street with my three children, people stare at us and there's always someone who asks in a tone of amazement: "the three of them are youuuurs?... how do you handle it having threeeeeeee?", as if none of those people had ever had more than three siblings… or children! - many of them are old ladies.  Nowadays, being a mother of more than two children is considered as a heroic deed, when last generation a family with less than six children was very little. Women's mentality has changed so much, but that's material for another post 

Merged in one only

I met Mario sixteen years ago. We were classmates in high school.  I liked to laugh about his jokes and he helped me out in English class. The graduation day was the last time I saw him. Seven years later, I got a forward with his e-mail address within the "to" addresses. I was surprised because it had been so long that I hadn't heard anything about him and besides, I wasn't sure that he was the same Mario González I knew. I wrote to say hi and very quickly I got a reply. 

Housekeeping

Since some time ago I've been struggling with this thought of taking more advantage of the kids in housekeeping. I use the verb struggle because it is a true revolution of thoughts that is taking place in my head.

Our new home

Finally, after six long months of living in a house that didn't meet our family needs, we've found a little paradise just in the middle of the area where my husband works. The search was arduous and sometimes disappointing  because we felt there was no place that could fulfill all the characteristics that we looked for in a house. 

Singleness and Real Estate

I've lately been thinking about that period of my life when I was single and there was not any perspective of marriage yet. I remember how difficult it was to have another birthday and keep being single.

Mom's eagerness*

In Spanish, we have a word that cannot be translated to English. It is "afán" It can be a noun or an adjective. It expresses application, strive, aspiration, wish, vehement yearn, diligence, rush, hurry, eagerness. I can say that I am "afanosa" which means that I have all those qualities. Or I can say that I have an "afán" to do things, which means that I want to do things in all those ways. I've been searching and I think that the best word I could find to translate this concept is "eager, eagerness" I'll use these two words whenever  I'm talking about the word "afán" or "afanosa" in Spanish. 

Knowing the letters again

Two years ago, more or less, Mati started to recognize the letters of the alphabet. We did many activities together to practice the sounds of the letters, capitals and lowercase, and finally, to put letters together and get words.

Pocket of favorites

The other day I was very excited showing Mateo a new book of exercises to practice writing. After all my explanation about how exciting it would be to start working on this new book, Mati said very properly: "Mom, in this moment I'm not very interested in all that writing stuff" I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

Magic word

Another idea that I found to motivate reading, was to make a "magic word" appear on the whiteboard every morning. The objective is to draw the children attention to the word and motivate them to read it and after that, talk about it or do related activities.

Today appeared a list of words with the title: "OPPOSITES". Mati was very curious to know what it said, so he made an effort to read the title. Then, I explained to him what it was about, and very anxiously he wanted to read all the words . We went through all the list, braking each word into syllables to make it easier - I like to do this. In Spanish it's way easier, because our language is exactly the same the way you write and read. It's not crazy as in English. We continued to do this activity until the list finished. We read each word in syllables, we thought about its opposite word and wrote it beside and broke it into syllables as well. He was very enthusiastic about being able to read and have the right answers. I think I've never seen so much happiness and desire about reading more and more!

Stability is attained by stability

The last episode of "the dog  whisperer" I saw, really impressed me: a German shepherd dog was very violent and aggressive and frightened his owners and all those who passed by his fence.