BEAR week

Last week at school was BEAR Week (Be Excited About Reading). Basically, it’s a week of focusing on literature and books and reading and all sorts of fun and exciting things at school, so that the children come home completely exhausted and incapable of anything other than vegging out AND THEN also requiring no TV or movies or computer for that week! It’s pretty much torture for the parents.

In reality, it wasn’t too bad for Bethany, who doesn’t usually watch anything during the school week anyway. But for Becca, it was a completely different story. She has special times when she is allowed to watch movies or TV, since she doesn’t go to school every day. For example, Monday night was GEMS, which means Ed was home with the two little girls. They almost always get to watch a movie, but this week they couldn’t. I think Ed gave them a two-hour bath that night. Then there was Tuesday, my scrapbooking day, when Becca & Elise usually spend the entire afternoon watching movies. Thank goodness it was a nice day and they could play outside! Then there was Wednesday, when my mom takes care of the little girls while I take the older girls to lessons…usually they get to watch a half hour or so of TV so that my mom can clean up her preschool. So, now it also became torture week for grandparents! Thursday was pretty tough, as well, as the little girls usually watch TV for a little bit in the morning so that I can get things done. Sigh. What a week. Thankfully, we survived, and next year will be easier because Becca will be in school every day.

The last day of the week is pretty fun, though. It’s Storybook Character Dress-Up day! Everyone, including teachers, principals, and even high school teachers’ aides, dresses up as a character from a book! In the morning there’s a big parade at school where everyone gets to see how everyone else is dressed. This is our 5th year doing this and I never knew parents went to the parade before, but I happened to find out from Becca’s teacher that parents do come to watch, so since I was bringing them to school that morning anyway, I thought I would stay. Elise & I had a great time seeing all the kids in their creative outfits. I love the original costumes, where it’s obvious that the kids worked on it with their parents and didn’t just buy a costume and then try to find a book to go with it.

This year, Bethany decided to be Pippi Longstocking. There were a few of them at school that morning, but she was by far the cutest.

She knew that Pippi had a blue dress with orange squares on the cover of the book, so she cut out orange squares and taped them to her blue dress! So original! I put pipe cleaners in her hair and eye-shadow freckles on her cheeks.

Becca was first going to be her American Girl Doll, Samantha, but the wardrobe wasn’t working out, so she decided to be Fancy Nancy, which is a perfect fit for Becca.

She pretty much went through the dress-up box and came up with an assortment of fancy things to wear. She even cut ribbon and taped it to her baton by herself to make the Fancy Nancy wand for the parade. I braided her hair the night before, then took it out in the morning and put it up in a fancy up-do.

Cuties.

At the parade…

BEAR week is a good week, even if we have to turn off the TV.