I MADE IT!!!!!

I made it.

12 weeks of summer holidays.
8 different sets of visitors.
100 + loads of sandy/muddy/wet washing
100+ loads of bedding and towels washed.
At times up to 8 beds to be made, unmade, washed, dried and then remade.
100+ meals for my family and sometimes others.
18 bottles of wine, 5 bottles of port, 1 bottle of gin (i counted as I took them to the bottle bank)
10000000+ pints of milk (slight exaggeration but I reckon we have to be close!)
1 teething baby.

My children went back to school this week and my house is staying tidy, I have time to sit and relax, and time to blog!
I realised pretty quickly after we arrived here that we needed to adopt a really organised and efficient system for general laundry, school clothes, and school books. I have 2 boys at school, Amelie at preschool, and will have the 2 babies at home. I figured that if I put a system into place now, then it will just naturally evolve as the children get older (i hope). Sunday was spent ‘systematizing’ (i dont even know if thats a proper word but it came up on spell check when i typed in systeming)

Bring on the colour co-ordinated baskets. Each child has been assigned a colour (Maxi = blue, Luis= green, Amelie = pink, Vivi= purple, new baby= yellow/orange)

Each child has numerous baskets in their specified colour, one basket for their casual clothes (which gets filled every 2 days and each child is responsible for putting away their washing) they have a smaller basket which holds their socks and pants, and then they have a larger basket for school stuff.

The washing baskets live in the utility room, pants baskets in their wardrobes and the school baskets live in the hallway storage unit. Each night they get home they put any homework straight from their bag into their basket. After dinner the basket gets brought to the table where they do their homework.

So far so good! its actually working! we started the washing baskets before the summer holidays, and did think that adding the school stuff baskets would be like basket overload, but so far its actually really helping us all be really organised.

Clothes wise my fabulous mummy stocked up on loads of shirts for the boys so I am able to give them 5 shirts each at the start of the week (so on Sunday I wash and iron 10 polo shirts) then they have 2 jumpers each and 3 tracksuit bottoms which get changed over on a Wednesday and washed as need be.

So that explains my system a little bit, Im super proud of it (as you can tell by the fact I dedicated a whole blog post to it)

Luis is in second class this year, equivalent of year 3 back home. He makes his first holy communion in May! He is enjoying being back but we are still having attitude problems with him, it breaks my heart and we have one more strategy to try, as well as some children’s meditation sessions before we are just going to resort to tying him up outside and beating him as punishment for bad attitude and behaviour (joking people!!!)

Maxi is in Senior infants (year 1) his teacher wanted to keep him back to repeat the year as his reading and writing is not that great, but we fought it and he has gone up. We did loads of extra work over the summer holidays and I am confident he can more than hold his own in his new class. He has the same teacher this year (there are 2 year groups to a classroom so both boys are in the same rooms with same teachers as last year) so I hope that he really shows her what he is worth!!! Someone told me once that Maxi could ‘charm the birds out of the trees’, he loves school, he is friends with everyone, so he was thrilled to go back!

Amelie started preschool up in the next village. Its a 10 minute drive but well worth it as its fab! She loves her teachers and her new little friends. It’s a beautiful setting, based on some Montessori principles, lots of nature, they have a fab outside area set in farmland, it’s stunning and I know she will thrive there. Vivienne will join her there next September and they will have a year together before Amelie goes to school with the boys. The clevs are gonna rule the school, there are only about 60 pupils there at the moment and numbers are dwindling so with 5 of them all there together it sure will be interesting!!

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2013, Family

Clare Clevett

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