– Today is a MckMama McKDay for me.  I made these pancakes this morning, which I was completely unsure of but was pleasantly surprised when the kids gobbled them up.  Anything made with flax seed meal and flax seed oil sounds a little, uh, gross to me.  But, in an effort to reign in our not so great eating habits, I followed the recipe to a T.

I’m going to make the cookies this afternoon.  And next week I’m going to try the Nut Butter.  I feel so domestic!  (And Barbara, I’m going to wear the new apron – can’t wait!)

If you’ve never read McKMama’s site, you really need to add it to your google reader.  She’s hilarious, she’s an amazing writer, and I think that she just might be supermom.  Plus, she makes me think that if she can manage four children in four years, one of whom has serious health problems and still make meals that contain flax in them, then I can too!

I love blogs…

– I signed the kids up for the library’s summer reading program this week.  And then I bought them canvas bags for their library books and let them decorate them.  Just so you know, a five and three year old and metallic puffy paints are nothing short of an adventure…

So, the reading program:  For every 12 books the kids read, they get a special prize from the library.  I’ve actually added to that goal, though.  I told them we would go back to the libaray to collect their prize when they read 12 books in English and one in russian. 

Piece of cake.

Except they can’t read in English yet!  Gah!  Which means I am having to be much more intentional about reading to them.  I started working with Sloan on his English reading.  I bought a great workbook that seems to be helping a lot, so I think I’ve decided that for every 7 pages he does in the workbook, I’ll let him count it as a book read for the library.  I’m not sure if that’s cheating or not.

Just FYI – teaching kids to read English is H-A-R-D.  English is a dumb language.  It makes no sense.  At least in russian every letter has only one sound.  Once you know the letter’s sound, you’re good to go.  English?  Good grief.

So we’ll see how it goes.  Sloan’s already read three books (I read them to him and made him sound out the shorter words) and Tia has “read” two.  When I’m done here, I’m going to search the internet for simple russian language books. 

That won’t be hard at all.

– I’m going out of town in a week in a half.  I will be gone for 8 days and it’s the longest I will have been away from the kids since they were born.  I’m a little apprehensive about it.  I’m not one of those mom’s who has a hard time being separated from her kids – in fact, I think it’s GREAT to get time away – but I’m going to be really far away and my kids will be spending a majority of their days with a babysitter.

This makes me nervous.

I’m also thoroughly overwhelmed at all the preparations that need to be done.  Meals need to be baked and frozen, schedules need to be ironed out, diapers need to be bought, packing needs to be done, and major pep talks need to be given to my husband who is being very supportive and cool about this whole process but who I can see is freaking out just a little.

Whew.

Wish me luck.