Santa Portraits | NEW 2020 STUDIO POLICY!

We are SO excited that we have the opportunity to bring Santa back this year, I am not going to lie, when COVID started in March..and then April and May it was one of my first thoughts (and many of yours!) that we wouldn’t have the magic of Santa. But our Santa is awesome and wants to have this for the children but we hd to come up with a plan to make it the safest possible way to visit with him. Together we came up with this list of things that we will do to ensure everyone’s safety— I know it’s a crazy time and I hope that the magic this year can bring will warm your heart! We know that we have the best Santa in Richmond Virginia and our private Santa sessions are something to be treasured!

Santa portraits Richmond va

Top 10 tips to stress less from a former panic attack queen

The racing heart, tightening in your chest, sweat pouring — you’ve likely been there and experienced a moment of intense stress or panic attack in your life! For many years I thought there was no end in sight, and then, things got better. I created a video to help walk through some of the things I have done to better this, but here is a quick checklist if you want to screenshot it to go through the steps when you’re feeling this way.

stress less checklist

Homeschool Schedule | Moms with a plan

Most of the time when people decide to homeschool there is lots of hours of preparation, decisions to be made and well thought out plans. This week we learned due to the coronavirus that our children would not be returning to school until next year (and we are a district that doesn’t get out until mid June!) and I have to be honest I had a little panic set in upon hearing that— which was the first time I’ve really felt uneasy about all of this.

We’ve been told to…
Stay home? I got this. Working from home I knew this wasn’t going to be an adjustment for me.
Don’t eat out? Great, lets save some money that we always say we are going to cut back on.
Sanitize everything and wash your hands all the time? Have you SEEN my stash? We’re good there too.
Don’t go around people. This is probably the hardest thing we’ve come across— I haven’t met a stranger and my kids live for playing with someone other than us all of the time- but we are committed to this because we believe it’s the best thing we can do.

And I was fine with doing work from home for two weeks, I mean.. you can do ANYTHING for two weeks right? But quickly those two weeks turned into months and I began to doubt myself. By last night I had picked myself up and began a plan… and that plan included a schedule! My life revolves around the never ending to do list, but it helps me stay focused— so why would my children who are coming from “specific things on certain days at the same time” be able to adapt to my “we get it done when it happens throughout the day” plan I THOUGHT we would stick to?? It actually was a lot more stress for me to be “stress free” — So here we are :)

I am not going to be rigid with “20 minutes for this, or scheduling a break here” — you can tell when you’re children are going to need to move around. For “science” today- it was literally reading a book about brains and halfway through I saw them fidgeting a little bit so we let our brains show us they could quickly respond to commands, “Skip! Jump! Touch your toes!” They loved it, and quickly were able to sit back down and we finished the “lesson”. — I’m not being too hard on myself here, we are literally at Day 1. Ground Zero. But… I didn’t hate it and i’m excited for tomorrow too.

I struggle a bit with worksheets without seeing the whole plan, so I did invest in some homeschool curriculum and I’m excited for that to arrive, but the school will continue to provide help as well— It’s just hard to print out SO many sheets— my printer is already screaming low ink when I just put a new one in last week! I’d rather buy a book! So we grabbed some things from The Good + Beautiful (highly recommended by most of my homeschool friends!), I found some workbooks and textbooks on Ebay, and believe it or not we have plenty of stuff here! If you’ve ever ordered educational books from Usborne.. you got this! :)

I am excited to see where this will go, and here’s a schedule that I created to help us to mark things off the list feel free to share it, and tag me on IG if you print it off! @meggarrison

homeschool schedule

So for “TV time” section the kids will get 5 points per line a day, equaling 30 points. If they get all 30 points they automatically double those, equating to 1 hour of TV/Computer free time in the evening. I probably should have labeled the “only asked once” a little better since i’m sharing it, but it’s something we like to say to remind the kids to do something the FIRST time we ask not making us yell and go crazy for something they could have just gotten done quickly.

I LOVE seeing one week at a time because it not only saves paper but lets us gauge how the week is going. And if you are non-religious here’s one without scripture study:

homeschool schedule