My bloggy friend, Susanna at Our Homeschool Fun tagged me to answer 8 questions.
Here are the eight questions:
What do you worry most about (that is, if you are a worrier like myself)? At the moment I worry about Reese at school....will anything horrible happen when I'm not with him?
What is the one food you could not give up (and yes, chocolate is a food group)? CHEESE, glorious full fat cheese!
What is something that you do not like doing on a daily basis, but you do anyway? clean up after dinner and change poopie dipers
What meal do you cook most for dinner? I try to spread it out so nothing can be pegged as "the most frequent." Over the summer we were on an asparagus & ham lasagna kick or fajitas.
How many times per week do you cook on average--a real meal, Eggos and/or chicken nuggets do not count:-)? 6
Do you have a tattoo? (and no, for the record, I do not :-)? no
Who is your favorite children's author? hard to pick just one, eric carle
What is your favorite fragrance, ie, perfume, body splash, lotion? Banana Boat after sun beachy smell and Bobbi Brown Beach perfume
What is your favorite nice place to eat out without kids? the melting pot is a new found favorite
We took a bunch of letter C stuff on vacation with us and never pulled it out. We didn't even read any books! We actually spaced this C stuff out quite a bit because it seemed like we always had a lot of other stuff going on. We started off using the do a dot markers to make both a capital and lowercase letter c. Reese loves these markers.
I got downloaded these from Me and Marie Learning. I have seen them on several websites though.
Reese used his crayola markers to color in the C with as many colors as he could. He really spent a lot of time coloring with both crayons and markers during this letter C period.
Gluing the c words on remains his favorite part. He also added c stickers.
We tried some celery with peanut butter for a snack. It was ill-received.
We used the lacing cards also from Me and Marie, but not for lacing. I laminated and then cut it out, but I was in a hurry before vacation so I didn't punch the holes. When we pulled it out to use I decided to use our little shape counters from the Target dollar bin.
Reese just placed them on the letters to follow the shape. He was very concerned about finding enough in matching colors to fill the letters.
We did some workbook pages about colors. He had to circle the items of a designated color. This was the pink page.
He practiced his pincher skills with the clothes pins. This came from Me and Marie Learning. He has to locate the C and place the clothes pin on it.
We worked on ice cream cone counter discs with the clothes pins as well as the counter shapes. I'm afraid to let him use beans because I think Gus will come steal them and eat them all.
Reese picked carrots from our garden and we made beef stew with them.
We were disappointed to find our library didn't have the clumsy crab book this craft was based on, but it was a fun craft anyway.
Reese also made a caterpillar. He painted half an egg carton green and added a little pink (for flair?), added some googly eyes and pipe cleaner antennae....
and took that caterpillar for a walk across the table.
He worked on some counting caterpillars we downloaded from Confessions of a Homeschooler. We also used theColor matching and upper/lowercase matching caterpillar puzzles. Several of my photos this time are totally visible in my storage area on the computer, but when I try to use them most of it is grayed out. Photoshop says it's corrupted or something---very annoying as it appears to have loaded in my computer, so how am I to know? Now I feel like I can't delete photos from camera until they have been successfully used/printed. grrr...
Also corrupted were the photos of the play doh mats we used. He molds the play doh into the shape of the letter. We found a cool pack of different style paint brushes at walmart. One of the options is a foam dauber. He tried it out on this crab mask we got on sale for $1 at Joanne's early in the summer.
He had lots of fun giggling behind this mask and chasing Gus around. Gus didn't really get the whole mask concept so the amusement was one sided.
These are the books we read:
He really enjoys showing daddy what he made! He races to his door as soon as daddy is home to tell him all about his creations. Of course this time he had two 3 dimensional crafts that couldn't hang on the wall.
Overall Reese really seems to be enjoying doing all his letter projects. You can find a bunch of other cool tot school ideas.
The poor boy fell asleep in the car driving from speech to school. I woke him to take Reese inside, then as soon as we got home I put him in his crib for a real nap. I heard him talking to his animals and books for a LONG time. Finally about 2:20 he was totally quiet. At 3:20 I went to rouse Gus from his nap so we could pick up Reese at school. This is what I discovered:
Seriously?!? Gus took his diaper off!!! Luckily it was clean as was the bed. I would've had to toss a pooped on cow had he actually gone.
Ugh, we've been dreading it all summer. School began today. Last week the the teacher called and asked if we'd switch to the pm class. I was seriously dreading the struggle to get up, all of us ready amid the struggle to get dressed and in the car, while Reese shouted "no school" at 8:15am, especially since we've been getting up about 9:30 everyday. So I gladly granted the request to move to the afternoon.Reese's inclusion class is our city special ed program combined with headstart. So there is a special ed teacher and 2 aides as well as a headstart teacher and 1 aide. We also have 2 volunteer "grandpas" from the community usually in the class. Headstart doesn't start until next week so today and Thursday we go from 12:45-3:30, next week we go 4 days a week starting at 12:15. Reese picked his cubby to hang his new Buzz backpack and his jacket. He remembered the routine---play with the legos while waiting for the bus kids to arrive. I'm still too afraid to do the bus. We'll see how this goes with the napping situation. Gus usually naps about 11:30 or 12pm. Since Reese has to be dropped off at 12:15 I plan to keep gus awake and hope he doesn't fall asleep in the car then let him nap when we get home, while Reese is in school. This means I'll have the time to actually get something done. We'll see..... He almost instantly told me I could go (such a difference from last year when he wanted me to stay forever!). I waited awhile until the aides got there so the teacher wasn't the only adult. She's new and I don't know her, so ....I don't know I feel like just because you are a teacher doesn't mean I can automatically trust you. I guess I'm a little freaky. He was so intent on his dry erase and chalk board drawings. After this the aides arrived so Gus and I hurried home to nap. He did not nap well. He normally sleeps a solid 3 hours. he was in the bed for about 2 hours but he was very restless. I heard lots of rustling and babbling. Of course he was kind of cranky later. So....we need to iron out the schedule. Reese reported he had fun on the slide and he ate cheese, so that's all I know. They pinned something to his rain jacket which punched holes in it...grr....but I think it went well.
Reese got this laptop as a gift from grandma for his birthday or Christmas. Now that Gus has shown some interest in playing with it Reese has been using it everyday. He's a non-sharing little turd. But he is getting really excited about the letters and likes typing letters he knows. He typed MMYY and told me it was Mommy!! I was pretty excited!
Gus thinks it's fun too.
Reese was actually willing to share for once and tried to show him stuff.
They were really working hard on something long enough for me to notice...the missing little people farm animals stuffed in the sub-woofer!! See that pink back there in the hole? That's a pig. There's a sheep too.
Gus has his goldfish crackers on the stool. He's just snacking away. By the way his new thing is he takes these stools and scoots them all around the kitchen like a push toy.Here the chunky monkey (can you believe those cheeks are only 2nd percentile?) is dropping a cracker on the floor all sly. There's Tara squeezing in behind him to get the crackers. She's gobbling as fast as she can and he is on a mission. To get cracker crumbs and slobber on my camera lens!
A few days ago I was making some meatballs for the boys to have with lunch. I sneaked one and started thinking there must be a way to eat this where they aren't hidden in spaghetti sauce. This is the concoction I came up with. This is Kyle's second helping. I should've taken photos along the way, but I wasn't confident it would be very good.
This is what I used:
1 pound fresh asparagus cut into bite sized pieces 12 ounces baby portobellos cut into bite sized pieces 2 red bell peppers cut into bite sized pieces a little olive oil and salt and pepper aidell's pineapple and teriyaki meatballs 2/3-3/4 package of whole wheat linguine for the sauce: 1 cup chicken broth 1 TBSP corn starch 2 TBSP soy sauce 2TBSP hoisin sauce 2 TBSP rice vinegar
Boil pasta according to package directions. Meanwhile, in a large skillet saute asparagus, mushrooms, peppers in a little olive oil. Add a bit of salt and pepper to taste. Add meatballs, cook until heated through. Add sauce, stir, heat until thickened. Add drained linguine to skillet and mix to coat the noodles in the sauce. Serve....YUM! If you use homemade meatballs I think they should be marinated in teriyaki first.
This summer had kind of a late start followed by a mix of excruciating record breaking heat and no sun days. I think this is to blame for my utter failure of a garden this year. Even my zucchini died. In the past, like everyone else, we've had more zucchini than humans can consume. My tomato plants and bean plants have always over grown. This year my bean plant is literally about 1 foot tall.
I have been diligently picking and freezing each full sized bean since early August in hopes of collecting enough to make one dinner's veggie side dish. So far I have enough for one adult. I'm sure Reese would gladly make the sacrifice, but I was hoping he'd be more inclined to eat it if he picked it himself.
The plant isn't dead so I'm still hoping we'll get enough for all of us to eat beans once this year. Next year I think I'll have to do some extra soil prep and rotate my crops. I think I'll grow my seeds indoors for longer as well. Hopefully a little tweaking will give us an improvement over this year pitiful crops.
On Saturday we went to the Blackberry Festival. It's the usual stuff...food booths, vendors, music. They had a whole parking lot dedicated to bouncy house toys and a kid rock climbing wall.Reese tried out the obstacle course first. He went through MANY times. He loved it and really could not get enough. Next he tried out the caterpillar. It was a long tub with little obstacles inside and then you got out by going down a slide. Along the side were plastic windows so we could see in like this:
They also had little air vent holes so I stuck my camera to get a shot of: Gus went in too! It was a little rough in there once a bunch of bigger kids got in. I did get a little anxiety that he was sometimes face down on these pointy things for what seemed like too long. In the photo below you can see the black circle outlining a vent hole. Next to it is a vertical green strip. That's an emergency exit zipper. I kept my cool and let Gus stay inside. He had a blast! Once he realized we could look in the hole at him he kept coming back to get us. This was the exit. You have to climb the ladder to go down the slide to get out. I was hoping the bigger kids would go up calmly and then Gus would get the idea and follow. But they were all wild and crazed. Gus didn't really get to watch it be done and he never even attempted to climb it. So in the end we did have to unzip it in order to get him out. Both boys really had a great time. We need to find an indoor facility that has these so we can go whenever we want. Anyone know of such a place?
Kyle and I got married March 17, 2006 in Vegas. We had Reese 11 weeks early on February 16, 2007. This blog is all about our juicy scoop. Blog#2 RECIPES: With an eye towards organization I will post my recipes here to eliminate the recipe cards that inevitably stack up in a variety of locations around the kitchen.
