Handwriting

Katie really enjoys drawing and coloring. Recently she used some glue and glitter and then told me that she made it for her best friend, Lauren. She wanted to know how to write "Lauren." I was a little busy so I tried to appease her by just telling her the letters and hoping I wouldn't have to stop what I was doing to write it out and show her (lazy mom). She surprised me though, since it was the first time I had ever seen her attempt to write a word. I didn't expect her to be able to write the letters from memory either, but she did a decent job for being 2 years old (ALMOST 3).

You can see that she wrote the "U" upside down, and the "r" is above the U. It is lower-case and she didn't like the curved part at the very top so she corrected herself to lower it slightly. Don't you love the "E" with a million lines on it?

I asked her to write her OWN name - and this is how she did. It was her first time writing her name, but I spelled it for her so she knew what letters to write. Not bad.

On a related note, here is Ryan's handwriting. He made a picture for one of his best friends, Sarah. She's 8. He's 4. But they get along really well. And my kids have good taste in friends because Lauren and Sarah's mom is one of MY best friends too.

And here's the back of Ryan's paper for Sarah. He drew a picture of Dazzle. She's one of the Planet Heroes and he LOVES her because she has a lava gun.

A Fun Preschool Day

We decided to take Ryan out of preschool in January. I was glad that he had something to look forward to, he loved the painting and projects and especially friends that he got to see regularly. BUT - I missed him. And I realized that this was possibly my last year with him before kindergarten and I wanted to take advantage of it. I wanted to take the opportunity to teach my OWN child. I feel like it is not only my duty, but it is something that I genuinely like to do. It felt silly to pay someone else to teach him when I am always talking to Derek about the time when I will one day open up my own preschool and teach other people's children. Hello! What about my own child?

SO... now we spend time each day doing different projects and activities. Ryan is learning to read and we practice his handwriting. He is very cooperative and likes to help me think of things to do in school. Thursdays are our field trip days where we take rides on the train, go to the zoo or science center, find a neat nature reserve and go on a hike, that sort of thing.

This was a particularly fun day for me because I could see my children learning. And it was completely child-lead so we were doing what THEY wanted to do.

They started off stringing letter beads.

Which then progressed into sorting colors.

Then Ryan wanted to know which color had the most letter beads so we decided to graph it.
Here they are putting one letter in each square (of this huge awesome pad of paper from Uncle Adrian.)

Here are the letters all lined up. We looked at it and could tell that yellow had the most, but Ryan wanted to know exactly how many of each color.

So then we used a marker to trace along the edges and made a bar graph. He counted each square in the blue bar and came up with 23. I showed him the line next to it and said, "If that one has 23, how many do you think this one has?" "23," he answered. I went along that way for each of the other lines and it was fun to see him subtracting one or two from each line to get the answer without needing to count every square each time.

Like I said, it was a rewarding day. Afterward, I couldn't help but feel like a pretty good mom. And I knew that teaching him at home was really worth it because I could watch him learn. I didn't know that he could count to 46. I also didn't realize that he could compare one quantity to the other like that. I probably would have just missed it completely if I had kept him in preschool.

Domestic?

I got this high chair from freecycle recently. I really like that it is smaller and wooden and fits nicely at my counter like a stool for the kids. The only thing wrong with it is that it didn't come with the cover. It's no big deal for an older child, but Millie just didn't sit comfortably in it.

Then, a few weeks later, I snagged some memory foam off of freecycle and I decided to try my hand at making a cover for the memory foam to go on the high chair. Not having a pattern or barely any sewing experience made things a bit tricky. Plus, I needed to have the top be vinyl so that I could wipe down spills. I also needed the cover to be removable.

Here's how it turned out. I am pretty pleased with it overall. If I had a do-over, I would make it slightly tighter because right now the cover sort of sags all over, and I would make a lip on the top back that goes over the back of the high chair, but it is functional, and I made it. So I'm happy.

A Few of My Favorite Things

This is kind of a silly post, but I just felt like posting a few things that I like.

Knitting. I am just barely learning, but I am excited for what I will one day be able to make.

Soap nuts. This is the fruit of a tree that is natural laundry detergent. I love it.

And these are some of the beautiful flowers that are found in my garden. These are the ACTUAL flowers - not just pictures from Google. Bless the owners of this house for surrounding us with such spring beauty.

Our snap peas are growing.

Millie's Milestones

Three weeks ago, I went into Millie's room in the morning and found her standing up in the crib. Mind you, she was not completely upright, she was quite hunched over, but it was an indication that I needed to lower the crib mattress.

Also, I have noticed that when I hold her on my hip, she usually will climb up me until she is in a standing position - my arm around her back with her feet straight and standing on my gut. Her body isn't against me - just her feet. This is how she prefers it and she'll stand like that for 30 minutes at a time. (Note to self: get a picture of this.)

She has to be watched much more carefully now because she will pull up to standing next to anything she can and we are in a house of all hard floors. She's had her share of head bumps already. She can crawl over the step from the living room to the kitchen area, and Derek recently walked into the kitchen to find her up on the dishwasher door. She is really not coordinated enough to be doing this stuff because she can't get herself safely down. Heck, I wouldn't leave her on the hard floor sitting by herself and walk away. She still falls over to the side half of the time. Crazy girl!

Happy Birthday Katie

*This post has been sitting as a "draft" for practically a month now. Might as well post it.*

Katie turned 3 years old right before Valentines Day. I have discovered that I buy toys too often for my kids. This is because I generally buy toys that have already been used by someone else from thrift stores or garage sales or Craigslist - so it's easy for me to just bring them home and hand them to my kids to enjoy (or else they are there with me when I buy them and they are excited to play with them). Problem is, when it comes to birthdays or Christmas time, I just don't know what to get them. We go to the toy store or Target and everything just looks like useless JUNK. I already have enough clutter - I really don't WANT to add junk to my house.

So, this year, we got Katie this tub of letter beads to string (lower case letters) and 10 books. She was as happy as can be - and we didn't feel like we were adding useless junk to our collection.

I have never thrown an actual birthday party for any of my kids yet, but my good friend who has a Disneyland Annual Pass took Katie to Disneyland for two hours so she could go on "It's a Small World" and get a birthday button. I asked her what kind of cake she wanted and she said, "No cake." And she meant it. I asked her multiple times and she always replied with the same answer, so "no cake" it was. We took her out for frozen yogurt instead and she had a great day.

A few days later she picked out this little kitty family with the birthday money from Grandma Cookies and Grandpa Cozza. She definitely loves kitties. (And doesn't her hair look awesome?)

Happy Birthday Katie.

p.s. 3 year-olds go potty in the toilet every time. Well, almost every time.

Blue

Jodie, she is getting up on her hands and knees and moving forward now, but it's not like she is at full speed. The bigger babies have more poundage to move around. ;)
Her eyes are blue.
Like, but don't LOVE the teether. I put frozen bananas in it or frozen baby food and she seems to enjoy it, but I only use it before I bathe her because it makes a huge mess.

She has an unsightly runny nose in this picture - so I cropped it to avoid the "what gross pictures" comment. Ha!

A Few Milestones

Millie decided to start crawling on all fours last night. No longer just a worm. And today those two little teeth finally decided to break through on the bottom. Two milestones in two days. 6 months is a pretty busy age.

Give a Cat a Bone?

So, I have a random chicken bone sitting in my fridge right now. Just sitting there on the shelf. I felt like it was a reasonable, though silly, compromise.

Ryan loves all things fast; space shuttles, race cars, jets, Blue Angels, the French TGV trains, and of course, cheetahs. He pretends to be a cheetah pretty much all the time. He is always on all fours (hands and feet, not knees) and races all over the place. He's actually pretty fast at it. He often scares Katie with his "mean cheetah" faces. He is learning that "mean cheetahs" have to go outside. Only nice cheetahs are allowed in the house. He tries to keep the mean faces to a minimum. The cheetah play has also caused many a hole-in-the-knee of his pants, but that's a story for another day. I digress.

He has recently started asking me - no, BEGGING me for a dog bone. We go to the pet store to buy food for our bunnies and he asks me if I will buy him a dog bone. I ask what he wants to do with it and he tells me in an exasperated tone, "Chew on it." I have tried to explain how disgusting that is (he LOVES the word "disgusting" right now), but he still insists that he needs one so that when he is pretending to be a cheetah, he can chew on a bone.

So last night when we ate a roasted chicken, he asked for the drumstick. Then he cleaned the chicken off of the bone and went and washed it off. Don't think I didn't see it coming. At least it doesn't have weird dog stuff on it. I told him it would NOT be okay to keep it in his room or else it would get gross and start to smell awful. He declared that he could keep it from going bad if he just put it in the fridge. *sigh* A good compromise? You tell me.

Response to Gina

Maybe I shouldn't mention that last week alone, all three of our children fell off of a bed and hit their heads. All three. In one week.