A Few Randoms

Weekend art work.  Somehow, painting turned into finger painting...

A special date with just my boy.  A trip to the zoo with two things on the agenda:  ride the train and ride the carousel.  We accomplished both of those and then he was ready to go!  Haha!  And it turned out to be a good thing because it started pouring as soon as we got in the car.  So we stopped for donuts at the bakery down the road and headed home.

When I first saw this little booger, I thought "Oh my gosh! I have to get a picture to show the kids!"  And also that this must be our garden visitor this year, since we have one every year.  Well!  Little did I know, this is not a catterpillar of any kind.  It's some sort of tomato "worm" thing.  It doesn't get into the tomatoes themselves (although it does eat some of them, leaving wide, gaping wedges missing), but rather it eats almost all the foliage from the plant itself so that the tomatoes have little tools to reach the nutrients from the sun.  I could have gotten him out of there, had I known!  Instead, little by little, the leaves disappeared and I was left with bare branches sticking up like twigs.  :(  We still have plenty of tomatoes, but they're just not as abundant as years past.  P.S. - the head of this thing is at the bottom.  It totally grosses me out now.

A second trip out to pick blueberries.  And it's still unreal to me that we wore long sleeves and pants!  That's just unheard of for blueberry season!  Usually, we are dripping with sweat by the end of picking.

This Week...

After practicing with the "-at" word family on the Easter egg for a few days, I tried a new reading activity with Sophie using six of her now familiar words as sight words.  On two separate pieces of paper I scattered each of the words all around the page (three different words per page) and gave her three different colored dot markers each time.  She stamped all of the words that spelled "cat" in blue, "sat" in a different color of her choice and "bat" in yet another color.  She loved this and it was more great practice.

Will spent just about every afternoon climbing the door frame - his new favorite skill.  LOL 

Both kids wanted to work on some dot stamper pages on another day and worked hard to create about four or five masterpieces each. 

We had swim lessons tonight at my mom and dad's.  The previous location for our swim lessons was no longer allowing open swim to the public and our private instructor agreed to come out to my parent's pool to finish up our remaining three lessons.  The lessons also got moved to Thursday, which was fine.  So tonight, we finished up the lesson and stayed awhile after to swim with papa.  Craig was doing our usual grocery shopping trip and my mom and brother are in Honduras on a mission trip for the whole week.  So it was nice to spend some extra time with papa.  During the lesson, we found a frog floating in the pool filter and I had to scoop him out with my bare hand!  I put him in the grass and we thought he was dead, but slowly he seemed to regroup and start to move a little bit.  The kids took turns holding him and Sophie pretended to kiss her Prince Charming.  :)

Finally! Some New Paint!

It's been awhile since we've done any painting!  Our tiny pots of Crayola washable paints had been used up and awaiting replacement for quite some time and finally we've gotten some more.  The kids received a box of new, small, paint pots as a Valentine's present from us and we promptly dumped them into our awesome drip-spout paint containers.

They got to work this morning at their easel.

Will, of course, painted Transformers. 

And then washing up the paint brushes (which I always leave to the kids to do), was almost as entertaining for them as painting!

Valentine's Day 2013

I was just about to make a quick, lunch-break trip to Hobby Lobby a couple weeks before Valentine's Day to see if I could find one of those paper mache mailboxes for Will to decorate for his class party... when Craig insisted that he was going to make one at home instead.  Will is still completely enamored with Transformers and Craig wanted to make him an Optimus Prime letter box. 

Seriously, the amount of effort and detail I watched Craig put into this thing was ridiculous...ly adorable.  :)  Craig said he always had a cool homemade box when he was a kid and he wanted the same for Will.

Will's job was to color in the cab and hood, which were covered in paper with flame outlines sketched in.

Will LOVED this!

You can see the open flap at the back of the truck bed.  That's where the Valentine's went in and, when lifted up, it had Will's name displayed on the underside.  Then the flap was able to tuck inside at the end of the party.

Will also spent some time the weekend before V-Day filling out some requested, store-bought, Transformer Valentine's to pass out to his friends.  Of course.

 

Thankfully, Sophie's preschool class made all their own Valenine's "pouches" in class so she didn't need a box.  But we did make her Valentine's at home from an idea on Pinterest.  I printed a fish bowl template just large enough to fit into a resealable sandwich bag and then traced one for each child in her class onto cardstock.  I cut them out and wrote in the wording on one of my lunch breaks at work and then Craig spent an evening that I was taking Will to karate to work with Sophie on tracing her name on each of them.  She's still not completely legible with writing her name yet, but it's getting better.

On another evening, she and Will worked together to put the fish bowls into the bags and spoon a few spoonfuls of fish crackers in each.

They read:

"Valenine, I'm glad we're in the same school!  Love, Sophie"

Valentine's Day 2013 - and party day for both kids at school today!

No great shots of both of them together this morning, but oh well.

This evening, Nana came by to bring them each a Valentine surprise (an OSU t-shirt for Will and a Comets t-shirt for Soph + some treats for each) and then she let them climb in her lap and sort through all their cards from their school friends.  They were in heaven.  And I was grateful for some free moments to finish up dinner preparations.  Thank you, Nana!

Happy Valentine's Day!