Live. Laugh. Love.

We are to the point of buying buttermilk by the half gallon now! :) Most of it goes into making pancakes (at least twice a week), but some goes into other baking too. I have a coconut lemon bread recipe I want to try soon that calls for some buttermilk.

On the menu last (oops!) week:
1) Lots more pancakes... our standards: whole wheat oatmeal and carrot, of course.
2) Philly cheese steak sandwiches! Thanks to my friend, Melissa, for sharing the recipe. We all loved them!

3) Grilled chicken with black bean salsa - recipe from an old Cooking Light magazine but I can't find it online to link.

4) Lasagna... I finally got the recipe my mom and sister use (which is courtesy of my Great Aunt Jane) and we definitely like this one better than my old one. It was soooo good!

5) We actually ate A LOT of lasagna leftovers last week. Haha! But then Casey and Wes kindly invited us over on Friday night for BBQ beef stew and that was fantastic! I just printed the recipe after linking it here and I definitely plan to make it again. It's a slow cooker recipe, which is soooo nice to use on busy days. Plus, Craig was in love.

6) I also baked a batch of Aunt Cathy's chocolate chip oatmeal cookies last week and that has sufficiently satisfied the sweet tooth we all have post meal time. :)

Question for you this week: what is your favorite slow cooker recipe?

Happy eating, friends!

Yikes! These pictures have been uploaded for DAYS and I'm just now getting around to filling in the text for this post. I guess I got a little distracted.

So here are some of the learning activities we've been up to over the past few weeks.

Will has gotten sliiiightly more interested in writing/drawing recently (though still not a LOT) and he still needs a LOT of practice. I found this great book at a teacher supply store shortly after Christmas. It has dry erase pages that teach him to trace, draw and follow directions and he totally loves it.

Tracing the path of a firefly. Apparently he has inherited the tongue-hanging-out-pose from Aunt Casey when he concentrates/writes/draws. I think Casey still might do this?

Learning to draw a butterfly with step-by-step directions and then space to do it all on your own.

Skip counting with even and then odd numbers. He needed help with this.

Tracing a spider's web.

While Will worked on this book, Sophie worked on her bear family dressing puzzle.

Now drawing ants...

...and tracing in a maze.

Sophie also moved on to her green coin slot game.

She then created an improv game of spoon-feeding pretend "soup". Perhaps this is broccoli stew from her Hey! Wake up! book.

Okay, I know the idea of this is scary, but she never actually put a coin in her mouth. She was just pretending and I was watching her the whole time. Just to clear that up... ;)

This was a cool page that asked him to draw circles around the yellow butterflies, squares around the red ones and triangles around the blue ones.

Okay, finally moving on from the cool workbook...

This was a day that the kids were playing with empty spice containers. We haven't done open-close trays in a long time, so I don't know when he mastered this, but Will can now easily unscrew the lid of a jar/container.

Sophie still needs a hand, but she's starting to get the hang of it.

More improv on their part: sticking maracas into the container and pretending they're ice cream cones.

Also this day, we broke out the crayons and some of Will's giant coloring pages from his birthday.

We own a couple books about planets and outer space and Will's been very interested in learning about them recently. He knows all the planet names and, of course, has favorites that he will tell you about for very specific reasons. We learned that the first four planets closest to the sun (Mercury through Mars) are the rocky planets (made up of rock) and the last four (Jupiter through Neptune) are the gas planets (made up of gas). We also learned some neat facts about each planet and lots of new vocabulary for Will. He requests this book (below) and one other one frequently.

This book was one of his Christmas presents and we'd just gotten around to playing with the sticker page. There are stickers for many of the new words he's learned (galaxy, milky way, meteor, astronaut, etc.) and of course all the planets, and he could create his own solar system in the center of the book.

On another evening, we did some fine motor activities.

Sophie dropped toothpicks into the shaker lid of a spice container.

Then unscrewed the lid (with a little help), dumped them out and started again... and again... and again.

Will did his nuts & bolts work again that we've done in the past. Again, like the unscrewing of the spice container lids, he seems to have mastered it now. It takes a lot of twisting and turning to see any progress so this is definitely a good work for patience and persistence.

Ta da!

I planned this next game mostly for Sophie. Will had done it in the past and it seemed a little too easy for him now, but he still wanted to participate in her activity. They worked together to put erasers on the ends of all the pencils - another good fine motor task.

What I love about Tot School work at Sophie's age is the love for repetition. And, with Sophie, you need only show her something once and she picks it up instantly and immediately gets herself to work. She worked so diligently and then neatly set out her finished pencils in a row. :)

When they finished, Sophie took it upon herself to then UNcap each one and place the erasers in the container they came in.

I am so proud of my girl for this next game! I first showed it to Will almost a year ago and he really struggled with it. Probably because at a younger age, you don't understand that it's helpful to work in rows or columns so as not to bump the other marbles. Sophie placed each marble randomly too, but she must just have a little more control because she only knocked over a few and she was able to retrieve them and fix it. She did this whole peg board on her own!

Sophie is usually very careful with all her Tot School type work. Quite the contrast from her normal playing behavior. Around the house, this girl is such a destructive, little tornado!

Yay! Great job, Sophie!

Meanwhile, Will worked on his patterning board (another 3rd b-day present) from Lakeshore. He really enjoyed it this day and chose strip after strip of patterning ideas.

After she finished the peg board, I gave Sophie a handful of marbles and a melon baller to transfer between two bowls. She did this pretty skillfully too after just a couple times showing her how to twist her wrist.

Saying the pattern aloud to figure out what comes next.

He did it!

Next, he took three of my larger marbles and pushed them through the holes of the Bilibo one at a time to watch them slide up and down the "ramp" (sides) like a skateboarder.

He did one at a time and laughed when they knocked into each other.

Sophie has also been noticeably into dumping and pouring things in the bath tub and on her high chair tray. Grr. So I thought she'd dig the activity of pouring beans between two measuring cups. The idea is just that it takes a little more control and caution not to spill any beans. (No pun intended.) We started with larger white beans and Will showed her what to do.

No prob. Beginner's luck.

Next up: smaller black beans.

Puzzles! Sophie is not nearly as interested in puzzles as Will was at this age. I wish that she were - I think they're such a great activity - but every once in awhile, she'll get into them for a little while. I try to present them often. She especially likes the animals and numbers. She's been really into numbers and counting lately.

Will still loves puzzles and can sit and work at them for long periods.

Here's another thing I picked up at the teacher supply store: word family flashcards.

They're great for learning how groups of letters ("families") work together to make similar sounds in lots of different words. Will really enjoys them and we usually do a small handful of cards in the evenings a couple nights a week.

Branching off of those cards, I came up with a fun game that combines a sensory sort with reading word families. I gave him a dry erase board with a word family already on it and a cake pan filled with other single letters (mixed up under the dried lentils) that can work to make a word in front of this word family. Make sense?

Can you see the letters hiding under there?

He dug out a letter, placed it on the board and then read me the word.

This was the other word family we did: "-ar".

And finally, a great game I found online: a paperbag digraph sort.

I used this printable and cut the tops off of three paper bags to create a shorter sorting recepticle. (You don't really need the bags - you could just lay them out on the floor. But I think the extra element of dropping the words into the bags makes it more fun.)