SC&O: Photo/Video

I think it was January that I placed this order.

Nearly 900 photos (arriving in two boxes from Snapfish) to catch up my albums from May 2010 through January 2011. And that was being choosy with all the photos I actually took in that time. The nice thing about placing a large order is that you really question whether you need each photo. So this was the minimum in my opinion. Haha!

Since then, Snapfish has had some ridiculously good print sales and I've caught up through Sophie's birthday (but not Easter)... another ~200 photos.

Around the same time, I used some Christmas money to order more albums from the collection I started years ago. See here for the catalog's web page and here for the albums I buy. Guess what! They're having their big sale right now (I got a special sale price when I ordered in January too) and I just ordered two more for the kids since I've filled the others. You can see below that there are three album colors. I buy the blue albums for Will, the sage for Sophie, the butter for everything else (general, home, etc.) and I personalize them all. There were actually two albums for each child in this order, but I'd already started working on one of Will's so it isn't in the box here.

I know there are photo printing websites out there (Shutterfly?) that print the date the photo was taken on the back of it. To my knowledge, Snapfish does not and the pictures do not arrive entirely in chronological order. But I've been using them for years and I appreciate their 9 cent prints, so I doubt I'll switch. So... I sit down with a stack, pull up the photo files on my hard drive, write the date on the back of each one and then sort them in stacks by kid and by month. I amaze myself at remembering which month our everyday pictures were snapped. I also often remember events by what we were wearing. Is that weird? Do you do that? Casey and I have discussed this and she does the same thing. So if I'm weird, so is she. ;) So this actually didn't take that long. I should have taken a picture of my sorting box. :) I took an empty shoe box and made divider cards (a la a recipe box) that read: Will - July, Will - Aug, Will - Sept, etc. I also sorted out the photos I would put in the general "Our Life" albums, which I still haven't gotten to yet. Those get filled much less quickly since the kids came along. Duh. Then I worked month by month, arranging the photos in chronological order into each of the kids albums and captioning them after.

Voila!

This is where we've left off. I just ordered volumes 7 and 4 respectively.

I also can't imagine not having memo albums. I love to be able to caption them! Must be the inner yearbook editor in me.

Moving on.

Photos aren't the only means of record keeping I was way behind on!

I also had many, many months worth of video clips that needed to be organized into monthly files on the hard drive, each one labeled and dated. But then I burned DVDs of all of them to keep in with the rest of our collection. You can see we got our video camera when Will was four months old by the date of that first DVD. We just keep our DVDs organized in a CD case for easy access.

I worked on most of these during my sick week following Mother's Day because I could just set it to burn and go back to sleep and then switch a new DVD. The program I use for our camcorder has changed a bit so I had a little learning to do, but no biggie.

So now I just need to file our general photos into albums and order/file our home pictures too. (I like to keep an album of the changes we make on our home for us to remember.)

So now that this very time consuming project is (mostly) done (is it ever really done?)... I can move on to more cleaning and purging. Like, say, the refrigerator. Grr.

First Day, Last Day

Today {Thursday} was Will's last day of school. Preschool Year 1 is over already! Wow.

I read an idea in Family Fun magazine to take a picture of your child on their first and last day of each school year to see how they change. I love comparison/progression photos and before-and-afters so this will definitely be a school year ritual in our house! :)

September 7, 2010 {First Day!}

May 26, 2011 {Last Day}

Thanks for cooperating, Will! :) But Craig cracked up at this picture and insisted I use it. Will's forced smile is so ridiculous. It reminds me of my brothers when they were little.
First Day

Last Day

First Day

Last Day

First Day

Last Day

{You wouldn't think we'd be wearing jeans at the end of May, but alas, this day was only in the 60's.}

First Day

Last Day

I think he looks noticeably older. Don't you?

Craig met Will at school today for a picnic lunch and party to celebrate the end of the school year. They played games and I packed them a lunch and a blanket to sit on. Craig took our old, little Nikon camera and got frustrated with how slowly it snaps compared to our SLR so he didn't take many pictures. But here's one of Will and his classmates singing "Goodbye Friends" for the last time at the end of the day.

Goodbye Friends
{sung to the tune of Where is Thumbkin?}

Goodbye friends, goodbye friends.
Time to go, time to go!
Thanks you, friends, for sharing,
Thank you, friends, for helping.
Love you so, love you so.

It's so cute to hear them sing that to each other. Will's definitely going to miss his buddies for the next few months!

We're looking forward to a fun and healthy summer before beginning Preschool Year 2 in the fall!

Sidewalk Paint

Recipe for Sidewalk Paint:

1/4 cup cornstarch
1/4 cup water
food coloring (enough to reach desired color)

This was our Sunday morning experiment. We spent the whole morning outside and I thought it would be fun to try something new. I found the recipe online a long time ago and was just saving it for a sunny day. ;)

Sophie also absolutely ADORES bubbles right now. So we did a lot of that Sunday morning too.

This pic was kind of an accident but it's turned out to be my favorite of the day. Isn't it cool? I love that you can see both kids and a bunch of flying bubbles through the bubble wand. :)

Chasing bubbles.

Also, on Sunday I did some weeding around our landscaping while the kids played and Will decided he wanted to help. He went and got this stuff on his own and I let him give weeding a try with gloves about 8x too big for him. ;) We also weeded and hoed the "garden-to-be" last week. I'm going to have to pick up some gardening gloves for both kids pretty soon so they can feel like they get to take part in our garden.

Tot School: Birds

This post is way over due... as all but one of the activities were done in about mid-April. I just haven't gotten around to posting it until now.

Will and I have been really interested in studying birds this spring. (All on a pretty basic level, of course.) He had been noticing and pointing out robins through the windows or while we were driving or walking and always talked about them or asked about them. So we started with borrowing a bunch of bird books from the library. You'd think so many books on this topic might bore a child, but not so! He enjoyed them all.

Here are what we checked out:

A Nest Full of Eggs by Priscilla Belz Jenkins

Topics: how birds make their nests; different types of nests; gestation of a baby bird - what they look like and how they change in the weeks after hatching; a whole spread of the different types of feathers; how to "help" the birds build their nests. You'll see below that Sophie and I tried to "help" the birds with nest materials. :)

How Do Birds Find Their Way? by Roma Gans
Topics: names of birds; new vocabulary word: "migrate"; how high and how far they travel; theory that birds have an "internal compass" and can always find their way home.

The Robin in the Tree by Dana Meachen Rau

Will read quite a lot of this book to me.

Robins: Songbirds of Spring by Mia Posada

Topics: spring rituals of robins; their songs: "Cheer-up, Cheerily!"; babies are called "fledglings" and have spotted orange breasts.

My Spring Robin by Anne Rockwell

A girl claims a robin as "her spring robin" and waits all winter for its return, searching through all new signs of spring to find it: crocuses, forsythia bushes, magnolia trees, daffodils, earthworms, etc. until she finally hears its song again.

Just How Long Can a Long String Be? by Keith Baker

The many purposes/lengths of a string. "A string's just as long as I need it to be."

Flip, Flap, Fly! by Phyllis Root

Cute rhymey book with lots of babies! Sophie liked this one.

Little Hoot by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Author of Little Pea, which we LOVED. This is another book that cracked me up to read to Will because his expression and obvious confusion showed that he thought we were reading about an alternate universe. I have to share some excerpts from this book, because there are so many cute ones! First of all, it begins with "Once, up on a branch..." Get it? Like "Once upon a time...?" Little Hoot's parents make him stay up very late because he is an owl and must learn to be wise and nocturnal. But Little Hoot just wants to go to bed. :) "All my other friends get to go to bed so much earlier than me! It's not fair."... "When I grow up, I'm going to let my kids go to bed as early as they want." Then when he was finally allowed to go to bed, Little Hoot's parents said "But wait! What about a bedtime story?"... "And don't forget a glass of water." Haha! My mom bought this book from Anthropologie for Sophie's birthday. I'm so glad we own it! It'll definitely be a frequent read.

After all our books and interest in robins, I found a simple craft to make "rocking robins" on a random (but cool) blog I'd never visited before. We traced and cut out circles from the cardboard of empty cereal boxes.

We tore and crumpled little pieces of red tissue paper to glue on the belly.

Then we folded the circles in half and glued on the red tissue belly, an orange beak and a yellow tail feather.

Will's robin is on the left. Sophie's (with a lot of help from me) is on the right.

For awhile, my kitchen window was looking very spring-ish with our robins and flowers and turtles.

Another super cute idea for edible birds nests came from here. {Will and I also discussed the nest questions at the top of that link and categorized birds that swim vs. fly.}

We discussed how the Shredded Wheat cereal and coconut are like the twigs, branches and grass clippings that birds use to build their nests and the butter was like the mud that held it all together.

Sophie and Will each crumbled a biscuit of shredded wheat into the bowl.

Sophie lined the muffin tin with paper liners.

So cute to see them working together in the kitchen. :)

Love this cutie.

Sophie dumped 1/4 cup of coconut into the bowl...

and Will spooned 1 tbsp of brown sugar in as well.

I added 1/4 cup of (cooled) melted butter and we tossed it all together.

Then they pressed the mixture into and up the sides of the muffin liners. This made six nests.

And into the oven they went - 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

After they cooled, we served them as a treat with dinner with three grapes in each (for the eggs). Aren't they cute?

This idea came from another blog I follow and it seemed like a simple, fun craft that Will and I could work on one evening. We made a "nest" out of yarn using diluted glue and a small balloon propped in a dish to set the shape.

Will clipped lots of long strands of yarn...

swished the strands around in the glue...

dragged his pinched fingers down the length of it to remove the excess glue...

and draped the yarn around the curved top of the balloon.

I helped him keep the appropriate shape of the nest when placing each strand.

We left it dry for a couple days and then I let Will pop the balloon with a pin to remove it.

I found this pair of birds at the Dollar Store for Will to put in his nest.

And we set it on his bedside table. This activity went very well with the Just How Long Can a Long String Be? book above.

On another day, Sophie and I were playing outside and found a bird's nest that had fallen from a tree in our back yard. I told Sophie what it was and that this was a birdie's house.

I remembered one of the books we read suggested you could help birds build their nests by putting out pieces of natural fibers for them to find and use. So Sophie and I hung a few pieces of stretched cotton balls, piece of yarn and felt from the tree in front of our porch.

It also suggested grass clippings, so Sophie pulled some pieces of grass that we left in a bowl near the tree... just for the day.

I found this parts of a bird diagram here and printed one copy on white paper and one copy on colored paper for Will to use as a puzzle.

We talked about the different names of the body parts and which parts were unique to birds that humans do not have.

Will has been so fascinated with looking things up on the computer lately! So we played this really cute Who Am I? game with clues about various birds sung to the tune of This Old Man and then looked up each individual birds pictures on Wikipedia. He LOVED this! I'd highly recommend checking it out (the song game, I mean).

And finally, on a night recently, the kids did some feather painting on their new easle to wrap up our bird activities for now.

I gave each of them a feather and a small bowl with two paint colors in it.

I'm pretty sure Will did this last year and it seemed to work out better. This day, the feathers just seemed saturated so quickly and weren't easy to work with. Will didn't mind, though. He just kept "painting" away. I think what might have worked better is to have them paint on a table instead of the easle and just dribble some paint on a page for them to swirl their feathers around in for a softer, wispier look.

Sophie's work:

Will at work:

After painting, they made feather collages by drizzling glue on a piece of construction paper and pressing different colored feathers into it.

My conclusion to the feather work: feathers are not fun to work with. Ha! They're messy and hard to clean up. :(

But the rest of our bird activities were a hit! The only thing we didn't do that I wanted to was make bird feeder treats to hang outside. But that seems like a winter activity anyway, so maybe we'll do that next fall/winter.