It can’t decide decide if it wants to rain today. So it’s just wet from random sprinkles. Around here, rainy days usually equals the resurrection of a tent of some fashion.
ps. if you are coming over today, don’t come in the front door….
Tags: tents
Our baby swing broke this morning while Emma was mid-swing. It snapped at the hinges and she abruptly dropped to the floor. She made a face like she was about to holler, but then stopped and looked around as if to say, “whatever this works too”. And she just sat in the swing on the floor until we were ready to leave. That’s my girl, roll with it and we’ll get along alright.
The swing was a hand-me-down when we got it for JJ. Then it was worked to the bones through all the boys, the other kids I watch and several 3 and 4 year olds that took it for a ride every now and again. It had a good long life.
Tags: baby swing, Emma, friends
We have been in this place with Henry (almost 3yo) for 9 months now. He won’t nap but he still needs one every couple days. If he doesn’t nap, by 4pm he can be a terror. But if he does nap, he doesn’t go to sleep until 10pm. You see my catch-22?
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while – you may know already my love for sleeping kid pictures. Here are a couple I have snapped in the last few months during this transition. Poor guy, he so clearly needs a nap.
Conversation between me and Kim…
Kim was talking about how she was going to homeschool Tyler for preschool.
Me: “Oh, I could never homeschool, I’d go crazy , I’m not organized enough, etc”
Kim: “Jill, you DO home school your boys.”
Me: “Oh, I guess I do.”
I never think of it as homeschooling.
Tags: friends, kids, tot school, totally tots
We go to our little library in the strip mall about once a week. Don’t knock it, it has some of the sweetest librarians around. Every once in awhile, we’ll get a couple of books from the library that I don’t want to take back. We have a little library, so usually when we get books I pick up ones that I requested online from recommendations. The boys also pick from the selection there too, which usually means dumping out shelf after shelf to find the one they want to take home.
I’m not going to do a book report on each of them, that’s what Amazon is for, so here’s our list from our “checked out” this week. These are all great, you know the the kind of book that you actually don’t mind to read again, the books that the words just bounce off your tongue (love Dr.Suess) and then especially the ones that get a giggle out of me and the boys.
We have been having so much fun doing the Christmas Book and Activities at the Crafty Crow. She basically picked 12 Christmas books and put fun crafts to do with them. We requested and checked out at the library whichever books on her list that were available. Yesterday we did two, The Gingerbread Man and Mr.Willowbys Christmas Tree and today we did Petunia’s Christmas.
The boys LOVE apples. They probably eat 2 a day each. They aren’t apple snobs like me either, any type will do. They love to eat them whole and usually they accomplish eating the whole thing and sometimes they leave it half eaten. The half eaten are the ones that pain me. You know they won’t eat it later b/c “It’s yucky” aka brown. I encourage them to finish eating the whole thing, but sometimes they don’t.
To solve the problem, I took the advice of Amy Dacyczyn, author of The Tightwad Gazette. When the boys are “done” with their apple I cut up the uneaten remainder into lil’ pieces, stick them in some Tupperware and stir some brown sugar and cinnamon in with them. Then we have a a special treat for later, save some apples and the boys love them. They call it, “Mommy’s Special Apples”.
One of the projects I loved doing this summer was creating and then using JJ’s Zoo Field Guide. We are Zoo members (thank you to Mr. and Mrs. E!) and with that you receive a STL Zoo Magazine. JJ and I usually look through it together when it arrives and talk about the animals we want to see the next time we go to the zoo. Unfortunately, the next time we go to the zoo we have already forgotten what animals we saw in the magazine.
This time when the magazine came, we recycled it by making a Zoo Field Guide. Here’s how we did it: Read more…
You know the toy bins I’m talking about. We bought ours at Target thinking this is a practical way for the kids to organize their toys. After a couple months, I realized that JJ (2yo then) does not have the ability to remember that the Turtles go in the small red bucket and the blocks go in the large yellow bucket, etc. So inevitably, the bins would have random stuff in every bin, no matter how much I showed him the “right” way to organize them. Well, duh right? He was 2 years old. Read more…
Tags: organizing
Greta tore out an article for me at the OT’s office titled, “How to Let Kids be Kids“. I knew it was up my alley when I saw the title picture of kids running through a big mud puddle. It basically talks about the benefits of not over-scheduling your kids, how society hypes up over-scheduling and how to get your kids to discover simply playing.
I think the majority of the time, our lives reflect the ideas this article. So this is one of the few articles that makes me feel like a good parent. (: Most of the time it’s just my laziness, not my intention, that he plays with a cardboard box for an hour…and this article says he may learn more from the box play then a planned activity. Yea! Read more…
