Seven Quick Takes

~1~

Farmer's Market tomorrow! It's the first morning of the year, and I'm excited to go. I think Ender will really enjoy the experience now that he's a year older, and I hope it will be a good opportunity to talk with him more about how we get our food.

~2~

So is there a correlation between age and number of pages read at night? I swear I can only make it a page or two into any given book before I start falling asleep at night. Fiction, non-fiction, doesn't matter. The other night I got into bed to read around 8:30 and don't remember falling asleep. Superman tells me it was before 9:00.

~3~

Have you seen this beautiful Montessori space? I love this infant room! And while we're looking at gorgeous Montessori inspired rooms, have a look at Jennifer's Learning Room.

~4~

Superman has a rare day off tomorrow and our boys are going to be hanging out with their grandparents so we're taking the kid-free opportunity to clean out the storage room in the basement. I know- we're big party animals. I have to record in the morning so Superman is going to work on a school paper until I get home. Then it's all about the cleaning, baby.

~5~

We visited with our pediatrician about Ezra's speech (or lack thereof) on Tuesday last week and we're delaying any intervention. I just don't feel it's necessary yet, and our doctor was willing to wait until he's two before we pursue this further. Since the appointment Ezra added the word "No" to his vocabulary, and he's making attempts at the word "cracker" so I think we're fine.

~6~

So, I've had a few people ask me to post my recent knitting. I really would but there hasn't been any. Crazy, right? My poor needles have been stuck 3 1/2 inches into the cuff of a sock for probably two months now. I've been mostly busy with Reed's Quilt and some clothing for the boys in my limited crafting time, so knitting is on hold. I promise to get back to it soon!

~7~

Consider this a little hint at the quick weekend project I'm planning. It had a former life as a table cloth. It sooooo won't be a table cloth when I'm done with it. It also may not go as plannes and may end up being a total wash, so we'll see.

Graphing

We did our first work with graphing the yummy way- with M&Ms! I demonstrated how to make columns by color (we were working with Easter colors, so we had blue, green, pink, lavendar and yellow) and Ender did a great job sorting. He had a hard time with putting just one M&M per box, so that took a little bit of practice.

 

Ezra wanted to help too.

After Ender had formed the columns, we used another graphing chart to color in the same amount of boxes as M&Ms in each color.

 

 



The M N M at the bottom of the page was his idea. :)

 

And one last note. I swear we do make it out of our pajamas at some point during the morning. Superman pointed that out the other day- so many of the pictures I post here are from when the boys are still in their jammies. They do own clothing other than pajamas- I promise!

Butterflies

We saw so many butterflies on our morning walk yesterday that we came home to make some of our own. I remembered seeing some butterfly crafts over at The Crafty Crow not long ago and we used one of those examples as our inspiration.

First the boys finger painted on paper plates. This is the first time that Ender has really filled a page with color instead of just painting the center.



After the paintings dried, we cut little triangle notches out of the plates to make wings. I cut for Ezra, and Ender cut his own. I had precut the butterfly bodies so we stapled them on and the boys colored the bodies.





 

When we finished with everything, we hung them on one of our windows.

 



 

Summer plans?

Want to help me out?

I will be working a lot less over the summer so I have been making a list of things I'd like to do with the boys over the summer. You know- the things all kids should do in the summer? We have a few local day trips planned (like we're going to visit the dairy we buy our milk from) but I'm trying to also to think of the little summer things like having picnics, playing with sidewalk chalk, making our own ice cream, looking for fireflies, and spending a lot of time in the water. The boys will be 3 1/2 and 2 over the summer, so we're not quite old enough for things like lemonade stands.

Any ideas?