And Baby Makes Three

We welcomed Baby B to the world on Friday. He is such a sweet baby boy, and we are truly blessed that he is healthy. We are home now, and J and M are adapting to life with a new baby brother. My mother has come to help for a few weeks, and I am so grateful. I am not sure how we'd manage without her!

We couldn't be happier or prouder to be the parents of three such sweet souls.

A Day at the Park

We have a wonderful park right behind our house with a duck pond and playground as well as walking trails, basketball court, bird houses and fishing. The proximity to the park (I see it out my kitchen window) is one of the reasons we bought our house a few years ago.

Whenever the weather is nice, M loves to go over daily to play. This past weekend I remembered to bring the camera along to catch some fun morning playing. M loves the slides, and J loves the swings (and basketball court).

This is M posing for the judges. She got a 10 for sliding down the "tunnel slide."

Here is one of my favorite shots of T pointing out the baby ducks to M.

J's First Author Signing

J loves author Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series of books. He has read all of the books, seen the movie twice, and looked up many of the Greek Mythology tales retold in these stories. When he heard that Rick Riordan was coming to a nearby city for an author signing, he really wanted to attend.

The bookstore it was held at had given out all 1,400 tickets in less than an hour, which meant that J would have to stand in line for several hours to get a chance at a signature. He wanted to go anyway, so he and Daddy packed their sack dinner and went off to the bookstore Thursday evening. J waited patiently in line for over three hours to get to meet his favorite author and get his book signed, but he said it was worth it, and he couldn't be happier!

Insect Crafts

I know posts have been scarce lately, and they will probably remain that way for the next few week's until we welcome home our newest addition.

M has been working on many insect related activities this last week, including several crafts.

First, she made a ladybug using paint, pipe cleaners and an egg carton. M loves anything involving paint, but you could use markers to color the egg carton as well.
Next, she made a ladybug using paper plates, paint and pipe cleaners (I helped with the dots). Again, markers or crayons would work in place of paint as well.
Then, she made a bumblebee out of tissue paper, a recycled water bottle and construction paper. This was her favorite craft by far, and that bee has been flying around our house for several days now!

I will try to post more of our insect activities in the next few days.

Shiny Paint

M has been wanting to paint all week, so Saturday I set her and J up to do "shiny paint". "Shiny paint" is just corn syrup with food coloring added to color it. It is very sticky to paint with, so we used popsicle sticks rather than ruin our brushes. It dries very shiny and smooth textured, and the kids really enjoyed using something different. Be warned, it is hard to clean up and food coloring will stain - so we wore aprons.

Tot School: Birds

(M is 33 months old)

As I mentioned before, I am on bedrest until our son is born, so I really haven't been able to prepare any items for M for school. On top of that, my laptop recently died, and we won't be replacing it for a while (I am using my husband's work computer to post). Luckily, my mother stepped in and has made some fantastic theme weeks with activities that M and I can do while I lie down. I didn't get pictures of everything, but here are the ones that I did get from our Grandma-designed bird week.

Math: M created a bird using her puzzle pattern pieces and we did some 1:1 correspondence and counting using Robin's Egg candies left over from Easter. She also did some sequencing of paper birds by size.

Art/Crafts: She painted a bird and we added tissue paper wings. It flies over her little table right now.

We talked about what birds build their nests out of, and then using a flour and water paste and a coffee filter to help hold the shape, M made her own bird's nest. We used twigs, moss, grass, yarn and feathers just like birds do.

Letters: We filled in the missing alphabet letters using stickers and then M colored-by-letter on a bird shape. I had her use twistable colored pencils to work on her grasp, which she really enjoyed.

M also played with some new bird magnets and learned about different types of birds. The flamingo was her favorite, because it was pink, of course. She did some shape matching and worked on finding which object did not belong in a series from some worksheets Grandma made up for her.

She did lots of pretend play - making birds nests out of playdough and pretending to be a bird flying around the house. She also spent quite a lot of time outside with her brother observing birds, feeding ducks at our pond, and searching for birds' nests.

This coming week we will be working with dogs and activities related to the book The Pokey Little Puppy, which is a current favorite in our house. To see what others did in Tot School this week, check out the McLinky at Carisa's blog 1+1+1=1.