It's breastfeeding month again!

August is National Breastfeeding Month

...and an update on my breastfeeding journey has been posted on the Sweet Pea Births blog, like the last two years.

You can view it here.

Father's Day!

I love Mother's Day and Father's Day.  I know they exist to make money and that they shouldn't be different from any other day, but they mean a lot to us anyway.  Being a parent is the best thing that's ever happened to us.

I dream of years of hand-made goodies from my kids.  So far, we haven't had much cooperation.  My mom has better luck, so most of our goodies come from time spent with Grandma.  Nevertheless, I do manage to get the kids to As You Wish Pottery for our yearly handprint/footprint frame.  (This is probably the last year I'll be able to do this unless they come out with a bigger frame...I'll have to switch to a larger matted frame!)

My mom helped the kids make "Daddy's Helper" toolboxes for my husband.  Each child dictated his/her contributions, and Mom wrote them on the tools.  All Mikey wanted to say was play catch and play cars, so Mom helped him a bit.  Ellie understood the concept a little better.

Mom had a good time with gifts this year.  She got all the men Whoppers for being "a Whopper of a dad."  Most of the men got chocolate candies for this play on words.  Not my dad...

Happy Father's Day!

'365' one-a-day-challenge

Featured Photo of the Week

In case you missed my first post, here it is:

Irresistible Ideas For Play Based Learning has issued a challenge: '365' one-a-day-challenge.  I took them up on it, starting today!  You can find my photo album on Kandid Katie's Facebook page.  There are a lot of fun albums linked on Irresistible's page, so check them out!

Build a Monster

I joined a busy bag exchange group on Facebook.  I decided I wanted to finally start making the cloth quiet books for my kids that I've been planning, so I made pages for all my trades.  The first one I completed was for the preschool group.  The activity is a create-a-face monster made of felt.

I sewed the monster's head onto the page.  (I used muslin, but any cotton - any fabric, really - would work.)  I backed the page with a piece of felt and another piece of muslin.  I would like to have bound the edges, but the muslin I got was ridiculously thin and was trying to disintegrate.  Instead, I did a couple of messy zigzag stitches around the edge to hold it together and minimize fraying.  I made all the monster faces out of green or dark purple felt.  I used light purple thread for contrast.  I also did not take care placing the stitches because I wanted chaos to go with the monster theme.  (I apologize to the neat and orderly monsters out there.)

Since I was going for chaos, I picked a wacky, mustard-colored, animal-print fabric for the storage bag.  I put a button on the bag to keep the pieces in and attached it to the page with a sparkly orange ribbon.  The bag holds the three eyes (well, two sets and one single eyeball), three noses and three mouths I created to stick on the monster face.

Most of the members are not making cloth quiet books, so I added one or three buttonholes, whatever their preference, so that the page could be joined with other quiet book pages of other mediums on a ring or in a three-ring binder.

I also included directions:

In case you can't read that:

MONSTER FACES!

Includes: Monster Head, 3 Eyes, 3 Noses, 3 Mouths and Attached Storage Bag

Get creative and get scary!

Optional 2-person Game:

The first person designs a face with one of each part without telling the second person what it is.  The second person creates a face, trying to guess what the first person designed.  The first person tells the second person how many parts are correct and how many are wrong.  The second person tries to guess again, and the game continues until the second person guesses the correct combination of eyes, nose and mouth, counting how many tries it took.  The players switch roles, and the player who guessed with the fewest tries wins!

For the love of writing

I didn't enjoy writing as a child.  I hated it, actually.  Thank you notes, paragraph-long stories, what-I-want-for-Christmas compositions, every essay in school...they were agony.  I never enjoyed writing until my senior year of high school when we had mandatory free writing every day in English class.  Something about writing anything I wanted until a timer went off appealed to me.

I'm glad writing and I finally became friends, but I'd love for my children to enjoy writing from the beginning.  Tonight I read a fantastic article with great ideas for inspiring children to write.  Journaling, letter writing, emailing and postcard exchanging are ways she inspires her little girl to write.

On a related note, I believe in making children write thank you notes.  I do, however, do what I can to make them enjoyable to write so that my children don't come to resent the task.  I also keep the note writing age appropriate.  For example, for a first birthday, I might trace their hand and let them scribble a bit with a crayon.  For the second birthday, I might let them go crazy with stickers.  Actually, that's exactly what I've done with my two so far, but the next child could have different likes and skills.

Mikey just finished his thank you notes for his second birthday.  He enjoyed making them, so much so that Ellie got a little jealous, so I handed her a pile of Christmas cards, thanks to Daddy's genius.  Mikey had to get in on the Christmas card madness, too.  The only downside to all this was Ellie's disappointment that the cards we mail don't come back to us.  Somebody send this poor girl some mail!  :o)

She colored ornaments on the tree and added a star

Ellie noticed that the trees on the cards were triangles, so I gave her a bunch of foam triangle stickers and let her go to town

5-a-day books

A preschool blog I follow and love introduced me to the 5-a-day book plan.  When I found out about the 5-a-day book plan, where you read the same five books every day for at least a week, I knew it was perfect for our family.  I love themed story times, and anyone who's ever had a toddler or preschooler knows that children love to read the same books over and over and over and over and over...

Since Ellie is obsessed with spiders of late, I choose books about spiders this week.  I also had to include books containing spiders, since our library is surprisingly light on children's stories about spiders.

The three story books in this picture are The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle, Itsy Bitsy Spider (my kids love books that can be sung and songs made into books) and Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin, which is very entertaining.  I'm also reading "Little Miss Muffet" from a treasury of stories and poems.  I added Fuzzy Bee and Friends to get to five books.  Yes, I'm desperately in need of more spiders in our home library.  The three books featuring pictures of real spiders are just reference books we picked up while seeking out stories.

Musical Macaroni and Cheese

We had musical macaroni and cheese for lunch! What is musical macaroni and cheese, you ask? Let me tell you!

 

It's when you make fresh mac-n-cheese for the 3yo, who then decides she doesn't want it. Then you reheat some leftover mac-n-cheese that you were so looking forward to and the 3yo sees it, thinks it's the 1yo's and decides she wants some. You give the 3yo the mac-n-cheese you made for her, and she's so excited. You bring your mac-n-cheese to the table, and the 3yo asks for some. You say, "you have mac-n-cheese," but she says, "I just want to taste yours." You ask, "did you even try yours?" to which she very convincingly tells you she did. You give her a bite of your yummy leftover mac-n-cheese, and the 1yo decides he must have some, too. You give him a bite and he goes nuts. You decide to try giving him the 3yo's, since she doesn't want it. He's thrilled. You feed the 1yo, then the 3yo, then the 1yo, then the 3yo... So you put the 3yo's mac-n-cheese on the 1yo's plate and your yummy leftover mac-n-cheese on the 3yo's plate, just grateful everyone's eating. Then you try to eat what's left of your yummy leftover mac-n-cheese, but it's cold and you're just not hungry anymore.