alphabet matching

When I first saw foam stickers, I have to say I was a little cynical.  They seemed like a terribly inefficient and excessive way to design stickers just so that they would have 1/8" of hight above the page.  But over the past few months doing stickers with my 2 1/2 - 3 year old boy, I have become a convert.  Not because they are extra special and pretty- but because he can peel the back off by himself.  Maybe other 3 year olds can do this with flat stickers, but not my boy.  He can do the foam stickers, but it still takes him FOREVER.

So when I found packages of number and letter foam stickers in the dollar bins at Target, I snapped them up.  I didn't know for what, but I figured I would come up with something.

I stashed them away until I figured out what would be the perfect thing to do with them.  And then, of course, Jonathan found them while was cooking dinner and holding a screaming up baby.  He wanted to play with them NOW.  So I had to come up with something fast and dirty- and here it is.  I drew the letters on graph paper (because it was what was handy).  And pulled out one sticker for each letter of the alphabet.

The goal was for him to match the letters and then stick the sticker on the page at the proper spot. Simple.  Easy.  Low time commitment for me; high engagement for him.  It got him thinking about the exact shape of each letter and having to distinguish between T and J and I;  O and Q; R and P and B; etc.

It was a hit, so I think I might try to come up with a more permanent game that doesn't require me to keep buying more stickers and re-drawing the letters.  I am thinking about rigging something up with magnetic letters and an old cookie-sheet.  Also I would like him to start recognizing the lower-case letters since most of the text we read is in mostly lowercase- so when I start paining my cookie-sheet I think I will be paining those instead of the caps.

Storyboarding

We recently took our first trip ever without our little man- we were flying with the baby; he was staying with Gramma and Grampa.  Since he gets his patience from his mother and still has a limited understanding of long-range planning, I didn't mention it to him until two days before the trip.  I tried to frame it as his adventure in getting to spend the night with Gramma, but his reaction to the news was tears.  "Why don't I get to go on the airplane?!?"

I panicked.  As if I was not already feeling guilty and nervous enough about leaving him.  So I broke out an idea a friend of mine who is an art-therapist had shared with me- storyboards.  The idea is that everyone, even (and especially) little people, do better when they know what to expect.  But little people also have a limited understanding of time and often limited vocabulary.  So storyboards can help prepare and guide them though unfamiliar situations with pictures and a time-line.  And they can take ownership in a situation that is beyond their control if they get to help design and make the storyboard. Plus it helps with the foundations of reading to have a story told from left to right with pictures and words.

So the night before our trip, I sat down at the kitchen table with a big (9x11) sheet of paper, our markers, and Jonathan on my lap.

You can see my artistic ability in the exquisite stick-figures.  I drew one row for each day and divided it up into a few key events- wake up, school, church, bedtime, etc.  As we talked through what his days were going to look like, I tried to give him choices in the pictures.  "When you wake up you will have breakfast with Gramma.  What do you think you will eat?"  or  "Samantha will probably be at school- what color should we draw for her?" or "What kind of toys to you think you will play with Grampa?" By the third or fourth box, he was pretty into the idea and getting more excited about the trip.  He brought the storyboard with him, and Gramma crossed off the days as they happened so he knew when to expect us to return.

I don't know how much it helped him, but the trip went well!

choices

Today was an exhausting day.  It was my first day home for summer vacation and for some reason I guess I was mentally unprepared for what "vacation" was going to look like this year.  Don't get me wrong- I am SUPER excited for this time with my kids.  But I might need something stronger than a pot of coffee to keep me going because staying home with these two little guys is WAY more work that being at work.

(yes, he is wearing 15 shirts)

By the time the kids were in bed and Jim got home from work, he practically had to peel me off of the floor.  And what do I have to show for this day of hard work?  A sink full of dirty dishes, a hamper full of dirty clothes, sticky finger (and mouth) prints on the glass door, a fresh pile of crumbs under the table, and a bathtub full of match-box cars waiting to dry out.  I spent all day today sneaking extra cups of coffee and chocolate chips in a vain attempt to have an ounce more energy.  Nothing got crossed off of my to-do list.  Because I was busy.

Busy constantly monitoring Zoë's progress in learning to army crawl up and down the step into our play room so as to avoid a bloody nose.  Busy answering the 500th question of the "WHY is that lego green?" variety without loosing my sanity completely.  Busy re-stacking the stacking cups- again.

Days like today I feel like I am running at top speed but getting nowhere.  I desperately need a reminder that the to-do list isn't what is important.  A reminder that the things that are important are built.  Slowly.  Little choice by little choice.  The choice to take a deep breath in another room instead of screaming.  The choice to insist on serving zucchini for dinner instead of chips.  The choice to pull out the crayons and stickers instead of popping in a video.  The choice to ask them to share the leggos.  The choice to act like it is a still a surprise when the trash-truck falls down the slide for the 5th time in a row.  None of the choices make much of a difference on their own.  But today I need the encouragement that a week or a month or a year or 18 years of making those choices day in and day out adds up to something.  To kids who know they are valued and important.  To kids who might not always make the right choices, but who know what love and compassion and self discipline and character look like.

caterpillar house

I found my first caterpillar in our garden yesterday!!  (I'm sure there will be more- they usually eat my parsley to the ground).  But yesterday I snatched this little guy off of our carrot leaves:

I plunked him with his carrot top into some transitional housing, to wait for Jonathan to get home.

I then had him help me make a new house for our caterpillar.  We filled up the bottom of a big vase with dirt, mulch, rocks, some sticks and some more leaves for our little friend.  He insisted on adding one of his insect sponges too.

We put some saran over the top to keep him in (and little fingers out).  And the caterpillar house is not a lovely centerpiece for our table!  Last time I did this, the caterpillar made it into the chrysalis stage- but he never came out.  Hopefully this time will go better!

Birthday Part 2: Cakes

We might have gone a bit overboard with desserts surrounding this most recent birthday.  But with my Mom in town, we had so many cute and yummy ideas that we had a hard time limiting ourselves!  We narrowed it down to three desserts- cupcakes for school, chocolate shortcakes with strawberries for the family party, and a construction cake for his party with friends.  They were all a hit!!

We put these cute little faces together using nilla wafers, cheerios and a pre-made tube of red gel icing the night before and I think only one got eaten for breakfast!

A few weeks ago they started digging up the streets around our house to redo some sewer lines.  As a result our neighborhood is a little like toddler-boy construction heaven.  During the day (including Saturday) at least one bulldozer or dump truck drives past our front yard every 10 minutes and we can see 3 excavators from our front door.  Not surprisingly, our little man has caught the construction bug- so we decided to go with it for his birthday theme.  From new toys:

To the cake:

 My Mom and I had a lot of fun making this one.  We made a 9x13 cake and used chocolate icing. We scooped out one corner of the cake for the excavator's hole and pressed Oreo crumbs onto the slope:

 We took the scooped out cake pieces, along with some icing and more Oreo crumbs and made a pile for the bulldozer to be scooping up:

And we mixed Oreo crumbs and Nilla Wafer crumbs 50/50 to make some gravel for the dump-truck to be dumping (and some coconut tinted with green food color for some grassy contrast):

I was really pleased with how it turned out!  I think next-time I would have made the chocolate icing a bit lighter so that the Oreo crumbs would have had more contrast.  But it was a hit!  And  hard to wait until the party to dig in!