Spring Fever

Spring fever has officially hit our house. 

Grumpiness, restlessness, a desire to run away – far, far away from Minnesota… and that’s just Mama.  It definitely hits me the hardest.  My husband is an eternal optimist – February always makes me happy because I know it’s not much longer now until spring (he says while I shoot eye darts at him along with mental warnings to just shut it because he knows full well what I consider real spring is at least two more months away); and M always has the hope of coming snow to break up the monotony of our days (while I shoot eye darts at the skies and wonder just how did I end up in this cruel, cruel cold wasteland).

So.  There you see the real me.  The real pregnant me,- because throwing up all of January, just to be hit with gray skies and snow in February does not. seem. fair.  We need some happy yellow daffodils poking up through green grass.  Not more grayness, covered with an occasional layer of whiteness and blah-ness. 

We recently went here, as everyone in the family is desperate for Mommy to act somewhat normal again:

I kept thinking how lovely it would be if they would just leave me here for a week with a pile of good books and a pillow (and please try to get rid of the rest of the people milling about.  Because sometimes they talk.). 

And it seems M has caught the flower bug.  He has grand plans for his very own garden this year.  He spent an entire afternoon looking through a flower book and marking all the flowers he wants to plant:

 

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that here in Minnesota (sigh) you have to choose based on hardiness, not prettiness.  So here’s what the book looked like when he was finished with his page marking:

He wasn’t actually finished… he just got to the “G”s and ran out of bookmarks. :)

My husband saves things like vegetable trays from Sam’s Club, thinking that they’ll come in useful “someday”.  I fake-smile at him and mentally scream things like “Declutter!  Peace!  Sanity!  Small home!”, while he thinks things like, “Useful! Recycle! You never know!”.  As long as he stores his “stuff” out of sight, I am okay with it.  And, clever man that he is (and he is, I admit) he used a little super glue to attach an upside down cover to a tray, then poked some drainage holes through the bottom of it.  M will be using this to start his garden – hopefully sometime this week we’ll get around to actually planting the seeds:

Because in this cold and cruel place you have to start your seeds inside, two months before spring, if you actually want anything to grow. 

Now I’m off to continue my hibernation attempt (if only everyone would leave me alone, I’m sure I could sleep through March).

Your little ray of sunshine,
Nicole  :)

Crafty Science Experiment – Crystal Snowflakes

Winter has been around for a while, and M recently decided he needed something other than leaves hanging in front of his bedroom window (maybe I was in denial about the whole winter thing?).

I’ve seen this little project everywhere, so I’m sure it is new to no one except us.  I don’t know why we didn’t get around to doing it sooner.

It’s all about saturated solutions.  We used the following items:Borax, 5 pipecleaners, 2 dowels, food coloring, 5 glasses, measuring spoons, and a kettle for boiling the water.

First, boil some water.  We had a full kettle and used almost all of it to make 5 snowflakes.

While your water is boiling, form the pipecleaners into snowflakes.  We cut each snowflake into 3 sections, leaving one longer than the others (for hanging), and twisted them together in the middle, then pulled apart the six points of the snowflake.  Twist the long end around one of the dowels, then hang in a glass.  Make sure your snowflake is not touching the sides of the glass:
Next, I poured the boiling water into each glass, and M began measuring tablespoons of borax into them. (Note – borax can be harmful if swallowed, so make sure your child is able to do this without deciding to take a taste!).  He stirred until the borax dissolved, then added more until there was a bit that wouldn’t dissolve, making a saturated solution – yay! :)  I think it took about 3 tablespoons of borax for every cup or so of water.  We weren’t too exact, to be honest. ;)


We decided a little color would be nice, so M stirred in a bit of food coloring.  We added in a quick color-mixing review, and made one of them purple by using blue and red together.
Then we let all the little snowflakes hang out over night:
They stayed in their solution for about 18 hours total.  The following day, the glasses looked like this: Isn’t it beautiful?  I think it would be really neat to do this to a glass jar to make a pretty votive holder.  I hated washing all those pretty crystals off, but decided we do need drinking glasses after all.
The snowflakes turned out great!  Here are some of them:

We let them dry on a paper towel, then moved them all to a clean dowel rod and hung them in front of the window:

You can also do this with sugar or salt.  The main thing is making sure your water is saturated with whatever it is you are using.  If you use sugar, use a string instead of a pipe cleaner, and make rock candy!  (You could use a pipecleaner, but I’m thinking about the fuzz getting in my mouth – bleck!)

I’m linking this up to   Be sure to check it out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

It’s for the Birds :)

I know the experts say you shouldn’t use cutesy titles for your blog posts, but sometimes a person just can’t help herself, right? 
I realized last week that I have not yet shared a fun little post-Christmas tradition that we have here.  We always have a real Christmas tree, and once Christmas is over and done with, we find a spot in our backyard and set our tree up for the rest of winter.  We pile the snow up around it until it’s reasonably straight and stable.  And by we I mean my husband.   Because, as you know, I’m all about hibernation in the winter, not going outside and doing crazy things with the Christmas tree.  But anyway…
It pretty much stays green until spring, and we make little cheerio bird feeders like this:
and hang them on the tree for our little feathered friends to find.  We also toss stale bread onto it, as well as any half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we may have lying around.
We have seen lots of sneaky little squirrels stealing things and chasing each other around. :)   However, as much as they might try, they don’t get it all!  We have a great variety of birds munching on our treats too, and it’s been a lot of fun to watch our beloved Christmas tree and the activity around it this winter.
I just wanted to share. :)
Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – January 17, 2010

M is 40 months old. 

Yay!  We’re back!  As nice as it was to not write up the TS posts for the past few weeks, it’s also very nice to be back in our groove. 

So, here’s what we’ve been up to…

Math Skills:

I put together a little *math box* (well, in our case a math coffee can) like the one here that my friend Natalie at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns put together for her daughter.  It was full of craft sticks and various bottle lids.  I even threw in some little cards with shapes on them.  He was totally interested in this as it sat on his shelves, yet… he wasn’t sure what to do with it.  So, I showed him how to make shapes with them and suggested a few other things (patterns, letters).   And, I kid you not, the kid said to me, “But can’t I just paint them, Mommy??”   I’m thinking this says a lot about who he is. :) 

We also did some fun number stamping with a grid and a number cube:   I wrote the numbers 1 to 6 randomly on the grid (20 spaces – you can print one here), then using a variety of stamps (the pencil top kind) we rolled the die and then stamped out all of the 2’s or whatever number we got.  We took turns with this to make it more like a game, because M is all about games lately.  He had to help me find the right numbers quite a bit. ;)

We also did some snowflake counting with clothespins and a piece of yarn: I don’t know if you can see clearly in the photo, but we had 5 snowflakes with numerals on them which we clipped in sequence onto the yarn.  Then we had snowflakes with dots on them which we had to match to the correct number and also clip on.  M really, really enjoyed this.  Anything to do with clothespins or paper clips is sure to be a hit around here lately!  The snowflakes were found here.  I colored them with colored pencils to make them pretty. :)

We also practiced counting with some linking monkeys: This was a great introduction to addition!

 

Shapes and Colors:

M did great with this little activity.  I found this pattern block mat here; it has 4 hexagons in different colors.  In order to do this M had to figure out how to make the red hexagon with his trapezoid blocks, the orange one with triangles, and the blue one with diamonds...  a very interesting activity!

 

M also enjoyed his triangle collage page:

 

I bought these fun color paddles with a little leftover Christmas money.  They were from Oriental Trading. M had a lot of fun walking around and looking through them at various things.We also used them in a window to mix colors by placing one in front of another.  There has to be a ton of things we can do with these.  However, I’m really coming up with blanks.  If you have any ideas, share them!!

 

Literacy Skills:

M worked on his letter matching file folder game from here.  This matches upper and lower case letters.

 

We did a letter stamping game similar to the number stamping one mentioned above.  With this one we used a printout from here, and some upper and lower case cards (more on these cards in an upcoming post!) to turn over… we focused on just Tt, Ff, and Aa and stamped them out.

 

M did his Bob the Builder name puzzles with glass beads: He continues to love these!

 

Sorting:

Our theme for this month has been winter and snow (hence the snowflake activities), and we sorted our seasonal clip art onto colored paper.  M did great with this, he’s really got his seasons down. 

Fine Motor Skills:

I have to say, gross and fine motor skill work is what M enjoys most… I have to keep that in mind and incorporate it into other areas, like using fine motor skills to clip numbered snowflakes, etc. 

Another little thing I ordered from Oriental Trading was this awesome Shapes Hammering set.  M loves hammering the little nails into the corkboard and he’s made several pretty neat designs with the shapes.  Most often he pretends he is building a house. :)  He’s played with this every day since I put it out for him.

He laced together two foam mitten shapes:

 

He received this great fire truck puzzle for Christmas and did it 5 times the first day.  It has 46 pieces and has an emergency scene on the other side.  He LOVES this puzzle!

 

I put together a little push pin activity for him, which he also really loved!  We had some little letter cards left from our toothpick poke activity which has become a little boring for him, so he did those first, then I added in some little shapes and drawings for him to outline with the push pins. He really enjoyed this and it was a great workout for those little fingers!  I think I first saw this at The Shafer Family blog.

 

Geography:

We’ve only recently been talking about maps and the world, our country, state, etc.   M is very interested, and enjoyed doing this puzzle (Target Dollar Spot!) of the U.S. Ha – you can see this picture is from some time ago – our Christmas light patterns are in the background! ;)

 

Gross Motor Activities:

M and Daddy and I all ice skated on wax paper in our living room: This is so much fun!  We first did it at our Nature Center weekly class, and it never gets old!

We did our movement cards too; they are always fun.  I’ve found that if M is in a bad mood or whiny or whatever (sigh), if I can think of an activity that has a lot of gross motor movement it helps tremendously.  He turns back into himself.  I’m just not good with all this “boy stuff”, hee hee.  I was a sit quietly and play with my dolls kind of girl.  But, I’m learning!!

 

Music:

M inherited a small keyboard from an older cousin and has been playing it non-stop: It plays a couple of demo tunes by itself and has 5 different rhythms to choose from.  M loves to play these rhythms and make them faster or slower.  It comes close to driving me up a wall sometimes, but I’m glad he’s learning about rhythm somewhere, because he sure isn’t going to get it from me or his dad! ;)

 

Sensory:

We’ve been using some oatmeal (in the cupboard for over a year) in our sensory tub lately.  After seeing oatmeal in a sensory tub at April Flowers, I decided to do it too! M enjoyed playing with his farm animals in it:

And because he loves to play with my seashells I hid them in there one day – 20 of them.  I have him a grid with 20 spaces and he spent a long time looking for all of them.

 

Creative Play:

M also inherited this remote control Scrambler (a Bob the Builder truck) from the same cousin that gave him the “piano”.  Well, he has pretty much played non-stop with Scrambler since we brought it home.  Here he is with all of his puppets and some stuffed animals strung out on the floor… trying to get Scrambler to run over them all. :)  Yep, that’s my sweet boy running over animals with a 4 wheeler. ;)

For more Tot School posts, go here!

Have a beautiful day! :)