Week Eighteen Recap

Monday:

We are back on track today! Hooray! As much as I love the holidays, and the go go go busyness of it all, I am happy to say we are back on schedule, everyone is napping, and we started our alphabet back up again. It was awesome to have Jordan home around Christmas and visits from the Georgia Peaches but it’s also nice to get back into the swing of things. We added a new piece to our daily schedule today—the calendar! Today we talked about the months of the year and the days of the week and we took turns putting the numbers on the calendar up to the 5^th. We learned a song about the months of the year and one about the days of the week that I am sure everyone who has attended preschool has heard or learned at one point in their lives! After we finished our calendar talk, the kids played with our musical instruments for M week while I got a project ready. We had some free play and then some snack, and then we made decorated mittens with little squares of tissue paper. Tristan wanted to draw, so we used colored pencils for the first time to color in a picture of kids making music. I love how intense Tristan gets when he uses a pencil or pen. He holds it the right way and almost colors in the lines! I am so proud of him!

Tuesday:

Snow Day! Well, sort of. It has been lightly flurrying all morning. We ate our breakfast, got dressed, and added a 6 to the calendar, then had some free play time while I threw in a load of laundry. Before we got too rowdy, we did some of our letter/picture puzzles. After we cleaned up, we did our project for the day---painting our Mouse M’s with water color while reading Mouse Paint. We had a little snack and then I made the executive decision to venture outdoors for a bit. After layer upon layer upon layer were, er, layered onto us, we headed outside. I was sweating at that point, but it was quite chilly. We took a walk down to the church playground and played in the little houses for a few minutes, then walked back to the house and tried to make a snowman. When that didn’t work, we tossed snow at each other until I mentioned peppermint oreos and both kids made a break for the door. It was a nice change of pace to get outside and blow the stink off! After our peppermint oreo snack, we built some forts, which is practically a must on a snow day before settling in for a (hopefully) long winter’s nap. After naptime, we ate our lunch and had some free play time, but we were a little too cranky for non-structured play. I decided the other fun thing to do on a snow day is build forts, which lasted for a little bit, and we finished the day with playing with some play dough.

Wednesday:

I think we all woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Today started off a little rough and cranky for all of us. After breakfast, the struggle of getting dressed, and calendar time, I decided we needed a little zen and calm in our morning, so we did some yoga. We haven’t done Cosmic Yoga since before Christmas so it shocked me that the kids lasted a full ten minutes before they got bored and started climbing all over me. It helped to stretch our muscles and take a couple deep breaths. Today’s project was an inverse snowflake painting. Using scotch tape, I made a snowflake shape on a small piece of blue paper. Tristan and Lily’s job was to paint the entire paper white, using a foam brush. They did a great job and when we peeled the tape off, you could see their snowflakes. After some snack, we decided to go on a shape hunt around the house. They had so much fun looking for circles, squares, and triangles that once we finished all our shapes, we moved on to a color hunt! They were running from room to room showing me all the things they saw that matched the colors we were talking about. It gave us some extra movement time which is always nice when you’re stuck inside all day. We settled down after our hunt and read some books. I left the room and when I came back, I got a “shh mom we’re reading!” That is always music to my ears!

Thursday:

Today started off slightly different than usual. The heater was acting up, so after we ate breakfast, we moved upstairs to Lily’s room to play because it was much warmer up there. It was a very…trying morning. They fought over almost every single toy and I couldn’t leave the room for even a second without someone crying or screaming at the other person. But the heater was fixed and we went about our normal day of looking for shapes and colors, having a snack, and making a snow hat by decorating half of a paper plate. We used markers today for the first time during project time and they did a very good job keeping it moderately neat! We read a few books before nap, after running a few laps and going on a bear hunt to warm ourselves up!

Friday:

TGIF! This was our first full week together in quite some time. And because I deeply believe in karma, especially in the once-a-kid-now-a-parent sense, I need to send my mother flowers for the hours she spent pulling my brother Bobby and I away from each other. I don’t know what it is, but they love to swat at each other! I’m guessing it’s the age, coupled with we are stuck indoors 98% of the time. As long as we keep moving, and stick to a routine, we manage. That being said, we did our breakfast, get dressed then do calendar thing this morning with little to no struggle or tears (mine or theirs). I got the instruments down and put on a music channel so they could jam. Once they started fighting over harmonicas (we have two, one just has a black string and is the coveted one), I put on some Cosmic Yoga and we stretched and took some deep breaths for a while. We tried Pedro the Penguin. It was definitely faster paced than Swish the Fish, but we had fun. For our project, I mixed glue and shaving cream together and let them go to town on a picture of a snowman. Lily dove right in with a brush and then her hands, but Tristan told me he did not like it. He did paint with the paint brush for a little bit, and I got him to dip a finger in and stir the fluff around but when he said he was done, I wiped off his finger and got him some colored pencils to draw with. It kept Lily entertained for quite some time! The pictures were a little too heavy/messy to save, but it was a fun new thing to try. 

Well, here's to a new year full of (hopefully) many new projects and fun new adventures! We have a lot of new going on over here (wedding planning, diets and exercising, learning and crafting) so I am super excited for 2015!

Enjoy your weekends!