Play dough pumpkins

Earlier this month, the four of us took an adventurous and windy trip to our local pumpkin patch.  We had a fabulous time! 

It was really important for Mini Me to choose the multicolored pumpkins - the ones that still had green on them, so we came home with two small, multicolored pumpkins.  We decided that their heads were shaped like Ernie and Bert!  


Before carving them, I thought we could have some fun with our in-tact pumpkins.  We pulled out our basket of play dough, and the four of us set to work making funny faces.  

Some of these are kid creations and some are Mommy and Daddy creations.  We all had a wonderful time playing, and this was a fun way to make "jack o-lantern" faces over and over again.  We sat down for several play dough pumpkin sessions before carving.  Fun! 

Animals and letters: initial sound activity

This was an "activity" that Mini Me started doing on his own that I turned into a teachable moment.  

While covering (and I do mean covering) some pages with stickers one day, I watched him put a sticker of a seal down and say, "/s/, /s/, seal!"  We had a sheet of alphabet stickers nearby and I asked him which letter made that sound and encouraged him to put that letter by the seal sticker.  

He did five or six animal stickers matched with the initial sound letter sticker before proceeding to randomly stick the stickers on pages.  He had fun and I know he learned... happy kid... happy mama!

 

What did you just say? (Part 3)

I haven't written one of these in a very long while despite the hilarious commentaries of my three year old and some equally funny actions - and now words - of my one year old.  Here we go....

*****

One day I made the not-so-great decision to sing "In Heaven There is no Beer" in front of my kids.  In my defense, I heard the tune on the radio and it's a really catchy tune.  The last line says, "All our friends will be drinkin' all the beer" and when Mini Me heard me belting it out singing it, this conversation started:  

Mini Me:  What is beer?

Me: Something grown ups drink when they are older than 30.  

Mini Me: Why are my friends drinkin' it?  (at preschool the teacher refers to all the boys and girls as "friends").

Me: The song means grown up friends.  Like Mommy and Daddy have friends.  

Mini Me: Who are your friends?  

I proceed to list some of my friends.  Mini Me then asks about the husband of my best friend ("Who are his friends, Mommy?").  I happen to know a couple of said husband's friends so I name them.  Then Mini Me asks who their friends are.  I finally start to see that this is going in a "six degrees of Mommy" kind of direction so I put a stop to it.  My consolation is that now, maybe his little cerebral filing system will remember every person I named and their friendship to whom instead of the beer song.

*****

One morning after breakfast:
Mini Me: Mommy, I just prayed to God!
Me: (very excited) What did you pray for?  
Mini Me: I said, "Dear God, please give me four hands for my police car, ambulance, and fire truck.  Amen".  Now I think every night he will give me four hands.  
Me:  That's great!...

Poor math and freaky anatomy aside, it's not a bad prayer for his first completely independent one!

******

 The three seasons porch we have on our house was added onto the kitchen, which means the window above the sink looks right out onto the porch.  One day while doing dishes, Little Lady's head popped up in the window and she gave me a big grin and said, "Hi hi hi hi hi".  I gasped out loud.  She had pushed her toy grocery cart over to the bench where we store our winter gear, used the cart to climb on top of the bench, and then stood up so she was looking in the window.  She climbs everything.  

 *****

One of our new favorite books is I Am Going by Mo Willems.  In it, Gerald (the elephant) says he is going and Piggy begs and pleads for 50ish pages that he not go.  Mini Me thinks it is hilarious - and it really is.  
He often acts out the book with Daddy.  In fact, he recently been calling Daddy "Gerald" and me "Mommy Gerald" and insisting that he be called "Piggy".  

Daddy/Gerald: I'm going back to work.  Bye!
Mini Me/Piggy: Nooooo.... don't go!  You can't leave me!
Gerald:  I have to go.  Bye!  
Piggy:  No!  Go next week!  Go next month!  Go next year!  Why why why why why why why why why why why why why why.   (note: these are all lines from the book)
Gerald: *He says nothing as he is probably halfway to work now.* 
Piggy:  *Dissolves into laughter*

*****

On the afternoons that I work, Daddy is home and in charge of naps.  Last year Mini Me got into a really bad habit of not resting nicely when Daddy was home.  We thought he would forget this habit over the summer but as usual, we underestimated his tenacity and intelligence.  Once I started teaching again in the afternoons, Mini Me became a pistol about resting in his room.  One day, my husband told me that this conversation took place:  


Daddy: Okay, it's time to lay in your bed and rest quietly.  
Mini Me: Jesus doesn't want me to rest.  
Daddy: What?  
Mini Me: Jesus told me I should only rest for Mommy.  He knows.  

*****

  Little Lady has developed a hilarious and somewhat maniacal laugh.  It's part giggle, part growl.  She does it mainly when she is playing a "joke", like offering me a bite of her snack and then pulling it back when I reach for it.  She also does it when she plays peekaboo.  She'll cover one of her eyes and then uncover it, say some high-pitched gibberish, and then do her giggle growl.  It's pretty darn funny.  

*****

Little Lady is in a bear hug stage.  She constantly, all day long, gives us huge, tight, bear-hug squeezes.  It is pretty awesome.  Almost every time I pick her up, I get a monster-sized squeeze.  One day as we were all saying goodnight, Daddy got one of her bear hugs along with a Little Lady toot.  Someone squeezed too tightly!

*****

As I wrote about in this post, Little Lady recently finished drinking all the frozen breast milk I had stored up.  This is no joke... her very, very last sip of breast milk was in the cup.  She took a swig.  She choked on it.  She spit it all over her shirt and the table.  
I should have laughed at the irony but I felt even sadder than I already did!

Our rainbow walk

I saw this idea on a blog earlier this summer... maybe last spring... and I can't remember where, so if you know who posted about it, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due!
Edit: Julie from Fumbling Through Parenthood posted this idea in June.  I love her son's photos, too, especially the orange one!  Look at her post here.  


One beautiful September evening (I'm a bit behind, yes) Mini Me, Little Lady, and I set off for a walk with our cameras in tow.  I told Mini Me that we were taking a rainbow walk and his job was to find all the colors of the rainbow around him and take pictures of what he saw.  He was beyond ecstatic - I don't know if it was because of the walk, talking about rainbows, or that he got to use the camera!


We first consulted the rainbow painting we made a long time ago doing this activity.  We had to make sure we remembered all the colors of the rainbow.

Next we set off on our walk.  Mini Me had a joyous time snapping photos of everything!  The photos here are all of his real photos.  On some I just cropped it a little closer to see the color he was aiming for.  I think he did a great job!

Here is our rainbow:


RED

ORANGE

YELLOW (Yellow is Mini Me's favorite color, hence all the photos of yellow things!)

GREEN

BLUE

PURPLE (We found these things right after Mini Me said, "I don't think God makes things purple.")

And here are some random photos just because I think they turned out really great.  I love the little guy perspective.  I need to hand him a camera more often.

As a follow-up activity, I put some of his rainbow photos in a Word document and printed them.  


The goal was to cut the photos out and then use our painted rainbow as a guide to help him glue the photos in rainbow order on another paper.  

Mini Me loves cutting and he did a great job.  

It took us four sessions to cut all the photos and glue them in rainbow order.  He enjoyed doing it, but more interesting things kept interrupting us.  He had fun consulting the rainbow he painted so long ago. 

We now have a double rainbow hanging on our fridge!

Making an autumn play dough tree

Mini Me has his very own subscription to Highlights High Five magazine and we love it.  It has stories, poems, games, cooking, and crafting activities.  There is usually a story in both Spanish and English, too, which I especially enjoy.  We saw in a recent issue how to make an autumn play dough tree and he couldn't wait to make one himself.  


We needed a branch, play dough, and a plate.  Mini Me also wanted to look at the magazine while he worked.  
First, we had to put a big lump of play dough at the bottom of the branch to weigh it down.

There was much concentration as he chose small bits of play dough to shape into leaves and stick onto the tree. 

It was his idea to roll the dough into snakes and then pull off pieces of the snake to make leaves.  

We did not have orange play dough so we used yellow and red and did a little color mixing.  Mini Me thought this was sooo super cool!

His beautiful finished project decorated our table for a few days and we all loved looking at it.  It kept falling over, though... play dough leaves are not light and crunchy like real ones!

Toddler color pail: blue

Take a look at our other color pails:

Red

Green

Our BLUE color pail:

 Can koozies

Comb

Foam letters

Squeaky block

Very old tanning goggles

Toy links

Felt triangle

Plastic lid

Crocheted flower

Rubbery key chain

Frog bath toy

Mega block

Chenille stem taped into a circle

Gift card tin

I try to find things that stack and things that are of varying textures.  I love to stack and Little Lady loves to touch the different textures - hard, squishy, bendy, fuzzy, etc.  

She explored the blue pail at least once every day - she pulled it right off the shelf and plopped down with it.  

Letter window clings: CVC words and word families

Ah, the Dollar Tree.  When I bought our shapes window clings I also bought a set of alphabet ones.  For a very long time I forgot about these in the closet and once I remembered and pulled them out, we had fun playing with them on the porch windows.  

We practiced letter sounds, CVC words, and word families.... so pretty much nothing new as far as our alphabet work, but when you are working with a new medium like window cling letters, it's always a little more exciting.  One night I heard my husband asking Mini Me what word he wanted to spell.  Mini Me shouted, "turbine!"  I don't know where that came from, but together they did spell "turbine" and it made me smile every time I saw it on the window. 


The letter clings live on the porch windows and that means that Mini Me can wander over any time and play around with them.  I enjoy hearing his self-talk as he plays.

Letter P - a year of ABCs

Read about how it all started - A year of ABCs.


Art - Color a penguin picture with colored pencils, make potato prints with pink and purple paint, make a pinwheel out of paper, color with pink and purple, and mount on a pencil.




Science - Make easy putty (we did recipe #2) - very messy at first but really fun when it was finished.  



Math - Practice putting together puzzles.  Match things into pairs.



Movement - Push and pull.

Freeze-ahead ground beef at our house

Saving time and money is important to everyone and when I spend a couple hours in the kitchen browning and freezing a dozen pounds of ground beef, I accomplish both.  

I don't know what I did without my deep freeze (Thanks, Mom, for finally talking me into one!)  In addition to storing my breast milk stash, I am able to stock up on sales at the grocery store: frozen veggies, cheese, meat, and I'm also able to do a lot of cooking ahead.  Browning and freezing ground beef makes a huge mess and takes a chunk of time, but it's worth it to have packages of meat all ready to pull out and use.  Quick and easy!

When I see a good deal on ground beef at the store, I buy a ten pound tube of it and get set for my assembly line.  I buy between 3-5 pounds of ground turkey to add to the ground beef (I'm trying a slow integration of this healthier meat).  I also add chopped onion for flavor and grated zucchini for a hint of extra veggies in our diet.  Sometimes I also add garlic powder or other seasonings.

I start by browning the beef.  It goes much quicker if I do it in one or two pound sets instead of all ten pounds at once (I've tried it both ways).  

I also brown the turkey.  The day I did this I only had 3 pounds of ground turkey.

After each pound or two is browned, it's time to rinse.

I start assembling the bags to freeze.  A hefty pound of ground beef is roughly 2 1/3 cups, so I portion the beef and turkey accordingly in each bag.  This day I did 1/3 cup of turkey and 2 scant cups of beef.  Next I added about 1/3 cup of grated onions and zucchini (those had been mixed together).

My onions and zucchini got a little too grated this time, but it will do!

I let the bags of beef/turkey/onion/zucchini cool before sealing.

Many times, I like to brown a pound of beef, add the ground turkey, and add spaghetti sauce, too.  I freeze this mixture and voila!  Spaghetti or lasagna is already half prepared.

I also add taco seasoning to a browned pound.  (yum, sodium).  I can pull a bag of taco meat out of the freezer, warm it in a bowl, and we have nearly instant tacos.

The entire process makes a huge mess in my tiny kitchen.  I have a routine down, and this day I made 13 prepared bags in two hours from start to clean up.

Ahhh... I love a clean kitchen.  I freeze the bags flat, and then put about three quart freezer bags of meat into a gallon bag for extra freezer burn protection. 

I will now use these ground beef/turkey/onion/zucchini pound packages for:

lasagna

spaghetti

tacos

taco chili

sloppy joes

tator tot casserole

beef burgers

chicken gumbo burgers

goulash

enchiladas

Spanish rice

I'm excited already about the ease of preparing these future meals!


I'm open to suggestions for variations on the plastic bags for freezing to be less wasteful.  My plastic ware stash is not currently large enough to use Tupperware or similar containers for freezing.  Ideas?