Beautiful Boy

(October 6, 2012) There were days when I would get out my camera and lay on the floor with the kids. I'd take some photos and sometimes they would smile and sometimes they wouldn't, but they'd always LET me take the photos. These days, everyone is too fast for that. The games in our house revolve around going to the doctor, or playing school, or cooking. There's not a lot of sitting and playing, but more running and going.

It's okay though. When the big kids are running and going this little guy is sitting on the living room floor with a pile of toys and he even smiles when he sees the camera coming. I know it isn't going to be like this for long so I'm going to relish every second.

First Day of School

(September 26, 2012) It's kind of funny that as we made the decision to keep our daughter home for school we made the choice to send mister W. Now, to be fair, I thought at the beginning of the year that it would be fun to do a bit of school for him at home too, so that was my intent. However, as the days turned into weeks I started to realize that I was going to need some help. Miss L and I were having our own challenges getting into a groove, nothing big, just beginning of the year stuff and planning for her was enough without planning an additional something for him. The problem was that he really felt left out! He so wanted to keep up with miss L. A meeting with my church moms group coincided with a single available spot in a moms day out program and we were so blessed to land in a great situation.

So mister W, as proud as he could be, started his very own school program in late September. I love the grin on this boy!

Some days...

(September 18, 2012)

Some days are just like this.

This guy splashed in tons of puddles and ended up with soaking wet pants (despite being warned that splashing "big" would result in such a problem). It was of little matter to him and never did seem to bother him. He also sang his heart out the entire way to the grocery store. It was a good day full of playing and laughing and craziness, but somewhere in the aisles of crackers and yogurt he just found he couldn't hold on anymore.

Someday, in the not too distant future, I'm gonna miss days like this.

Camping!

(September 15, 2012) After the seed festival we headed to a campground to camp! We hadn't been camping since the mister W was really little and we decided to go to a more family friendly, less backwoodsy sort of campground. That paid off bigtime! The kids had so. much. fun! The campground was sort of far from the seed festival and while daddy worked on setting up the tent and getting the fire going for dinner, we headed to the jumping pillow!

Can you tell the kids were excited?

 

There were two pillows for jumping, and at first we were the only kids around and each of the big kids jumped on their own pillow.

 

Eventually though, some other bigger kids came to jump and mister W got nervous. He joined his sister on her jumping pillow. It didn't take miss L very long to learn an important physics lesson. She figured out that if she jumped down hard right below her brother's feet that it would rocket them into the air. She thought it was so much fun! Mister W did not.

 

So he decided he was ready to see what daddy was doing. We jumped a few more minutes (a little further apart) and then headed back to the campground to cook our dinner.

Our campground was under a lot of tree cover. We noticed tons of acorns on our tent pad that we cleared before setting up the tent, but they kept raining on the tent all night. :o) Fortunately they made great materials for building with diggers. Mister W would dig them and miss L was the foreman of some kind of building site that needed them.

 

Sweet little man and I just relaxed for a bit.

 

After a dinner of hotdogs cooked over the fire we had dessert (which was s'mores, of course!). The kids loved cooking their own food though everyone was a little nervous about the fire.

 

After that it was time for bed! We took the lantern into the tent, did a quick tick check and then got into our jammies and into our beds. 

 

What a fun night! It was the perfect camping trip. One night, get in, get out, nobody gets hurt. We'll have to try it again!

  

Seed Festival

We love our little garden. We both pretty clearly remember our parents working in their gardens and growing a bit of food for the family. Now, as we strive to teach our children to be good stewards of God's creation and to learn where their food comes from. Besides we enjoy it!

This year the seed festival was even more meaningful for us. Over the summer I downloaded the lists of what miss L needs to know from our state. I worry that she might get behind homeschooling (though I'm much less worried about that now) and wanted to be certain that she is learning along with her peers. Part of the social studies component is knowing how people lived long ago.  Also the kindergarten curriculum puts an emphasis on life science and a seed festival is a wonderful place for discovering that!

Brad and I wanted to hear a few talks as well and the seed festival is just plain fun!

We were ravenous when we arrived and stopped for some really awesome hamburgers. We passed the donut truck (seriously! freshly made donuts!) and thought we'd come back later. While Brad was listening to a talk about perennial onions the kids and I wandered over to the area where they had hoop trundeling (yup, I had to google that!). They actually had a variety of games that kids would have played during Thomas Jefferson's lifetime but this is the one that we spent the most time playing. They gave each of the big kids a hoop and a stick and let them go.

We quickly abandoned the sticks, but spent lots of time trying to get those hoops to go in a straight line.

 

Eventually we just went for hula hooping. :o)

 

When we were done with that we walked around the green a bit. Mister W found some very interesting flowers to sniff along with loads of other interesting sights to watch. There were tons of families and lots of displays interesting to children and adults.

 

We walked around the displays for a bit and then it was time for the sustainable living talk. I really wanted to hear this one so miss L and I walked to the tent. The speaker talked softly and the tent was PACKED so we stood on the edges and I was so impressed as miss L sat quietly in the shade of this tree and built boats out of the leaves that had fallen on the ground. I just love watching her play and discover.

 

Here is one of miss L's boats. The stick is the mast and the leaf is the sail. The bottom leaf that made the boat had just fallen off.

 

We learned a lot. I got some ideas for creating an edible landscape in the front garden which I'm super excited to implement this spring (and a little bit this fall). We always leave the seed festival with tons of packets of seeds and heads full of ideas. I think we have a totally new plan for the garden next year and even though we have only a little space, I think we'll be able to grow a lot of our food!

The last place we visited was the children's tent. They had cards to make from dried flowers and those were fun though I'm sad that they got destroyed. Apparently fragile dried flowers and young kids don't mix very well. The very last thing we did was their favorite. 

The booth had wooden frames from the craft store. They covered the frames in a generous amount of ceramic tile adhesive and then the kids covered the adhesive in found objects from nature. There was dried moss, acorns, leaves, pinecones, sweet gum balls, dried berries, beans and more. They had a huge selection! Some kids made theirs with very uniform designs using only a couple of kinds of materials but our kids used as many different materials as they could find. Both of them enjoyed it and the finished frames look amazing! What a wonderful souvenir from our day!