Our big "project this past week was re-doing the Cradle Roll (0-4 yr old) classroom at church. Theoretically, we change the theme of the program, and the decorations that go with it, every quarter, but with all the chaos in our lives last fall/winter, we'd been going with a "farm" program for at least 6 months. I knew what I wanted to do next, just hadn't found time to do it. So finally I decided we needed to MAKE TIME! On Sunday, our friends, and the other regular attendees of the class, met us at the church and we took down the farm decorations and started in on the zoo decorations. We got it principally done on Sunday, and then the girls and I (and my mom) went back in on Monday to finish it up, with the FINAL touches on Thursday (I used to end up running in for short bits of time every day on the week we switched out the room, but that was when I was 10 min from the church, now that I'm 25 min, I try to consolidate it, and in this case, waited and went in on our way back from piano lesson on Thursday). It all came together nicely, I was abit concerned that the program was too short, but when we did it yesterday, granted we had more children than usual, we didn't make it to "visit" all the animals, so we're good :) The big change I made was, the little "props" that the kids hold, or bring up or whatever, instead of having Sassy & MiniMe (my "helpers") pass those out, we put one of each prop in a shoe box for each child, they keep that by their seats and find the right thing when it was time. We had a few times of them pulling out things at other times, but overall it went really well. Little Bit and J had been wanting to be "helpers" and pass things out which worked ok when it was just them (they'd "pass things out" to Penny (J's mom), and one or both of my big girls), but it caused fits when other kids came because the other kids didn't understand why they should be sitting down if L & J weren't and such . . . SO, that was one of my big reasons for the switch, it was a way to get them back in their seats being "kids" without having to explicitly tell them they couldn't be "helpers" anymore :) The other thing it's helping with is, in many cases we don't have identical props. We raided our stuffed animals and Penny's stuffed animals and the ones already at the church, and came up with enough of several animals for the kids to bring htem up, but the tigers are all different. Even just the first time through the program on Sunday, L & J were starting to choose favorite ones "I want the big elephant felt", etc. By having everything randomly in boxes, it's easier to say "you get what's in your box, your box might be different next week", and again, that seemed to work as intended this week, except Little Bit didn't like that she happened to get the SAME monkey she'd had when we "practiced" on Thursday LOL. The downside is, we don't have as many of some props as others, so we got around that by numbering the boxes. We have 4 boxes that have all the props, so they're all numbered "1", then the rest, are numbered 2-4 depending on how much they are missing. I've already warned Little Bit, that if we have "lots of kids" we'll need to share some things. So in that case, we'll sing the song once with whichever kids have the parrot, then we'll pick the necessary number of parrots up and sing it again for the other kids. We'd have to do the same "sharing" either way, this just has potential for L & J to feel more "possessive" of the things in their boxes, but hopefully with enough coaching and reminders, they'll get it. One of the props we needed to make was something for the rhino, so I found a rhino mask online and printed it out, colored it (because (a) the color version online was blue and (b) our color ink is wonky in our printer) and laminated it. Little Bit had to try one on right away, so I snapped a picture LOL. All in all, things went smoothly yesterday, even with a larger-than-usual class, so I'm happy with the results :)
The shower is ALMOST done!!! To the point that my dad is asking me what the next priority is, woo-hoo!
The weather is starting to get nice, at least part o the time, finally!!! We had planned to go to California Pizza Kitchen on Tuesday to use the girls' birthday coupons, but the weather was so nice, that we decided to wait and go this next week, so Dad could take advantage of nice weather for cutting the boards he needed and such. The garage is his 'workshop" but it's been an awfully cold workshop most of the time :)
The snow we were supposed to get the last half of the week never materialized, much to the kids' disappointment LOL. It WAS incredibly windy on Wednesday, and Sassy and MiniMe spent a good long time outside being "weather channel reporters" LOL. I'd have loved to get a video of it, but that would have meant staying out in the cold wind, and I'm a wimp, so just take my word for it, it was amusing :)
Little Bit takes every chance she gets to go check the tp roll bird feeders they made. She was SOOOO excited yesterday when she actually saw a bird ON one of them :) The bird was even obliging enough to stay, if not on the bird feeder, at least on a branch nearby through all her excited screaming until we came to see too.
Sassy and MiniMe continue to work diligently on their "News Paper" each week. They've figured out the basic formatting they need to do in Word, and Papa showed MiniMe (the official "puzzle maker") how to make crossword puzzles and such in Excel, so she's doing that on the computer too now (she was hand drawing them). I need to figure out a way to get her "cartoon" onto the computer, yes a scanner would be the obvious answer, yes, we have at least 2 of them, no, that's not likely to actually happen anytime soon), and then put the Word/picture/excel all together into a .pdf, then they can start offering "electronic subscriptions" to increase their 'readership" LOL.
We're also on abit of a science kick right now, in addition to the flash cards we just reviewed, we have 2 other science products we're reviewing right now, so the girls are getting lots of science, to go along with the "birding" we're getting as part of Little Bit's school.
Lately Sassy has been telling the Bible story in Cradle Roll most weeks (with MiniMe doing it occasionally), and a week or 2 ago, when she looked ahead and saw that this week was Baby Moses, she started planning immediately. She saw a big basket that I hadn't yet filled with anything, and borrowed MiniMe's favorite doll, and used a babywearing wrap as her "costume", and Jochebed told us the story of Baby Moses. She was soo cute doing it, and the kids actually seemed to "get it' for the most part, and listened as well/better than usual LOL.
We had planned to go to a nature center yesterday afternoon, but when we got home from church and the weather was SOOO SOOO SOOOO gorgeous (which would have been nice for the nature center too) we decided to just stay home. With moving in the middle of winter, we haven't really gotten to enjoy OUR YARD as a family much, so we opted for that, and it was lovely.
A couple weeks ago the girls found an old, flat, basketball in the weeds by the garage, and Papa re-inflated it for them, so they've got a new obsession with basketball. Daddy spent some time working with them on dribbling and passing and "faking out" the person guarding you, and such.
The previous owners had also left a birdfeeder hanging in a tree by the house, BUT it was in a location where you couldn't actually SEE it from inside the house. So while Daddy and the big girls were busy playing basketball, Little Bit and I moved it to a place where we can see it from the front windows, and put birdseed in it.
So that was our week. Now the girls are enjoying a day at Grandmom's and I need to get moving and get birthday shopping done while I can :)
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