11 months

Well, better late than never. My little man is getting so close to being the big 1!! I just can't believe how fast this year with him has gone. He is such a joy and delight to my heart. We are having so much fun watching his personality start to show. He is such a fun, laid back little guy. He has started waving by-bye and blowing kisses this week. He also has begun to share his disapproval with his sister when she does something he doesn't like, such as steal his toy. My life would not be the same without my little buddy! I am so blessed!!

Christmas Fun!

We have been in Indiana for almost a week now and someone has been sick the entire time. My hubby started getting sick on the drive (poor guy) and was finally feeling better on Sunday. My brother was also sick on Christmas. Then my mom got sick. Now, my sweet girl has bronchitis, strep throat, and a double ear infection. Hopefully we are all on the mend and will be better by the time we leave for home on Friday!

Other than all the sickness we have had a great time. I wish we lived closer to my family so that we could spend more time with them, but since that is not the case we will just have to make the most of our time together.

On Christmas Day we had our family celebration. My sister works at Walgreen's and unfortunately had to work at 3 on Christmas Day so we had a morning brunch for our meal. We had bagels, waffles, egg casserole, and lots of fresh fruit! Then we had a great time giving and getting gifts! My kiddos got a ton more toys and my hubby and I got some stuff for our new dog (which I will be blogging about when we bring him home in Feb.). It was a super fun and crazy morning! That afternoon my SIL and I spent some time playing kiddie games like Don't Break the Ice and Ants in the Pants.



My dad and Moo-Bear enjoying waffles and marshmallows!

Yes, my brother received a superman snuggie for Christmas...love it :)

My little buddy! I couldn't find him a Baby's First Christmas Outfit big enough to fit him, so we just went with the bib. He couldn't have cared less about the presents, but he had a great time playing with all the paper, bags, and boxes!

My sweet Moo-Bear! She had so much fun this year opening gifts. I absolutely love watching her face light up with pure joy!


On Sunday we took the kiddos to the Botanical Gardens, which they had decorated as Candyland! It was ok, but we were all glad that it only cost $1 rather than $5 to get in (they have a special on Sunday afternoons).

My nieces with their little cousin posing as gingerbread men. You can sort of see Moo-Bear in the far right. She wasn't really wanting to stick her head in the circle.


Most of our family. We left Buddy at home because he desperately needed a nap.

This wasn't part of the Christmas display, but they had fun anyway. You crawl through this tunnel an d pretend to be an earthworm and at the end is a slide. It was a huge hit with Moo-Bear!

Grandma and her girls!


So, that was a glimpse of our time with my family in Indiana. We had plans to do some more stuff, but with everyone being sick we ended up j ust spending a lot of time relaxing at my parents' house. Hope everyone had a Mery Christmas!!!

Slacking

32 months

I have really been slacking with the whole tot school/blogging thing lately. I guess it just kind of takes a backseat to other things (the blogging, not tot school). We haven't done much "formal" tot schooling the past couple of weeks. I had all these great plans and even printed off a ton of stuff to use, but alas we have gotten busy. I usually do tot school in the morning when bud naps, but when we are gone in the morning it just never happens. We usually have MOPS every other Monday, Tuesday Moo-Bear goes to a mother's day out thing, and Wednesdays I try to get together with other mom's to get to know them better and let our kiddos play. So, since we do tot school in the morning there are often 3 days in a week where we don't get anything done. I don't know if I need to try to do stuff when he is awake or just fit it in when I can. We do our "games" daily, but we don't always get to any theme/letter of the week stuff.

We spent a lot of time in the kitchen baking this week. I like to make goody bags for our neighbors and for Moo-Bear and Bud's teachers at church. I had Moo-Bear "help" this year. She really loves "helping". I put that in quotes because she really isn't much help. For example, we made chocolate covered pretzel rods and then rolled them in mini m&m's, crushed candy canes, and crushed heath bars and I think most of the time I was trying to keep her from eating all the candy ;) But, she has a blast and even "helped" clean up, and by that I mean play in the sink while I tried to wash the dishes. I really want to encourage her helping though so I try to involve her in what I am doing.

Here are a few pictures of the Christmas festivities at our house!




Moo-Bears wonderful present. I bought the materials to make the tee-pee and my MIL sewed it for me! Moo-Bear loves it. I wish we could find a place for it downstairs, but it is just too big. It is in her room and she doesn't play by herself in there yet so she doesn't get much use out of it, but I am sure she will!


We got her a Dr. kit and she loves it!! She likes to "check our beep" (listen to our heartbeat) and check our ears :)


The kiddos playing with Buddy's new ball toy. The lid loves balls, although he wasn't really impressed with Christmas this year!


Moo-Bear helping mommy bake and I think she enjoyed licking the spoon.



She really enjoyed rolling the chocolate pretzels in the M&M's and she loved giving them to her teachers at church and telling them that she helped make them :)

For more ideas check out 1+1+1=1.

I hope you all have a safe and wonderful Christmas. We will be traveling to Indiana to spend Christmas with my family for the first time since I was pregnant with Moo-Bear so we are really looking forward to it! Hopefully I can do better about keeping up with Tot School! Merry Christmas!!

Tot School

30 months

We are back doing our Tot School time for a few weeks, at least. We had family here for Thanksgiving so last week Tot School went right out the window. We still did fun things, like paint, but no pictures and nothing planned.

We did an early Christmas with DH’s parents since we will be with my family for Christmas this year! Moo-Bear got a tee-pee for her room and she loves it!! I bought all the stuff to make it and my MIL sewed it up and put it together. I think she will get lots of good play from it!

This month we will be doing all Christmas and Jesus activities. I love this time of year and it is so fun now that Moo-Bear is really starting to get things. I really want to make sure that we emphasize doing things for other people, especially this time of year. So, in future weeks I plan to have specific activities for us to do for people around us

We always have fun coloring with markers!

You can also never go wrong with gluing! She loves to do anything with glue. This is actually a Thanksgiving activity. Also, when grandma was here she made a cute Christmas tree, but I haven’t taken pictures yet. We just made a tree shape and then tore small pieces of paper for ornaments, which she then glued on the tree!

I got this game from COAH (I think). Moo-Bear is so good at matching colors. I think it is getting way to easy for her, but she loves it!

I am so impressed because this is the 1st time that Moo-Bear has actually put the dots in the correct places! Once she finished she did end up putting dots all over the place, but I was so happy she started doing it right even for a little bit! We got this page from COAH, also.

We also did this page from COAH. She matched the letters to spell Jesus. She was able to match and identify all the letters. Yay!!

Moo-Bear just wanted to get out our huge tub of pom-poms to play with for a few minutes.

I bought this tree and some small ornaments from a garage sale a few weeks ago so that Moo-Bear could have her own little tree to decorate.

I got this game from Big Lots, I think. It is Candyland Bingo. We just used the spinner to pick a color and put the gingerbread man on that color. We didn’t actually play Bingo, though

Ok, so that was most of our week of Tot School. We didn’t get much done b/c we left Thursday to go to Little Rock to spend the weekend with friends (well all the guys went backpacking). Check out 1+1+1=1 for more great ideas!!

Tot School

30 months

We had another slow week over here. Mommy hurt her back on Wednesday so I spent most of Thursday and Friday sitting on the couch with a heating pad and reading books with the kiddos! They were both rainy, dreary days so it was wonderful for snuggling and reading books My back is feeling much better now

Fun with magnets VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I got out some smiley face magnets and the whiteboard and let Moo-Bear go to town. I think she got these out every day!

elephant play VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I had these foam elephant stickers and I cut a slit in the lid of a container and she put them inside. She wasn’t too enthralled with this one!

color and shape sort VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

She loves this! When we were playing I would put the shapes on the wrong spot and she would tell me no and put it in the correct place

word color sort VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I got out our colored word tiles and colored buckets again. She really just liked dumping out the tiles and making a big mess

elephant dot art VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I got this “E” do-a-dot page from COAH! She loved it, as usual!

elephants and peanuts VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I printed off these elephant graphing pages from COAH. We used some peanuts as our counters and she did a great job. When she was finished we got a little snack!

elephant clips VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I also got these from COAH. They were elephants with numbers on them and we clipped the correct number of clothespins on each elephant!

fall bin VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

This is our fall sensory bin. She likes it ok, but I am beginning to think Moo-Bear is one of the few 2 year olds that doesn’t really care for sensory bins

So, that was most of our week. This week we are just going to be having fun talking about Thanksgiving! For more great ideas check out 1+1+1=1!

Tot School

30 months

This week we did letter “L” for leaf. I wanted to wait until the leaves actually started changing colors and falling down so we could go outside and play in them. But, we didn’t do a whole lot of leaf playing b/c both kiddos were sick this week. And b/c we have been finding snakes in our yard and it scares me to have them play in piles of leaves b/c I am sure snakes are hiding in there ;)

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I am trying to teach her to put the dots on the circles on the paper, but she still prefers to just dot the whole page. We got this from COAH!

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We did a leaf matching game, which I believe I got from File Folder Fun.

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She played with our homemade shape sorter. And I think you can see the lacing toy behind her!

This is our bead sensory bin. I also made a fall one, but that day my camera’s battery died so I didn’t get any pics. Hopefully next week I will!

We are working on counting and used q-tips and this ice cube tray. She is getting a lot better and one-to-one correspondence!

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I also got this leaf number matching from File Folder Fun. She matched them correctly, but I think it was more by color than number recognition!

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Moo-Bear is really into gluing lately. So, we got a leaf printable and glued black beans on it. My girl, who loves to have paint all over her hand like lotion, was not too happy about glue getting on her fingers ;)

I printed out some small and large leaves and she separated them. This is getting way too easy for her so I will definitely add the medium size next time.

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And here is the one day we did go out to play in the leaves. They had a blast :)

So, that was most of our week. Check out 1+1+1=1 for more great ideas!