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!!