The Baby Treatment

For the month of August I have been watching a 3 month old baby a couple of days here and there.  James has been practicing his daddy skills and his Bobos are getting the baby treatment.  He carries them in a cradle hold, burps them, puts them in the bouncy seat, boppy, and play mat.

He's going to be a good Daddy someday (if I let him grow up!).

Bossy

James has gotten kind of bossy lately...he loves to tell us what to do...
"Mommy stay!"
"Mommy wait!"
"No, Daddy"
"T'mere" (come here)
My favorite is when he is doing something he isn't supposed to do, like say jumping on his bed, and I tell him no.  He very nicely says "Mommy go downstairs!"  I have wised up to this trick and realize he is just trying to get rid of me so he can continue doing something he shouldn't!

Two-Year-Old School

This year instead of reinventing the wheel I found a curriculum for 2's online here.  I have been using this curriculum and supplementing it with activities found other places on the web.  I will do my best to create links to the activities I found.

Basically this curriculum has two different themes each month.  The first theme was the beach.

making shell impressions in play-doh

O is for octopus

ocean themed snack

beach sensory box

sponge relay

field trip to the pet store to see the fish

We have also decided to do "centers" this year.  We have four that the boys can work on each week.  I just pull them out for a short time each day when I need them to focus on an activity and slow down a little bit!  :)

                                     

1-using tweezers to move small fish erasers to an ice cube tray (1 to 1 correspondance)

2-fishing for paper fish and practicing color recognition

3-sorting links by color or putting them together and taking them apart

4-sorting counting bears by color

 1-practice cutting paper

2-matching colored octopus

3-transferring "sea urchins" with a spoon

4-using pom pom magnets on the magnet page

One-Year-Old School

Summer=Insects

 I need to quickly get updated on one-year-old school because two-year-old school has already started!

bug eyes

bugs that grew

 helping bugs escape from a block of ice

G is for grasshopper

I is for insects

I am sure I didn't take pictures of many of the activities we did for our insects unit but oh well!

PA

At the end of July we went to Pennsylvania for my grandfather's 90th birthday.  While we were there we had a family reunion also.  We hadn't had a family reunion in probably 20 years or more so it was neat to see everyone again.  James loved seeing and hanging out with his Mama Syl, Papa Cal, Aunt Missy and Uncle Dave, and Aunt Cassie.  It is neat to see him really getting to know our family that we don't see very often and remembering them and talking about them when we are at home.

Big boy room

We wanted to move James to a big boy room this summer because we thought he could probably handle it (although we were a little scared) and we had bunk beds my parents gave us that we wanted to go ahead and use.  We didn't have any real reason to rush and get it done but we were excited about getting the junk out of the room and transforming it into something cute.  We started working on the room and got everything set up but were waiting on mattresses for the beds.  James was so excited he wanted to sleep in his bed without a mattress.  I decided to capitalize on the excitement and let him sleep in the bed on a camping pad.  He did really well!

Here is the completed room:

Grasshoppers baseball

In July, we went to a Grasshoppers baseball game.  James was the all-american kid eating popcorn and a hotdog as he watched the game.  He still talks about the fireworks they shot off when someone scored a homerun!

July 4th

I have a lot of catching up to do on our blog from our busy summer.  I will be working on that over the next few days because we have some exciting things going on now that I want to blog about...gotta catch up first!

For the 4th of July we went to Lake Anna to Lee's parents lake house.  We got to go with our great friends, the McCutchens, who are currently foreign missionaries so we don't get to see them very often. One of Lee's and Tim's other great friends met us there for a day.  All three men have little boys now so it was fun to get the little boys together and start the next generation of friendships!