Holiday Crafts

We haven't done much preschool lately but we have been doing some fun, family, holiday crafts! I ordered some paint your own Christmas stocking holders. I painted the Christmas tree, Liam painted a gift and an elf, Aislinn painted Santa and a gingerbread man and Chris painted an orange reindeer with polka dots and a purple head. He was feeling creative, lol. As our stocking holders dried Liam and I worked on these snowflakes. We used cotton swabs and a hot glue gun, and lots of imagination. We hung them all along the beam that stretches down the middle of our house. It was fun and easy, I'm sure we'll do it again next year.

Christmas Concerts

Little sister, ready and waiting for the show!

There's my boy, smack dab in the middle of the front row! I thought for sure that we finally had good seats and we would be able to see him, but it wasn't meant to be. The 4th grade did two songs. For the first song they played recorder and the teacher stood.... you guessed it, right in front of Liam. The second song we were relieved to see the teacher grab her guitar and stand to the side, until the soloists came out and stood..... right in front of Liam! maybe next year....

Here's my little drummer boy! He had such a good time it was so fun to watch. I can't wait for the end of the year concert, when they'll be able to play more than one 10 note song! Beginning band students haven't had much time to put their new skills all together. It may have been short but it was quite good, Momma and Daddy were very proud.

Aislinn wasn't too fond of it though...

Aislinn talks to the big guy!

She's always been a bit scared, no, not scared, more like horrified of Santa. Last year she wouldn't even go in the same room with the guy. Both of my kids were happy to just write him a letter and hope for the best. But this year she walked right up to him and told him that she wanted some Pokemon cards for Christmas! The sad part is I missed it. It was during our town's holiday celebration and I was the person in charge of the children's craft social, so hubby took them to see Santa. A good friend snapped this picture for me. My little girl is growing up!

Merry Christmas!

Sending you all special holiday hugs!

Week 9

It's been a while since we finished up week 9, let's see what I can remember about our week. Here's our focus of the week...

We did our usual workbook pages and made this house for the word of the week, "home."
I let her pick out which colors to use and she was pretty darn close to our house, blue with a black roof. Not sure where the red door came from, ours is white, but I've always wanted to paint it. Hmmmmm maybe red would look nice!

Our animal of the week is her current favorite animal, a horse. I'd love to take her to see a real one, but the weather is getting too chilly for such a field trip. So, we read some stories about horses instead.

NH Ice Storm of 2008

As promised, here are a few pictures of our big storm! Everything outside was coated in a thick layer of ice, it was a sight to see.


These are the birch trees in the back yard, bending over the kid's sandbox. To give a little scale, the sandbox measures 6 feet square. We lost one, it snapped in half, but the rest have sprung back up when the warm temps on Monday melted the ice.



This is a big evergreen tree we have in the side yard. It's normally a huge, bushy thing. The ice weighed it down and made it look so sad.

This was the biggest shocker, the big birch next to our driveway. It splits into three big trunks about 4 or 5 feet up, each of the three were bent in a different direction and touching the ground. I never thought it would be the same, but after that warm day it popped back up!


We were lucky, we only lost one tree, and there was no damage to the house, but many were not so lucky. There are still people without power and there is another storm on the way tomorrow (6 to 12 inches) there were even several fatalities. Thank goodness we had a safe place to go.

Thawed Out

It's been wild and crazy around here! We had a HUGE ice storm up here in NH (ME and MA too) that shut down the state for several days.

Thursday it started and they sent the kids home a little early from school. Thursday night you could hear the ice hitting the windows, I never did look outside but it sounded like some pretty nasty weather out there. After we get to bed the power goes out.

Friday we sleep in a little after we get the calls that they canceled school that day. I got up around 8 and went to take the dogs out and what I saw outside made my jaw drop. EVERYTHING was covered in ice, all the trees were bent over and the tops of some were touching the ground. I went right outside and took a bunch of pictures. When I got back inside I started a fire in the fireplace since the temp was already down to 55 inside (we usually keep it at 67). I got out the battery operated radio and searched for some news. When I finally heard the news it wasn't good, they were saying it could take days, up to a week to get power back. I didn't have much wood on hand so as I put the last log into the fire I called my sister to see if she had power. She did, thank goodness!

So, by Friday afternoon we had packed up the car and were on our way with the two kiddos and the two dogs. Once we got there we were able to shower and do a few loads of laundry (I had packed dirty clothes, Friday is usually laundry day).

Saturday morning my sister, her hubby, the kids and I drove back here to check on the house (my hubby was working). We still had no power and it was down to 47 inside. We had no running cold water (frozen pipes) and the "hot" water was down to a trickle. BIL and I got to work draining the hot water heater while my sister stayed in the warm truck with the kids. Then I cleaned out the fridge, ick! Before we headed back to my sister's house we checked in on my neighbors. They said it got so cold in their house Friday night they ended up sleeping in the car with the windows cracked and the heat running. :( The high school was opened as a shelter but for some reason they didn't want to go. We headed back to my sister's nice warm house and spent the rest of the day getting ready for a Christmas party we were going to that night.

Sunday we got word that we had power back, but before we could go home we had a date with hubby's father to take Aislinn to the mall to get a Build a Bear for Christmas. We finally made it back home in the late afternoon and spent the rest of the day trying to put the house back together, it was quite a mess from the rushed packing etc.

Monday the high school was still acting as a shelter so hubby didn't have to work and we decided to keep Liam home too since he was pretty tired out from our long weekend. We ended up spending the day shopping for the food we lost, going to the dump and getting our Christmas tree. By the time we got it home though, we didn't have time to decorate it, Liam had his very first school band concert that night so we had to get ready!

It's Tuesday now and things are almost, ALMOST, back to normal.... Phew!

So now I'm trying to get caught up on all the online stuff I missed and I'm going to try to catch up on my blog and post some pictures of this mess.

Webkinz Wall

Liam got the collector gene from my husband... As he grows the collections change and evolve but for now his main focus is Pokemon cards and Webkinz. The cards are easy to store, but the Webkinz were starting to take over the room. They were in a hanging shoe rack but his collection quickly outgrew that storage solution. So Mommy moved a few pieces of furniture around and sewed up this king sized, floor to ceiling, hanging wrack with 94 pockets! Now the collection has plenty of room to grow and the little fuzzy animals are off of the floor and out of danger (our dog LOVES to eat the eyes off of Webkinz!). Here's my little man posing with his collection, at last count there were more than 50!

Week 8

I forgot to take the picture of our "Of the Week" chart before I changed it for this week, oops. Let's see if I can remember what our focus was:

Letter = G
Shape = Diamond
Number = 8
Animal = Giraffe
Color = Orange
Word = Ghost

In honor of Halloween we chose orange as our color of the week (and did a lot of pumpkin painting) and made a paper ghost for our word of the week.
Like the arms Aislinn added? That ghost has personality! It was a week full of seasonal activities and I ran out of printer ink, so we breezed through her workbook pages in no time, working on her letter, number and shape of the week. We didn't do too much with our animal this week, we usually at least check a book out of the library on the subject but we weren't able to make it this week. We did talk about giraffes though, and she surprised me at how much she knew about them. And to my surprise the first feature she pointed out was the color of a giraffe, and it's spots, etc. No mention of it's long neck...

Trick or Treat!

Liam as a Death Eater from Harry Potter

Aislinn as a Princess

I always seem to get at least one really strange photo on Halloween night. This year I got two, this is one of them... Last year I got one where you could see through Liam's head... I love this one though, the mist adds a softness that I couldn't duplicate if I tried.

The Carving Kid

Liam, for the first time ever, carved his own pumpkin this year. He still made me scoop out the guts, he says they're too gross to touch, lol. He made a cat face. All you can see in the pictures are the eyes and nose, but I promise, it has a mouth a whiskers too. While he carved I made some yummy pumpkin seeds. I usually just use butter and salt, but my sister is vegan and I wanted her to be able to enjoy them too. I use veggie oil instead of butter and about 1/4 cup of sugar with a pinch of nutmeg and a pinch of cinnamon. I coated the seeds with the oil and sprinkled on the sugar mixture and put them in the oven for 20+ minutes. When they cooled of..... yummo!

Party Time!

We threw our annual Halloween party for our playgroup kids and it was a big success. I think we may have broken a record for number of costume clad children in the community center at one time. This is my favorite of my many attempts at a group shot. Yes, the ballerina on the left is throwing a fit and the two on the right are already out of their costumes, hehe.

Aislinn as Tinkerbell

We did face painting, pumpkin painting, foam Halloween crafts, treat bag crafts, ate doughnuts on a string, passed out little treats and had a overall good time.

Tinkerbell painting her pumpkin

Week 7

Time is flying by! Week 7 (and 8, I'll post that week later) have gone by and the holidays are so close I can feel it in the air. Aislinn and I are still having a ton of fun with her home schooling, although we did get a bit behind due to bad colds and busy schedule we finally caught up today and we're back on track.

This week's focus:

The letter this week was a fun one! We made the letter F using feathers and a fish using triangles and studied frogs and the word float. Liam was home to help with the float lesson and the kids had a blast running around the house trying to find items that would float in a bowl of water I had on the table. Then they stacked things that didn't float on top of something that did to see if it could still stay above water. We had a watery mess to clean up after that activity but it was so worth it.

Aislinn's Makeover!

Aislinn had been asking me for a while to cut her hair and I just couldn't do it. I even had her all ready and scissors out ready to snip and I couldn't get myself to make the cut so she got a little trim and went for months until I was ready. I psyched myself up and had a cute cut in mind and I was ready to cut but she had changed her mind. Grrrr!

We both drifted back and forth like this until one day we met and we were both ready! Take a look!

Before:

After!

Photo Sampler

Here's a little sampler of the first few days with my new camera. I'm loving it! This one I took of Liam on the way home, it was well after 8:00pm and pitch black outside. I love it for two reasons, first because I actually got the shot, even in the dark, and second is that this captures Liam to a T, behind his DS. lol

Here is Aislinn by the lake. So many beautiful colors this time of year, yet she's still of of my favorite subjects to photograph!

One more shot by the lake, these were actually just on the side of the road. Pretty, huh?

Our view across the street. We've already lost the red maple leaves but there is still the beautiful yellows of the birch leaves.

I didn't have to go far for this one, these are the mums on my front porch. I love fall colors!


Soooooo, what do you think?! Not bad for my first day?

Week 6

It was a short week this week, due to the holiday weekend and the shopping trip Aislinn and I went on for Halloween costumes. But we still made it through all of our activities and worksheets. She's loving the worksheets, it makes her feel like a big girl, doing homework like big brother. I believe we started out with 5 different preschool workbooks. I pulled them all apart and put them in an order that fits our focus each week. Between the workbook sheets and the sheets I find online she's doing at least 10 pages per week. Here's what we focused on this week...

You can't have the letter E as the letter of the week without talking about elephants! It made sense to choose gray as our color of the week, to match the elephant. We also talked about eggs so we looked at the oval again for our shape this week.

She picked right up on the concept of equal, math really is her strong suit. I just might introduce greater than and less than signs soon, I think she'd get a kick out of it.

Here's our big project this week. We went for a hike in the woods near our house and collected little twigs. When we got home we glued them to the paper in the shape of a nest and put some eggs inside! Aislinn must have used half the container of glue on this project, it took at least 3 days to dry.

Before I sign off I just had to add the very first picture I took with my new Nikon D40!

I'm still learning so I'm pretty much just using it as a point and shoot, but I'm starting to venture out and experiment. It's so nice to be able to caputre the moment, instead of catching the moment that happens half a second after I clicked the shutter button. It's hard to predict what kids are going to do and I ended up with so man bad pictures because of that damn delay on my Kodak. I could go on and on, but I'll spare you. Let's just say, I like my new toy...

Week 5

Week five of preschool and my last post using photos from my old camera! To make a long story short, it looks like someone busted into my van and stole my Kodak DX6490. I had been itching for an upgrade and since I had to replace my camera I decided to go for it and get a nice one! Hubby gave it to me as an early Christmas present. My next post will include photos from my new Nikon D40! I'm having a blast with it. But I digress.... Onto this weeks topics....

We had fun this week with the letter D. Lots of fun things start with D, dance, dot-art, doughnuts, dogs, and delicious! We used our letter of the week and the shape of the week to make this heart dog. The template is really cute, but Aislinn decided to color it in black... if you look really close you can tell it's a dog.

Our color of the week was pink. I found a great source for color worksheets. Aislinn loves to cut and paste so it's right up her alley. We also did some crayon making again, this time melting red and white together to make pink! That is such a fun project. By the time the school year is over Aislinn will have her very own custom made box of crayons!

Aislinn's Other Teachers

For three or four days a week Aislinn has been going to "Daddy's school" to play with the big kids. They have a great course there, Working with Children, that teaches the high school students about early childhood development, etc. For 6 weeks of their course they invite community children to join the class and the high school students can put their skills to the test! Aislinn's having a blast with all of her new "teachers". It was a rocky start, she didn't want to play and she wouldn't talk at all, but now that's she's warmed up to the group she takes part in all of the activities and has a ton of fun. I'm so glad we stuck with it! I hope this helps her transition into public school next year.

Another plus to this class... It gives Mumma a full hour and a half to read, relax or talk to the other moms in the group. Imagine that!

A roof over our heads

It's finally done! The roof is done, paid for, finished, complete! What a long, drawn out project that was. One crew showed up on a Friday and, from what it looked like on the ground, almost finished the project. They said they'd be back the next day, or on Monday if they weren't able to get the materials needed over the weekend. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday..... they still haven't come back.

The view from my dining room window of the mess

We get in touch with their boss and he heads over to check their progress, he discovered why they ran out of materials that first day, they didn't bring any starter strips so they were using up full shingles. Then he checked their work on the skylights. He grabbed onto one to give it a tug and see how secure it was and it CAME RIGHT OFF in his hands! Thank goodness we didn't have any rain, that would have been a HUGE mess. So the boss man and his nephew spent an entire Friday on our roof, finishing the project. Then he fired the crew that was here the week before.

Nice view of a dumpster from my bedroom window

Just when you think it's over.... it took over a week and lots of nagging phone calls to get the dumpster out of our yard. Now that that's gone it's finally over. And it's been raining for the last two weeks without any leaks!

Week 4

I know, I know, we're in the middle of week five, I'm way behind, it's just been a bit hard to get enough motivation to post with all these icky germs attacking our family one by one. (Hubby has the cold now too.) I didn't even get a chance to photograph our "Of the Week" poster before I changed it up for this week, oops. It was a short week, since she was sick on Monday, but we still got a lot of fun learning under our belts on Wednesday and Friday.

The weeks focus:
Letter C, Shape = Triangle, Number 3
Animal = Cat, Color = White, Word = Cloud

We did lots of fun workbook pages and made a picture of a cloud using cotton balls. She loved this activity so much that her cloud is nice and puffy, we ran out of cotton balls before she ran out of steam. We planned on making cookies but that never happened :( we did eat some from the store though! She made a paper chain at the high school (more on this later) and it fit perfectly into our week so it's now decorating the window in our "classroom".

On top of all her worksheets and craft projects we also checked out at least ten books from the library about various animals and things that start with the letter C. She had me read every single one... In a row! She couldn't get enough! Mommy's little sponge.

Infectious

The one thing kids don't mind sharing... germs! Aislinn was sick last Monday, then Liam came down with the same thing on Thursday and now I have it. At least I think I do, my symptoms are different than theirs. They each had a fever and fatigue, I don't have the fever, but the fatigue is kicking my butt and it feels like I have rocks in my head. Aislinn and I both had a nap today.

But let's look on the bright side, or at least a different side. We took out our Halloween decorations out today, and even feeling as awful and I do, watching the kids go through the bins was so much fun. Aislinn is so excited, you can't help but feel her energy. The best part was when the kids started trying on some of their old costumes, Aislinn makes a damn cute Pigglet!

Hopefully I feel better tomorrow so I can clean up the mess they made...

Week 3

Another great week! Aislinn was actually begging me, "please, can we do preschool!" So it looks like she is enjoying herself as much as I am. Here is our focus for this week...

Our letter for the week was B, our animal was Butterfly and our word of the week was Bug. We talked about bugs having six legs and the fact that a butterfly is a bug. We looked at the life cycle of the butterfly and read a great butterfly book. We crafted a handprint, construction paper bee, a coffee filter and clothespin butterfly and "colored" a butterfly by gluing on dried beans.

We also planned on making a pine cone bird feeder with peanut butter and bird seed, but got as far as finding the pine cone in the woods before I realized that our bird seed is in a bin, on the deck, under the roofer's tarps, so I guess that project will have to wait. She was too cute, when we were in the woods, she kept saying that we were looking for a "pineapple!"

Here's our paper bee and coffee filter butterfly

And our dried bean butterfly

The number of the week was two. We colored a big number two and colored a picture of two flowers with two butterflies fluttering over them. We'll focus a bit more on our numbers in the after the first 10 weeks pass. We'll be starting back at number one and adding new challenges.

The shape of the week was the square. Shapes are another thing we'll focus more on later. For now we just did a workbook page, traced some squares and colored them.

The color of the week was blue. We gave her blue crayons and marker quite a workout this week! We also talked about the other colors that start with the letter B, like black and brown.

We ended our week with our B collage and the B page of Aislinn's alphabet book.

A bit distracted

As we wrapped up or third week of preschool Aislinn seemed a little distracted today. I wonder why. You think it could be because this...

...was going on over our heads? The roof is finally getting done, yippie! There is a dumpster at the end of my driveway and a swarm of carpenters banging away. Ripping off the old and putting on the new. I'm most excited about the new skylights. I'm looking forward to the next rain storm, it'll be the first time in years that we won't have to shove towels around the edges of the skylights to keep them from leaking. There's excitement in the air, Aislinn likes watching out the windows and Diego (the dog) is hiding under the bed. The poor thing is NOT thrilled with all the banging and the strange men on top of his house. If all goes well I'll have some after pictures on Monday, and a much happier dog.

Custom Crayon Colors

Our attempt at making our own aqua crayon wasn't really a success, but it wasn't a failure either. First, I must tell you this... don't attempt to melt crayons in the microwave. It doesn't work out too well. The paper cup started to burn and the crayons were still solid. So Aislinn and I scrapped that attempt and tried again.

Our second attempt worked out much better! I use a double boiler approach with a empty tin can.

The crayons melted in no time and we mixed our two colors together in hopes of creating an aqua colored crayon....

We wrapped the melted crayon in wax paper and waited for it to cool.

And then gave it a try!

Did it work? Kind of. I think we needed to add more blue to the mix. It turned our more of a forest green than an aqua color. But that's fine. Aislinn had a blast with this and learned about mixing colors. I will do this again for sure, when our color of the week is a secondary color, and she can have her own little collection of custom crayons.