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.