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.