Watercolor Relief Art

 We took white paper and drew on it with white crayon.

 Then added some watercolors on top.  The crayon wicks away the watercolors, leaving the original drawing in white.  Rose enjoyed the magic of it.

Chinese New Year Theme

Since Jan 23 was the Chinese New Year, we used that as our theme for the week. I don't have a lot of pictures, but here is what we did:

 During our weekly project playdate, we made dragon puppets (it is the year of the dragon afterall) using these instructions.  It took the girls just over an hour to color, cut, and assemble all the prepared (I cut holes in cups and the tp rolls for them) pieces.  

 We also ate Chinese food from our favorite restaurant, and I finally found a dish they will eat - Sweet and Sour Chicken!  Yea!!  And we made an asian influenced noodle soup in the crockpot one day, which we ate with dumplings and soy sauce (they like those too).  

Some books we enjoyed were:

"Cat and Rat: The Legend of the Chinese Zodiac" by Ed Young

"Shibumi and the Kitemaker" by Mercer Mayer

and several other Chinese folk tales.  

Some more cuteness!

It snowed! (Sort of)

Just some cuteness!

Snow! Just kidding...

We haven't gotten much of the white stuff here yet this year, and we all have a case of cabin fever due to self-induced house arrest (we have yucky colds), so I took the plunge and made my own snow.  I saw the idea here.

 Measure 4 cups of flour.

 Add 1/2 cup baby oil.

 Mix well.

(hold the bowl so your son doesn't dump the whole thing on the floor - which is where we should have started anyway!) 

Thoroughly enjoy yourself for over 30 minutes!

And the cool part is that it cleaned up rather easily.  I just had to let go of the messy part during play.  And besides, it smells good!

Building/Construction Theme Week

I am not really sure what inspired me to do this particular theme with the kids, but it was a huge success.  We started the week with a fun snack - make a building out of graham crackers, pretzel sticks, and peanut butter.  It didn't quite look like I imagined it in my head, but then again I was dealing with a 2 and 4 year old!  

 James enjoyed smearing the crackers with peanut butter and smooshing them together.  And of course eating them. 

 Rose's looked more like a building (after a little guidance on where to put the peanut butter), and she wanted her snack without the mess - so some fresh crackers were retrieved from the cabinet.  I have to say that it was a big deal for Rose to get her hands messy with the peanut butter, she is currently in a hand washing stage.

 We went to a cool place called the National Building Museum and they have a room for the kids to build in.  All sorts of fun toys - big legos, blocks, a huge playhouse, a train table, etc - and Rose built this neat building.  James of course came running across the room and knocked it down for her.

 Later in the week, I thought we could do some real hands on work.  We found a 1x2 in our basement, some roofing nails (they have a great big head to aim for), and the lightweight hammer.  There were some smooshed (yes that is a word google!) fingers, but they both really enjoyed getting to use my tools.  

 Lots of supervision was utilized, especially at the end when Rose got to take the (slightly loosened) nails out.

 Totally stole this idea from here.  I am pretty sure James enjoyed eating them more than building, but it was a good activity for a cold afternoon.

We enjoyed several story books at night time and reference books during the day.  Although I do have to say that it is difficult to find story books about construction vehicles.  Here are a few we liked:

Jack's House by Karen Magnuson Beil

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton

Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site by Sherri Rinker

Number 3!!

In case you weren't aware (unlikely) we are expecting number 3 the first week of June (I am keeping my fingers crossed for late May)!  We just got back from the longest ultrasound ever - 2 hours, and 3 different people pushing on my stomach later - we have these cool pictures to share.

 Thumbs up in here!

 Ok, face is a little weird looking, but the cuddly look was too cute to pass up.

 Aww...

Profile shot.

And, no, we don't know the gender yet, we'll let you know when he/she is born.

Snow Theme Week

Now that we are out of the holiday season and I am no longer feeling the effects of early pregnancy, we are back into the swing of things with school.  Rose loves doing projects, but we have been going slowly.  Our first week back was easy - snow, even though we didn't have any fall from the sky.

We had a snowflake snack - we did this last year too - but they really enjoyed it again.

We also did an interesting science experiment, which you can see Rose recording in her science journal.  I got this one from I Can Teach My Child, and it was one of the ones that the kids loved.  We did it several times that day, and again the next.  

You take a small piece of Ivory soap, microwave it for 45 seconds (or minutes as Rose kept saying), and watch what happens.  We thought the end result looked like a pile of snow, but it definitely did not feel like one.  We put it in the bath and James thought it was great - nice and mushy like mud - but Rose freaked out about the little white pieces floating around.

We also made coffee filter snowflakes for our front window and colored with white crayon on black paper to make a snow scene.  No specific books this week to share, like I said we are going slowly back into school.