Taking it easy

Most of what I do during the day is all about my kids. I keep them fed and watered, make sure their bottoms, noses and hands are clean, plan activities for them, take requests for their favorite music in the car, and make sure their social calendar doesn't get too overwhelming or too boring. It's kind of like being a life coach for toddlers. Except I don't get paid. And they take me for granted.

So as often as I can, I throw in an activity that isn't necessarily for their benefit. Like this week, when we spent time talking about hospitality and kindness to others during our preschool time. To illustrate, I let them make muffins for the ladies in my Bible study. And except for the part where Caleb knocked over my stand mixer while it was mixing the batter, I'd say cooking activities with the three-and-under crowd are getting easier and easier. We counted muffin cups as we stuffed the muffin tin, and Caleb surprised me with his ability to count to three over and over again.

Week Eight at Preschool Lite was letter v week, so we worked on coloring and gluing these letter v vases. Abby's getting to be pretty meticulous with her crafts and is becoming more and more confident with doing all the gluing and decorating on her own. I try to give her verbal instructions about what our craft will be and then see what she comes up with, rather than showing her an example for her to copy. The purpose of this mind-stretching is two-fold: (1) to see how creative she can be on her own, and (2) to avoid the frustration that occurs whenever her craft doesn't look exactly like the example. She's a little perfectionist, and that isn't always a good thing.
We read the story of Rahab in the book of Joshua this week and talked about how she protected the spies by hiding them in her home, and how God saved her and her family because of her faithfulness. And because I needed a Rahab craft idea, and because Abby has been begging for a bookmark ever since she saw me using one, we made some Wall of Jericho bookmarks with Ephesians 2:8 on the back ("By grace you have been saved, through faith...") and attached red cords to them to remind the kids of the red cord Rahab hung from her window so the spies could find her and protect her when they returned. Both kids loved this craft, and made a huge mess with those little red squares to prove it.
To wrap up our week, we celebrated Caleb getting his cast off by pulling out the box of Play Doh supplies that I've kept locked up for the past three weeks. In my mind, Play Doh, a two-year-old and a cast just seemed like a pretty bad combination. But with the cast gone, the kids can once again enjoy making snakes, sharks and letters of the alphabet for hours on end.
The end of this pregnancy is taking its toll on my energy level, so we kept it pretty low-key this week where preschool activities were concerned. We did lots of sitting and reading, sitting and counting, sitting and crafting...you get the idea. I'm looking forward to having my energy back, and being able to get out and do more active things with the kids again. I'm sure I'll need all the energy I can get if I'm going to keep up with these two crazy toddlers while lugging a baby around.