Hard work pays off

It was a big week here at the School of Mommy. We continued work on our sight words, which produced a huge payoff by the end of the week (more on that at the end), we played our little hearts out outside because the weather has been absolutely perfect, we introduced some counting and number recognition activities that were a big hit with both kiddos, and because it was cooking week here at Preschool Lite, we baked our first pumpkin pie of the season.

I've tried to loosely structure our weekly activities around some things that I want my kids to grow to appreciate, including cooking (I supervise while they measure, scoop and mix), field trips (they get to help with packing and planning), nature (nature walks, outdoor scavenger hunts, etc.), and hospitality (cooking meals for other people, bringing homemade gifts to Sunday School/CBS teachers). Daddy did his part to show the kids just how important cooking is by eating as much of this pie as possible.
I made some flash cards and worksheets for Abby to start fine tuning her counting skills and number recognition. I totally underestimated how long counting cheerios out on a piece of cardstock could keep her occupied, but she absolutely loved this activity. My plan is to transition the use of these little counting cards into some basic math concepts later on (adding the cheerios on the number 2 card to the cheerios on the number 1 card to see if they fit on the number 3 card, for example). For now, we're just counting and playing with the cards. Abby gets pretty antagonistic if she catches on to the fact that you're trying to teach her something, so I'm hoping that if we play with these long enough, I can make her think the upcoming math games are her idea. Shhhh....don't tell.
Even Caleb loved my little worksheets. He enjoyed filling in all the circles, cramming all ten cheerios into his mouth, then showing me the blank page and requesting "More chee-wos, Mommy!"
And, as is our standard practice when the weather is pleasant, we headed into the backyard. Having only one of these little ride-in cars provided the perfect environment for a productive lesson on sharing, turn-taking and kindness. Abby sang her memory verse song "Be Kind to Each Other" for me, but has changed the words to "Be kind to your brother..." because apparently that's what comes out of my mouth all the time.
We added some more sight words to our repertoire this week. It was letter i week, so we worked on reading the words is, it, in, and I. Abby was getting really good at recognizing and sounding out the word is in particular by the end of the week. She has long recognized her name, so I spent some time on Friday (while we were waiting on our appetizer at our favorite pizza place) reviewing her t words from last week, and then put together a simple sentence for her to see what would happen. To my delight, my little girl read her first sentence this week: Abby is three. She's "read along" with books in the past that she has memorized (not so much reading as repetition), but this marked the first time I've shown her a random combination of words and asked her to read it. I'll admit, there have been times over the last five weeks that I've had my doubts about my reading goals for her this year, but this big milestone was just the encouragement I needed.

Don't laugh. I know I'm not the only mom out there that thinks her three-year-old is a genius. It's just that I have the YouTube video to prove it.

Moving pictures

Abby started gymnastics three weeks ago, and this is the best picture I have of her participation. Because you know what's hard to get a picture of? A three-year-old doing gymnastics. Unless, of course, you're using a video camera.

As is the trend with most of her activities, Abby is again the tallest and youngest in her 3-5-year-old class at the gym. I had to gently remind the teachers that she just turned three, since they seem to throw her in with the 5-year-olds for many of the activities. Unfortunately, her 3-year-old brain doesn't respond to their commands as quickly as those of her kindergarten classmates, which was causing a wee bit of frustration for my little perfectionist.

So far the tumbling, jumping, climbing, swinging and bouncing are a huge hit. Ballet was great, but gymnastics is right up her alley. It seems standing in a line and twirling doesn't hold a candle to jumping on a trampoline or leaping into the giant pit of foam. Go figure.

Special thanks to her dear friend Neely for the adorable leotards. Those suckers aren't cheap.

Self-portrait

Our budding artist likes to entertain herself with this cheap Magna Doodle whenever we're in the car. She's turned out a number of masterpieces, each of which gets erased as soon as everyone in the vehicle has had a chance to admire it and tell her just how talented she is.

This morning, she drew us a little Abby with a bow in her hair, grinning from ear to ear. Or in this case, armpit to armpit.

Full of surprises

Have I mentioned that my kids love crafts? I started getting crafty with Abby when she was two months shy of her second birthday. Caleb's been indoctrinated a little earlier, and I'm pleasantly amazed at his growing affection for glue and construction paper. It sure makes the crafting portion of our preschool days a lot more fun when both kids will join in. I wasn't sure how that would go when we got started, but Caleb's proved a willing participant. I may need to pace myself....we're running out of room on our craft wall now that we're turning out double the projects each week. And on that note, special thanks to the chick at No Time For Flashcards for inspiring this week's letter t craft for my choo-choo-loving little man and his sister (and to Michael's, for having these super cool Thomas the Tank Engine alphabet stickers in stock).
We started working in our Kumon lowercase letter workbook this week. I honestly wondered, when I placed my order, if it wasn't going to be a little gimmicky. But it was only six bucks, so I decided to give it a chance. The letter-writing methods in the workbook seem so obvious and simple, and Abby absolutely loves doing her letter worksheets now. This is a huge change from the borderline tantrums I was dealing with when we first started. Whatever the gimmick is, it's working on my 3-year-old, and I'm not complaining. She's intense and meticulous when she's trying to write her letters now, and I'm learning not to interrupt or encourage her while she's concentrating. She's a self-motivator, and my praise only seems to get in the way. Since Caleb will still let me talk to him when he's coloring, I printed out some alphabet coloring pages that he can scribble on during our coloring/letter-learning time, though I'll admit he prefers his coloring book full of pictures of cars and trucks. I don't blame him.
My preschool package from Sonlight came with this teddy bear matching game, and I wasn't really sure what to do with it. So this week I just gave the kids some pieces and a little bit of direction to see if maybe they had better ideas than me. Turns out, they do. Abby invented her own memory game with four pairs of bears, and even thought to distract Caleb from stealing them by giving him his own matching set of bears to play with. When Caleb started hiding his bears in the living room, Abby decided hide-and-seek was a great idea, so she handed over the remainder of her precious bears for Caleb to hide, then together they went back and found all of them. (And, at my urging, made some matches. So there...I helped.) Now Abby regularly asks to play her teddy bear game, and I've had to hide the box to keep them from taking it out all the time and losing the pieces everywhere.
We're continuing to work on our sight words, which is going really well. Abby had familiarized herself with her four new words by the end of the week, and even picks them out in books now as we read together. She hates the pressure of being asked to identify a word though, so I have to get creative with how I "quiz" her to see which ones she knows. We also introduced some basic math concepts this week and did some simple addition/subtraction exercises involving balls of cookie dough and goldfish. She seemed pretty excited about the whole addition thing, but when I started taking cookies away, she made it clear subtraction was not her favorite part of math time.In summary, our fourth week of Preschool Lite was full of pleasant surprises. I'm still constantly surprised by how much I love this process, and how much my kids enjoy it. I'm surprised at how much this little girl is capable of figuring out and achieving. And I'm surprised at how time flies on our preschool days, and how sad the kids are when we pack up our supplies until next time. The best compliment came Thursday night, as I was tucking Abby in. I told her to get some good rest so that we could do something fun when she woke up.

"Are we going to do preschool tomorrow?" she asked excitedly. Good to know she's having as much fun as I am.

So wiggly

Baiting a hook should always be this cute...

Cure for the common car ride

Nothing cures a 12-hour car ride like baking brownies with Nana.

And having a couple thousand Brio train pieces scattered all over the living room doesn't hurt either.

(Kudos to Justin's parents for storing their boys' old train set for almost 30 years. Some toys never go out of style.)

Finding our groove

Every once in a while I have a confident parenting moment where I just know I'm doing the right thing for my kids. We had one of those moments at preschool this week. I think we're finally finding our groove. And I'm loving it.

We made the switch to the Kumon letter-learning method this week, which works on the premise that kids should learn the easy-to-write letters first, and build on those foundations until they're able to handle more complicated letters. Kind of seems like a no-brainer now that we're doing it, but when I first started reading about it, my organized mind did not find it at all appealing. I'm glad I got over my need to hang crafts on the wall alphabetically and decided to focus on what works best for Abby instead. We enjoyed fuss-free, tear-free letter time this week, and Abby was encouraged by her great success in drawing simple straight lines, which she quickly recognized look just like the letter l hanging up on her bulletin board.

We reached a compromise when it comes to writing her name to avoid the frustration of failure that seems to set her back so easily. She draws the parts she feels confident about, and I fill in the rest. This week, that meant she would draw a letter A with a straight line next to it, then hand the crayon to me to draw a circle to complete the lowercase letter b. Then she gets the crayon back to draw another straight line, and I complete the second b. And to wrap it up, because she feels so good about her ability to draw straight lines now, she'll happily take the crayon back and write the letter y all by herself. I'm learning that simple tasks move very slowly with a child who would rather give up than fail at something. I shouldn't complain...she gets it from her mom. Together, we're learning to break tasks down into a series of manageable steps.

Caleb, meanwhile, is working on his proper lefty grip. Or rather, I'm manhandling his little man hands until he grips the crayon properly, and he's tolerating it for about three seconds before reverting back to his chubby fist hold. I may put this goal on the back burner for a while.

But the bulk of our preschool days have been, and will continue to be spent like this. We read a lot of books each week. A lot. We read books from the Sonlight Preschool curriculum. We read books that highlight our letter of the week, including My ABC Bible Verses (featuring great life-application stories that focus on a verse in the Bible and how kids can live it out), our BOB books (pre-readers that allow Abby the opportunity to read some simple words that we practice beforehand), and letter books from the My First Steps to Reading series (stories that highlight repetition of the sound of each letter of the alphabet).

When the weather's nice (and lately it's been perfect) we spend as much time as possible outside enjoying God's creation. There are no chores to be done on preschool days. There are no grocery trips to be completed. I get to enjoy my kids and teach them whatever I've put in my lesson plan for the week, and they get some focused mommy time. And when the occasional doctor's appointment interrupts us, we take preschool with us and make it a learning experience, like the time we brought Abby's baby doll and some books about babies to my prenatal visit, or the time we read about Doctor Maisey and the pediatrician let Abby examine her stuffed puppy at at her 3-year checkup. This week we read a lot of stories about ducks, so on Friday we grabbed a loaf of bread (and some scones that didn't turn out quite right) and took a road trip in search of a duck pond. What we found instead was a field of geese, which seemed to satisfy my little ones just fine.

As part of my ongoing quest to create an avid reader out of my little girl (and my little boys one day), we introduced some sight words this week. We did a daily review of the words at opportune times like mealtime or when we were sitting around playing, and by the week's end Abby was able to identify all four words and can correctly read two of them when we come across them in her books.

I must be doing something right, because on our off days, Abby's gotten in the habit of asking when we can do preschool again, or when we can read some more of her "preschool books." It seems we've found a winner with this home-preschool thing.

Shoes tied tight...

We kicked off our fourth year of Community Bible Study today. Abby and Caleb are both in real classes this year, and I'm excited that they'll both be learning about this year's theme, Trusting in God, through coloring, crafts, stories and music time.

Caleb's one of the youngest in his class, and his teachers reported that he had a great first day. He settled in easily and apparently set to work right away putting all the trucks in a pile for himself and the other boys and bringing all the girls in the class some dolls to play with. It seems he's learned well the art of distraction from his sister. As always, he loved snack time and almost ate his weight in Cheerios, and apparently he was a good helper when it came time to clean up. (This could mean either he ate all the spilled Cheerios off the floor, or he actually helped pick them up and throw them away. I'll ask for clarification next week.)

Abby was super excited to learn that her teacher this year was my teacher a few years ago, and she too had a great first day with all of her new friends. She even noticed that a few of them were bigger than she is, which is rarely the case among her age group. She's the youngest in her class again, but the teachers said she did great, and storytime and coloring were her favorite activities. No surprise there.

And because we all love flashbacks, here are your comparison photos from the last few years. (I wish I had photos from our very first year at CBS, but Abby and I were in the Babes In Arms class together that year, and having a baby in my arms meant I had no hands free for a picture.)

First Day of CBS, September 2010

Abby (3 years), Caleb (19 months)

First Day of CBS, September 2009

Abby (2 years), Caleb (7 months)

First Day of CBS, September 2008

Abby (1 year)

Waitin' on Critter: Week 32

In case you've ever wondered if it's possible for time to simultaneously fly and stand still, the answer is yes. And it occurs when you're pregnant with your third child. As the weeks and months go by, I catch myself wondering how in the world I'm in the last trimester of this pregnancy already. And wondering why in the world it isn't time for this little guy to be born yet!

Our Little Critter is a feisty one, spending most of his waking hours (which, coincidentally, happen to be most of my sleeping hours) kicking, thrashing, punching and rolling over inside my belly. And since most of my belly is him, his movements are pretty noticeable to the outside world. Caleb, in particular, loves to watch my belly shift from side to side and change shape as his little brother moves around. He'll lift my shirt up and put his fat little toddler hands on my bulging middle and yell "Hi, baby!" into my belly button. He typically gets kicked or punched by his little brother in response, which prompts him to jump back and yelp, "Uh-oh, baby." When he's not driving trucks over my belly, that is.

At 32 weeks, our little guy probably weighs about 4 pounds and is about 17 inches long. Although if he follows in the footsteps of his elder siblings, he's probably already a lot fatter and a lot taller than that. His major development is completed, and he and I are mostly just packing on fat in preparation for his birthday from here on out.

And seeing as his birthday is right around the corner, we thought it was about time we named the guy. So we're pleased to announce that our little Critter is now officially...

Jacob Peter Fisher

The Jacob of the Old Testament was promised by God in a dream, "Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you" (Genesis 28:15). It is our prayer for our little Jacob that he will grow to know and love the Lord in his own life, and we are trusting God to be with him throughout his life, to lead and guide him in the right paths, and to complete the work He has planned for our son.

Peter is a middle name our son will inherit from his dad, a tribute to the man I most admire, and the man I hope our son will want to be just like when he grows up.

So keep cooking a little while longer, little Jacob. But don't be late for your birthday. We can't wait to meet you!

Happy feet

"A wise mother, upon arriving at their spot, first sends the children off to run wild and play and make as much noise as they want."

~Charlotte Mason (Outdoor Life for Children)

I'm pretty sure that after this weekend's adventures, our kids might be convinced that we're the most fun parents ever. See those muddy feet? There's a smile on the face of the little guy above them. A great big I-haven't-spent-a-moment-indoors-all-weekend smile. And his sister has one to match.

We woke the kids up early on Saturday and headed to Starbucks for a special breakfast. All good adventures should start with chocolate milk and scones (and a shot of espresso for the adults never hurts). I twisted Abby's hair into some french braids, a sure sign that we're about to have the good kind of fun, the kind that requires your hair to stay out of your face, and then we hit the road for our big day. We chased ducks, held worms, wandered through the woods, played in mud, splashed in the lake, and cheered daddy on as he explored his new fishing hobby.

After a picnic lunch, the kids made it pretty clear they were ready for some naps, so we headed home, scrubbed them down in a bubble bath, and tucked them in. A few hours later our adventures continued.

We picked up a pizza for dinner and headed to the creek to wander around in the cold water and catch crawfish, which is quickly becoming a favorite evening activity for our kids. Abby likes to pick them up in her hand and threaten Caleb with them, while Caleb prefers to hover above the bucket we keep them in, yelling "Hi, crabs!" and occasionally throwing rocks at them. So while the kids and I were busy scooping up crawfish, Justin put Abby's glittery fishing pole and our leftover pizza scraps to good use and reeled in a whopper of a trout, which we dropped in a bucket and let the kids pet for a while before releasing back into the wild.

And because we had so much fun on Saturday, we repeated the process after church on Sunday. Only this time, we brought the boat.

All in all, the only time we spent inside our house all weekend was naptime and nighttime. So, yeah, it was pretty much the best weekend ever.