Once the holidays were over and Anthony's vacation time ended, we started back into our every day routine. I caught the first of the year cleaning/organizing bug and I've been working on different sections of the house as the mood hits me. The day I took down all the Christmas decorations, I organized the entire garage and got rid of so much junk! Since then I have tacked the boys' rooms, their clothes, my sewing/craft supplies, and behind our couches. My next big project is our bedroom closet. It has become the catch-all place for everything, not just clothes and I've realized that there are things in there that haven't been touched since we moved in almost 4 years ago. Time to get rid of some more things!
Anthony's seahorses had their second batch of babies, which Anthony was really excited about! Last time they all died almost immediately, so this time was definitely an improvement. We had about 150 tiny seahorses that slowly died off over the course of a week and now we have one lone survivor. He is growing and looking strong, so maybe he will make it!
Anthony got a video of the seahorse pushing one of the babies out. It was an exciting morning, Anthony would call over, "He's having more!!" and we would rush to the tank to watch.
Here are some pictures of the babies when most of them were alive. There were so many and they were so tiny!!
James has started showing interest in doing preschool-type activities, which is so exciting for me because I've always wanted to do those with him, but he's never been interested before. I picked a literature-based preschool curriculum to use with him called "Five in a Row" where you read the same book each day, for five days and do different activities that are related to the story. He already loves to read books together, so I thought this would be a perfect way to keep his interest. So far he has been loving it! We do it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings and over the weekend he kept asking me, "Can we do Mommy school today??".
It takes us about two weeks to do one book and we are almost at the end of our first book, "Caps for Sale" by Esphyr Slobodkina. Every day we start by reading the book, then we do different games or worksheets based on the book. One morning we took printed monkeys with letters on their chest and pinned them on the clothesline outside in alphabetical order. It was a beautiful sunny day and about halfway through the monkeys, James said "Whew! This is hard work we are doing! This is a big job!"
Today we acted out the story, with James as the peddler that carries his hats on his head. In the story, he falls asleep and a bunch of monkeys take his caps and put them on their own heads.
James sleeping:
Rett being a monkey that took a cap:
Anthony being another monkey:
James shaking his fingers at the monkeys and saying, "You give me back my caps!"
Another day we did some counting worksheets:
On another day we did a comprehension sheet where I asked James what happened in the story and I wrote down exactly what he said. He remembered so many details, I was impressed!
We are having so much fun with our "Mommy School" and I love how much he loves it!
