Last Week w/ the Kiddos

Every day with the boys is a new adventure. I absolutely love being able to watch them grow and change, learn new things, and express their own individual creativity. We've had beautiful weather here, so we've been spending most of our time outside (and I never seem to take my camera with me when I'm in rough-and-tumble mode). We've been getting ready for Easter and working on some Spring time crafts as well as working on finishing up our garden beds so that we can get our seedlings into the ground sometime soon. Unfortunately it was too windy this weekend to use the paint sprayer to get the beds painted, so the little plants will have to wait one more weekend. Oh well...a lesson in patience for us all!



Sutton working on one of the lessons that I created - matching wooden animal beads to laminated cards. I scanned the beads into PhotoShop and then created sequencing strips for him.



Sutton loves munching on rice cakes...he calls them "cookies," so naturally his big brother needed to get his hands on one as quickly as possible too. Sawyer bit into it, took the chunk out of his mouth and inspected it, took another tentative bite, took that bite out of his mouth to inspect it, and then immediately looked at me with a confused expression and asked, "Is this paper, Mom?" LOL!



I got this idea from Chasing Cheerios awhile back, and decided to give it a try after picking up some cheap salt and pepper shakers at the dollar store. Each bottle contains a cotton ball that has been dipped into an essential oil (peppermint, lavender and orange oils). The object is to smell each shaker and match up the scents (there are two bottles with each scent). There are matching colored stickers on the bottom of each shaker so that they can self-check their work.




It's a great idea, in theory, but I should have waited until the kids weren't in the middle of springtime allergies. They really couldn't smell anything since they're too stuffed up, with the exception of the peppermint. Sawyer smelled every bottle and declared that they ALL "smells like gum."

He opted to match paint chip colors instead since he was frustrated that he couldn't smell :)

One of the boys' most requested activities lately is cutting things with scissors. We grabbed a stack of old magazines and started cutting out some of our favorite foods.

Sawyer cut me out this beautiful bouquet of flowers from the magazine cover so that we could have flowers on our refrigerator. He's concentrating really hard on getting it cut out perfectly!

When all of our favorite foods were cut out, we had fun gluing them onto paper plates for a pretend lunch. Sutton's has Jelly Bellys, oatmeal, waffles and a sandwich (that they fought over who got to have). Sawyer's has cheese, bowtie pasta (which he just discovered he likes last week), fish sticks, milk and a kiwi-berry freezer pop.

He was incredibly proud of the fact that he made himself an afternoon resting spot out of my yoga mat and Sutton's blanket (and yes, that is Sutton's potty in the background lol)

Of course, Mr. Monkey-See-Monkey-Do had to copy his big brother and make a spot for himself too




Don't worry little seedlings, we'll get you into the ground someday soon!