Cultivating Childhood

We're on vacation.  You know the kind - the whirlwind type vacation where you come home needing a vacation?  We are in California visiting with my wonderful family.  We have been seeing A LOT of friends and family while attempting to maintain some sort of sleep and eating schedules for two young boys.  Thus, the idea of blogging or even keeping up with any sort of organized preschool type activities has been put on hold. We were able to still finish week three of our Advent wreath before our trip to California.  I hope that we will be able to actually get through all of it next year since we'll be able to focus more easily on our new family traditions in our own home.  We did get to finish going through our advent calendar, but we didn't do any crafts.  There is just too much going on here to try to add something else to the mix.  Instead, we've had a lot of fun playing with duplos and trains at Grandma and Papa's house. One thing I real...

We are a bit late on our post from his last week, but that's just because we've been having so much fun!  We made it to two different museums as a family making it feel like a mini-vacation for us even though for the most part it's been a normal week for us. The Advent calendar continues to be a highlight of the day.  Even Button gets super excited when we say the words "Advent calendar."  He will run from the other side of the house over to the calendar and point and grunt until we get it down.  I'd like to say that he really enjoys our daily Bible readings that we have in it, but in reality I'm sure the M&Ms are the bigger draw.  ;-)  Little Buddy, on the other hand, can't wait to get his green  M&M (green is his favorite color), but he also looks forward to our reading time. One special part of this week was our trip to the Children's Museum.  Phil took a half day off so we could do this as part of Little Buddy's special birthday tim...

This week has flown by.  It's been a good week, and in some ways it's been nice not to have to plan a bunch of preschool activities.  We've mostly been doing child-led learning, and that's been going great.  Little Buddy had his first reading lesson this week.  I wrote down some simple words on his doodle board, and he sounded out each of the letters.  He didn't want to say the sounds "fast" nor did he make the jump to putting all the sounds together.  Instead, he just wanted me to write another word so he could sound out its letters. He's also really enjoying borrowing our computers to write out his name which usually looks something like this a lot of each letter both upper and lower case.  I'm looking forward to when we have a computer that is sorta "his". This is our first year really celebrating Advent.  Of course, we've always celebrated for Christmas and couldn't wait for it to come, but this year is different.  Having our ...

When I first started this blog, I went on an Internet rampage trying to find other bloggers who were trying to do the same thing I was.  I hoped to find some ideas of things that we could use in our own "classroom" and feel like I'm not alone in my quest to home educate my son.*  What I discovered was a host of amazing resources!  Apparently, homeschoolers like to blog and blog A LOT.  I thought I'd share some of my favorites. Totally Tots I think this has got to be my favorite blog out there.  It's a group blog with a number of different features that relate to young children.  For example, they have a feature called "Once Upon a Book" that focuses on one book and then gives a number of activities to go along with it including a craft, memory verse, and maybe a math or science lesson.  Other examples of features they include: "Crafty Corner," "Now I Know My ABCs," and "In My Heart - Bible Verse Memory." Links to All Things ...

I'm going to be doing something different here for the month of December.  We will be a doing a fair bit of traveling and a lot of festivities are about!  I know that I'm not going to be able to keep up with all that's going on here on the blog so I thought I'd just share with you up front what we are going to be doing to celebrate Advent and Christmas.   First of all, this time of year is always crazy for our family.  Not only is December 25th the day that we celebrate Jesus' birthday, but it is also Noah's birthday.  We want to make our almost 3 year old feel special that he is another year older, but the holiday is super important too!  It feels hard to not overlook our precious son.  We hope to do a few things special for him, and will probably let him open up his birthday presents a few weeks early.  At this age, he doesn't understand yet when exactly his birthday is, and I'm sure he'll accept gifts at any time.  ;-) Second, we are going...

SNOW!  Yes, the "bit of snow" that we "might" get turned into us starting the week with two full days of snowing.  We ended up with 6 inches of snow on the ground, and we didn't even try to venture out in our car for a couple of nights.  I was so thankful that my husband now works from home as there were poor people in Seattle that spent over 5 hours getting home on a commute that takes less than 20 minutes sans traffic!  One person we know actually gave up and went back to his office to sleep!  Despite the horrible driving conditions, Noah was SO EXCITED to get snow.  From his first sight of snow he screamed  out of pure delight for over an hour.  I've never seen him so excited about anything before.  Sorry Thomas the Tank Engine!  You've been replaced by frozen water droplets! The first picture is what our yard looked like on Monday morning.  The second is it on Tuesday morning. Once Zach decided the snow wasn't so bad after all, ...