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 ...