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Kent’s Birthday Present

We have the perfect birthday present on order for Kent!  His birthday isn’t until July but you know us, we like to plan ahead! The exact specifications are unavailable at this time, and despite having some pictures we’re told that the item may vary a bit from the description. The estimated arrival date is July 13th, 2013.  Kent was shipped earlier than expected though so you never know. 😉 They were able to provide us with some details.  Such as… IT’S A BOY! And… I’m feeling great.  Thanks for asking a million times!  😀 This is at 21 weeks and 1 day.

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green / Holidays / St. Patrick's Day / Tot School / Uncategorized

Tot School: St. Patrick’s Day week

Kent was 20 months old. As we’ve been growing in our faith I’ve started digging in to each holiday and trying to decipher whether or not it is worth celebrating.  For us, St. Patrick’s Day is.  We are not Catholic but the story of how St. Patrick spread the word of God is still an inspiring story that I feel Kent can benefit from hearing.  I wanted to make the week really fun.  It was VERY fun, even better than Brown week.  Planning and preparation is really paying off. I wish I had snapped a picture of the tot tray shelf.  I’ll try to do that from now on. We also colored a free printable of St. Patrick and made a shamrock egg carton craft.  It was a GREAT week! Have you changed the way you think about holidays due to your faith?  Any awesome activities we missed?

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Brown / Color Themes / Tot School

Tot School: Brown

Kent was 20 months old. I spent a lot more time planning Brown week and it paid off.  There was a bit of frustration on my part when he didn’t want to do some of the activities but I adjusted and we had fun. We did the matching cards a couple times.  This was our first time using them so he didn’t quite “get it” enough to find both parts.  Instead, I laid them all out, already matched, and had him pick out the animals by name and then pick up both parts and put them in the pocket.  This worked well and was a good way to practice his language skills. The yellow basket, aka color bin, was taken around the house and filled with random brown objects.  We have a coonskin cap from his Grandpa Larry and Kent enjoyed petting them and playing with it a little bit. I’ll do a separate post of the paper plate craft. This was by far our best week yet.  Stay tuned for our St. Patrick’s themed week which was even better.  What has been your favorite theme or activity when working with your children? This post is linked to: Tot School

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Color Review / Color Themes / Purple / Tot School

Tot School: January (Purple and Color Review)

Kent was 18 months old. We kind of wandered through January.  I tried to rotate the tot trays so that he had fun stuff to play with but I didn’t do a lot of planning or set any real goals.  We spent some time on the color purple. At some point I realized that even though we’d covered most of the colors I still wasn’t really sure if Kent knew and recognized them.  There was a time when he would accurately point the “the red ball” or the “green tree” in his books, but other times that he would point to something else.  So, we did some fun color review activities.  After working through them I could tell that he did recognize most colors, with normal errors and confusion over similar colors.  It’s just good to know where we’re at. Where are you at with learning colors?  What are your favorite color activities?

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Tot School: December

Kent was 17 months old. Ha, the only pictures I have from December are these two.  We made cloud dough.  It was fun but I think he tried to dump it out and I lost my cool.  We moved it to the bathtub and then the bathtub was greasy for a long time. We also did a few activities from The Truth in the Tinsel.  I googled and googled before I bought it trying to figure out if it would be age appropriate for a 17 month old.  The few comments I could find made it sound like the answer was yes.  I think the answer is yes, BUT you’d want to: a) have all your materials prepared ahead of time, and b) tell yourself to relax and let it be what it will be.  Neither describes me in December.  I was trying to pull supplies together with him at my side and he would (understandably) try to grab at them before I was ready, and I would get irritated.  Also, I had a long list of Christmas gifts to finish at the last minute so I was generally struggling in December anyway.  I’m still glad I bought the ebook,

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Casual Saturday: Rambings About Our House, etc.

This has been a good week.  I am finally feeling comfortable with life being full of projects.  I used to want all the “special projects” done as perfectly and quickly as possibly so I could get right back to my normal life and routine.  Now I’m learning to roll with it.  It’s okay that I’ve been canning for months.  It’s okay that three walls in my living room are completely painted… and one is not even started.  Yeah, it’s all good.  It appears that special projects are the norm when you’re a new little family living on an old, old farm.  I’m starting to redo all the things we did to the house when we moved in.  Can you believe we’ve been here for FIVE years!?  Crazy.  It was five years on Labor Day weekend.  Anyway, when we moved here we did a lot of work but it was mostly all hard labor and low dollar stuff.  My Mom helped a lot.  We stripped the cabinets and tore down wallpaper.  I put up new trim.  Brian rearranged the kitchen cabinets and installed new counter tops.  If you’ve been reading since the beginning you probably remember some of that.  If you weren’t

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