Recent Activity

One morning Ellie and I decided to make orange juice. We used the juicer that belonged to my great grandmother (right, mom?).

That same morning we had to make cookies because I had a cookie exchange that night. We made gigantoid crunchy peanut butter cookies. They were awesome and Ellie was good enough to only eat the one spoon of dough that I gave to her.

How many stickers can big sister put on little sister's face? And how bad do you think those puppies hurt when they came off?

Aaaaand how many stickers can I get on my hand?

She said, "hold on while I turn on my blender, cover your ears, it might be loud." And proceed to blend her felt pasta.

She got the lacing cards out when I was in the next room and when I came in, she held up this horse. Funny, she never did these when I had them out as an "activity." But now that I'm not doing any of that structured stuff...

Being silly in Dad's car while we waited for my car to be done with repairs. Julia wet her winter clothing and I hadn't changed out the spare outfit from a summer one... it was only 30 degrees outside, she wasn't cold, right? hah.

The first time we used our little cutter from For Small Hands. Ellie loved this.

She's obsessed with The Paper Bag Princess. We're trying to find an alternative to Disney princesses and this book was recommended on several blogs I found. Apparently there's a whole anti-Disney princess community out there.

I made this from a book I got from the library: Montessori for Everyone. Ellie has done it once and liked it.

Dancing to Christmas music with Julia! Dancing to whatever Pandora plays on their Christmas music channel is a new favorite. We have taken to repeating this ritual about twice a day, especially when Dad gets home and there are two big people to pick up and twirl the two little people.

I've been working on getting better at photographing the ordinary things we've been doing. Who knows, the next few weeks I'll probably stink at doing this. It's an ebb and flow thing for me, as is this blog. So goes life. :)

Table Top Fun

For a while now, I've avoided doing art projects with Ellie for fear that Julia would confiscate our materials and do unforeseen damage before she could be caught (not that she's that fast, but she gets out of "lunging" range pretty quickly). One day I decided to put Ellie at our kitchen table, which is waist-high on us grown people. This worked quite well for a few times before Julia decided we were doing something fun up there. I put her in her seat and the fact that she could participate in mess-making projects made her immensely happy. She now sits at the table for all art projects and is quite the budding artist. And of course I am happy with this arrangement because it's as much as control as I will ever have over Julia and art supplies. As you can see from the pictures, it's not very much control.

Ellie got some princess stickers from Dan a while back and she had been holding on to them for the perfect project. She deemed dot-a-dots as the project of choice. The completed piece is hanging on our refrigerator as the prize piece of artwork that it is. She also got herself dressed this particular day and is sporting two dresses in this picture.

Julia is content to use crayons for a while, then she is content if she can just eat them.

Gluing has been a consistent favorite, but we're just now getting into gluing piece after piece after piece on top of each other. Our gluing pieces are now sculptural!

This was a new activity and Ellie adored it. I drew tiny circles and placed wax paper on top, then she had to put purple dots inside the dots I drew. Quite simple and she did it about 10 times and managed to do it perfectly (which is how she likes everything).

Julia likes stickers almost as much as she likes eating.

J was not much of a fan of painting, she would rather have finger painted, but I decided not to put that idea in her head this particular day (I wasn't feeling too adventurous). Ellie filled up the paper and was done.

Normally I wouldn't have let J try markers, but she was NOT satisfied with crayons while Ellie was getting to use markers! So as you can see, she thoroughly enjoyed using them and even got confused as to what they are intended for (paper) from time to time.

Thoughts on Learning

This is a post about what the girls have been filling their days with lately. A bunch of whatever they darn well please! I've been doing some reading about schooling and taking a new approach with the two of them (previously I had taken a very structured approach that was not working and I was constantly frustrated). Basically it's allowing Ellie to choose what we learn about. Yes, I realize she's only 3, but she's full of curiosity and interest in the world around her. Her enthusiasm is fresh and interest is genuine, so naturally, I want to encourage her! I've stopped trying to coerce her into having an organized "school" time and embraced her natural learning style. Not that I'm, er, perfect (shocker, right?) and don't still take out some number flash cards when I find them... but I'm trying not to force her to learn things she isn't interested in. Think about the things that you have learned in your life time (not necessarily in school), or the things that you remember. It was something you liked, right? For me, it was art, design, and music. I truly learned very little until I started studying the arts, then it became enjoyable. Hours would pass while I was engrossed in art history, a design project, or while playing the guitar. The point is that we succeed in areas that we enjoy. Maybe for a short time period or maybe life long. So why not apply this approach to my 3 year old?!

At the moment, Ellie is extremely interested in princesses. Dressing up, wearing veils, dancing and twirling, all things girly. We talked a few days ago and decided to go get some books from the library on princesses. I think we are going to start with historic princesses, but I'm not exactly sure what this is going to look like yet. Pocahontas during this Fall/Thanksgiving season? She might not be girly enough... Maybe we'll start with go that direction and see if it interest Ellie.

Here are the pictures of our adventures as of late.

Learning to put tops on and take them off, too early, I fear. :)

She is quite pleased with herself to be able to get in this rocker and will shake her torso very stiffly in attempt to get it to rock properly.

This is a stacking game called "leaning tower of Pisa" that Ellie did very well on. Sort of like Jenga. Ellie could stack the pieces pretty high and was quite proud of herself. Julia would squeal until she could get her hands on the dice and waddle away (at the pace of a tortoise) before we had to retrieve our game piece.

This was not done by my 1 year old as you would probably assume...

She's doing "big girl" things already!

Eating brown markers...

Shopping!

What the girls have been up to lately...

Lots of dancing (Ellie will say she needs to go to dance practice, asks for her pom pons, and says to call her Carol),
Vacuuming (and standing, but not walking yet)
Drawing & coloring (and sharing!),
Feeding babies (at the dinner table nonetheless),
Taking friends to Chick Fil A (who's mom just had a baby),
Taking pictures of me & Julia (Ellie is getting pretty good!)

Ellie 3 yr & 4 mo
Julia 13 Mo