Monday, February 16, 2009

This Is Exhausting, Said The Frosting

Today's Muffin Tin Monday theme is I Can't, Said the Ant. We read the book and talked about rhyming words and chose foods that sounded good. I can't imagine why the artichoke didn't make their short list...

My husband took the camera with him on a trip, so there are no pictures for the next two weeks, but our foods are:

I can't bear it! said the carrot...
What a blessing! said the dressing....
How exhausting! said the frosting...
This is a breeze! said the cheese....
Rather rare! said the pear...
Gee! said the pea...
Take my advice! said the rice...

It's funny how we have weird combinations of foods like this for lunch. I'm not sure I would have ever served cheese, rice, peas, carrots, and frosting. But the food program just says we have to have a protein, a carb, and 2 fruits and/or veggies, so this qualifies. And it makes sense to them because of reading the book.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Space Work!

We have been having such a great time with the space theme this month. The kids are learning the names of all the planets, which ones are hot and which ones are cold, rotation and revolution around the sun, lunar cycles and phases of the moon... it's amazing. This is stuff I had mostly forgotten about from school and I'm relearning as much as they are, I think.

Did you know spiders went up in space? Yesterday was spider day- apparently back in the dawn of space travel they took different things up with them to see how gravity affected them. We wanted to see if spiders could still spin webs in zero gravity. They can. Arabella, the first spider in space, spun a web in two days. :)

Today we talked about how the astronauts had to develop special food to eat in space because gravity is what keeps your food on your fork! We pretended to catch food in the air as it floated around, and then we made space pudding.

Two tablespoons of vanilla pudding mix, four tablespoons of milk, zip it up in a bag, and smoosh it around until you've got pudding. You can't open the bag, because all the pudding will float out and get in your hair.... so we snipped a little hole in the corner and they sucked it out. So much fun.

Duchess and O'Malley LOVED it, Sebastian made the pudding and ate a few bites and then said it was yucky and needed to wash his hands, and Ariel refused to do it and ended up opening her bag and pouring the pudding all over her chair. Would not taste it either. But oh well. Most people had fun.

Duchess asked, "How come Ariel never wants to even try anything GOOD and only eats yucky stuff like green beans?" :) She does like her veggies, which I think is funny. Pudding? Cake? Cookies? No way. She wants peas and corn and green beans.

You can't make me eat the pudding. Not gonna happen.



Friday, February 6, 2009

6 Kids 5 And Under

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it would be like to have a big family. That's something I do on a regular basis, actually, but it's easier to visualize right now. Generally I've got a cluster of kids that are all pretty close to the same age. When we take the quad stroller and go walking, it's obvious to anybody paying attention that there is no way these kids could all be mine. Oh look! Four babies all around the same age-ish and then two more who just learned to walk! Not physically possible, not to mention one is Asian, two have red hair... whatever.

However, right now I've got two sibling groups who dovetail into each other, and then two infants. Today we went walking and I had Aurora, my Friday girlie who still needs a good Disney name, O'Malley, and Sebastian in the quad, and Duchess and Ariel walking. A man and his dog stopped to talk to us and made the predictable comments about my hands being full, just seeing the big kids who were petting his dog. Then he walked on by and saw the girls in the back of the stroller and just stopped in his tracks and goes, "HOLY CHRISTMAS!"

And I realized that for the first time in awhile, ALL the kids could conceivably be mine, biologically. The four bigger kids are all about 15-16 months apart, and Aurora and {help me think of a name for this new baby} are 6 weeks apart but look like they could very easily be twins.

5 1/2, almost 4 1/2, 3, almost 2, and 6 month old twins.

Good grief. This could be real.

I did tell him that most of them are my day job and only 2 belong to me. I have a feeling I'm going to want to start claiming them all though, just to see what people say to me. :)

Monday, February 2, 2009

25 Random Things About Us

This list is going around on Facebook, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to show off snippets and pictures and stuff that's happened so that I'll be caught up once and for all...

  1. Snow White graduated and went to her new school at the beginning of January. We all miss her and the kids ask when she's coming back to visit. I hear she's doing fabulously well in her new place, which was never a doubt in my mind. She'd outgrown me. :)
  2. Simba thinks he is one of the big kids now and I keep finding him in weird places quicker than I think he ought to be able to get there. He was trying to scale the shelves but got down when I went for the camera.
  3. I've also found him on top of the table this week, but I was too busy running to get him before he leaped off the edge to get a picture of it.
  4. I have a new part-time baby girl who comes on Fridays sometimes. I can't think of a good Disney name for her.
  5. It is taking Aurora quite awhile to get used to the fact that she has been dethroned from the title of The Only Infant In The House Who Should Be Held All The Time And Not Have To Watch Anyone Else Be Held Or Heaven Sakes Fed!
  6. The big kids divide on gender lines most days now. Duchess and Ariel want to have tea parties or play Sorry! in another room, and O'Malley and Sebastian like to hang out and smash trucks into each other.
  7. Most of them have a Webkinz account and so when they go outside they want to dig for gems or else make "gak" or "gunk" and stir a bunch of mud and rocks around and paint it on stuff.
  8. Ariel has become even more dramatic lately and will throw herself into sad-looking positions and whimper and peek out through her fingers to see if I've stopped the universe for her. Usually I laugh at her and take her picture. It bugs her, but most of the time snaps her out of the funk because she wants to see what she looks like.
  9. Muffin Tin Monday has become a pretty regular occurrence around here and they like trying to figure out the theme. Today we had olives, cucumber slices, hot dog slices, carrot slices, cheerios, and string cheese slices. Circles. They were pleased.
  10. Our curriculum theme for February is Blast Off! and we're all really excited about it. I've been finishing up random bits of leftover months that we never got around to, and haven't ordered a new theme box in a few months.
  11. I don't think I have found one thing that Simba will not eat. The kid can put away some groceries.
  12. On the flip side, most meals he eats more than both Ariel and Sebastian do all day long.
  13. O'Malley and Sebastian are trying to potty train. It's in that stage where I despair of it ever happening, but I know that all of a sudden one day it just WILL and I should stop worrying about it.
  14. Ariel is beginning to drop her nap and I let her stay up two days a week and work on school while I do kindergarten with Duchess. They are learning to skip count by tens, fives, and twos. Duchess is annoyed that Ariel is picking it up as fast as she is- she wants to be the smartest one. :)
  15. Duchess loves to hold Aurora and pretend that she's her baby sister. I think she wants to keep her.
  16. I wish I had a wardrobe as cool as Aurora's.
  17. I'm really excited about the supply fee this month- it's been awhile since I bought a lot of new things for the playroom.
  18. I'm looking at getting this for the babies. It looks like something they will enjoy. You put them on their belly and they can spin around and play with all the different parts of it.
  19. I'm not sure what direction I want to go for the big kids- Lakeshore is such an awesome place! There are a million cool things there that would make our days more fun. I think this may be at the top of my list though.
  20. I'd also really like a sand and water table that I can use for moon sand, but I'm not sure how practical it would be and if we could keep the area clean enough to not drive me batty.
  21. I finally feel like I might be caught up on all our goings-on!