Best Food Ever

Now that Aurora is one, she's eating most of the things the big kids are eating. I gave her spaghetti for the first time here today. I have not seen joy and rapture of this magnitude on that child's face before. Nor have I seen her face so messy. Ever. It was quite astonishing. She ate three helpings.

Scuse Me, I Believe That's My Chair...

I love watching the babies get bigger. It is so much fun to get a tiny infant and watch them learn to do things. One day they're all just lying around on mats and the next they're rolling, sitting, standing... it's one of the best things for making sure this job never gets boring. There is always something new going on at each stage, for each kid.

Chip has learned to sit up alone. He is highly pleased with himself. He also really likes to grab his feet. We have learned two things from this:

1. If you put him in this particular bouncy chair, the effort of trying to reach his feet makes him fall over sideways. He's perfectly happy to hang there, but it looks really silly.

2. He does much better sitting on the floor. However, this results in a very Weeble sort of effect- he's constantly doing a slow roll sideways or backwards, because it's really hard to balance on just your bum while you're trying to put your toes in your mouth. Just doesn't work too well.

Roo was a few feet behind him in the living room, hanging out and totally minding her business, just chillin' on a blanket when Weeble Boy came crashing onto her from out of nowhere.

She was very startled.

Lilo and Stitch

If you've been reading awhile, you may remember the girlie I now refer to as Lilo- I used to call her Marie. That was back when I just started Disney names and wasn't trying to keep siblings together. She went home for the summer and is now back full-time with her little sister, so I needed to find a movie to put them both in.

I haven't actually seen Lilo and Stitch, but just from previews and watching these two, it seems perfect. Lilo is very dainty and particular and girly and soft-spoken. And their parents actually refer to Stitch as "Alien Girl" at home because she's everywhere, she climbs, she growls, she makes crazy alien-esque noises when you don't feed her fast enough... it's hilarious how different they are.

So. Meet Lilo and Stitch. :)

Lilo, dressing up in the princess dress...

And my girl Stitch.

Can't you just hear her making those bleh bleh noises? :)

Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Our Five In A Row book this week is Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?. Today we're looking at all the different shapes in the book- Mama Bear's kitchen floor is quite festively decorated with a bunch of squiggles and shapes. Our art project is to make a floor of our own using foam shapes and patterns. Today is the first day I've done "official" art with Aurora, which is really fun. She came crawling over and told me "ART ART ART!!!" and stuck some stickers on her own paper.

Search Engine Overload: Orca

You know those commercials out now for bing.com where they talk about what information overload is doing to us? The ones where the people just start spouting out random facts about stuff?

yeah.

That would be Ariel. She cracks me up.

We were playing with the puppets the other day and one of them is a killer whale. She asked me what it was called and I said an orca. She looked completely blank so I added that it's also called a killer whale, and that there is a famous one named Shamu that she will see when she visits Sea World.

She just sat there looking at me for a minute and then things started falling out of her mouth.

"OH! An ORCA! Orcas live in the ocean. They are black and white and they like to eat fish and leatherback sea turtles are afraid of orcas!"

Go, Diego, Go is a beautiful thing. :) As long as she can remember what an orca LOOKS like, she already knows all about it.

Exercise...

I've been thinking a lot lately about exercise for the kids. My preschooler email bulletin from Babycenter today had several links to articles about it as well, so I guess it's on many people's minds. I know that 60 minutes of daily exercise is recommended, but some days it is hard to get that all in. Sometimes with the big kids I just think, well good grief, they NEVER sit still, they've got to be active enough! But this article is saying that 89% of "so-called exercise" seen in the surveyed preschools was too sedentary and basically didn't count.


In addition, this article is saying that even INFANTS who are cared for in a home daycare setting are ending up heavier than ones who stay at home or go to corporate centers. Really? They aren't sure of the correlation, but they see it happening. It makes for some interesting reading- food for thought, although I have no idea why or what to do about that. It's much easier to work on physical curriculum for the big kids. Usually tummy time and room to crawl is enough for the babies. But just knowing that it's a possibility makes me want to be sure that I have enough opportunities set up!

I can see that we don't always do enough with the big ones here, especially in the hot summer. Spring and fall are much better for us in terms of going outdoors. We just can't stay out long enough to do much right now, because in about ten minutes they're bright red and sweaty and begging to go back in. And inside the house they'd like to run around, but since this is my HOUSE and not a center, I like to try to reinforce house rules. You don't run inside the house- at least my family doesn't. Walking feet. Please don't jump off the couch, get down, settle down.... it doesn't lend itself to a lot of exercise. I have some large-muscle games like ring toss and bean bags, and we have a couple kid exercise videos, but it's not the same as getting to really run around. (Although the "workout in a chair" snippet of Elmocise kicks my tail if I do it with them..... )


I got a book at my last workshop called Jump Into Math that I really like so far. The whole thing is physical activities to do in small chunks with the kids, just a few minutes at a time, that stimulate both brainpower and muscle work. We're also going to start active games like Red Rover and Red Light Green Light.

We didn't choose to do summer classes with Ms. Mimmie, but she was GREAT at making sure they got all their activity in on Tuesdays. Hopefully in the fall we can start that back up too.


What other ideas do you guys have that would be good? I'm going to keep looking around for more, but I can always use feedback!!