Bulletpoint List

I do enjoy a nice list from time to time.

• Bianca got her ears pierced over the weekend and I am absolutely paralyzed by the cuteness. Pictures soon.
• We have yet another new friend! He's pretty close to Simba's age.
  
• Only two more openings left now, and five people have called asking about the spots. It will be interesting to see who we end up with.
• I'm hopeful it will be dry enough in the yard to go out today. I got a huge new set of bubble wands and a jug of bubbles last week and the kids are frothing at the mouth to get out there and spill it all over themselves play with the bubbles.
• I still need to do an introduction post for Chip. He's Belle's little brother, so I thought Chip (like the little teacup, not the rescue ranger) was a good name. :)
  

Sleep

It does a body good.

Reminder

School will be closed on Friday, April 10.

Happy Passover!
Happy Easter! :)

Personnel Change!

It occurs to me that if I'm going to keep introducing new kids, I really need to mention the fact that there's a new Daycare Girl here too. As the list of kids gets longer, it looks more and more crazy that I would be here by myself with all these babies. I'm a licensed facility, so I can have up to 12 kids if there's a second adult here. We're working on getting up to 12. I like switching things around every now and then, and I've been working by myself for the last four years. For three years before that, I did daycare at my mom's house and the two of us had 12. It was FUN. I love finding somebody else who loves kids and can help plan fun activities, and let's face it, it's nice to have somebody to talk to during the day who doesn't expect me to wipe some sort of bodily fluid off of them. :)

My weird sense of humor wants to give us mean Disney names, like the two evil stepsisters or a couple of villains. But that's probably not the best idea. I don't really want to go around being Cruella. I'll probably just still be Daycare Girl, and I'll ask her what she wants to be when she gets here. She's got a little girl who's in between Aurora and Bianca in age, so it works out well. I'm looking forward to lots of fun times.

Roly Poly Bugs

Yesterday I spun them around on our little octopus merry go round until I couldn't do it anymore. With four or five kids sitting on it, that doesn't really take long. They're used to me giving up quickly, and one of them will generally refer to my "tired little noodle arms". They know me well. Anyway, they asked if I would move it out a few feet so they had room to run around it and take turns spinning each other instead. Bonus.

I don't move it very often because it kills the grass underneath and it's kind of muddy and gross. I scooted it over a bit and they got to see a huge den? (nest? what do you call it?) of roly poly bugs.

And ooh, now I am totally going to print that out as a coloring sheet and teach them all about it.

But anyway. There were about fifty of them all milling around and the girls were immediately fascinated. Duchess, Ariel, and Tinkerbell (who was back visiting for the day) were fighting over who could catch more of them, gathering them by the handful, letting them crawl up their arms...

And Sebastian was standing on top of the merry go round screaming. "BUGS! YUCK!"

I love that we're all about breaking down the gender stereotypes here. :)

Ariel got to sixteen, I think, before her handful got so big she was going to squish them if she tried to put more in.


Sebastian, in the blue plaid, never would get down or touch them, but he did get brave enough to lean over and look a bit more closely.

Lovely New Addition

We have a new friend. She's settling in nicely and all the big kids are much enamored of her. The way O'Malley says her name totally cracks me up- it ends up sounding like "baby hose" and that is nowhere close to her actual name. But anyway... for the purposes of the blog I think she will be Bianca. The big girls are obsessed with The Rescuers lately and they think that little mouse is the cutest thing ever. They leaped all over it when I suggested that we call her Bianca.

I haven't been able to catch a good picture of her smiling yet. I can't wait to do it though- she has a thousand-watt smile that lights up her whole face. It is awesome.

But even without the ginormous smile, she's pretty darn cute. :)

Outdoors!

Simba went outside on his own today for the first time. He hasn't been walking very long and is rather prone to scavenging- he's one of those kids where you're constantly saying "did you put something in your mouth? what is that?" On the days that it's been nice enough to go out this season, I've put him in a chair or the exersaucer so he can watch everybody and enjoy the fresh air, but not get into trouble.

Today I figured we'd try it for real. He did really well! (until he discovered the sand table... but I guess green moon sand is too big a temptation to resist tasting.)

He'll be one next week, officially a big boy! Of course, in his own mind he's been one of the big kids for months now. He's got places to go and things to do.