Fruit on jammie Monday

It wasn't a true Jammie Monday since we did leave the house. :) Our friends are moving out of the neighborhood, so our playgroup had a goodbye party (with pizza and cookie cake--we weren't gonna miss that!). :)

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Today we talked about the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control).

Side note, when I got to self-control, Anna-Kate said, "Oh, I know about that, you tell me to get some all the time when I'm being naughty!". I laughed. Really hard.

We talked about how the fruits are God's gift to His children, to help us be more like Him. I showed her a rotten and black banana and a nice yellow one and asked her which one she would rather eat. We both agreed that the yellow one was much nicer--and that's how God wants us to be. I then asked her which one we looked like to Jesus when we were being sinful, ugly and disobediant. She looked sad and pointed to the nasty banana. I said, "but God can make even something ugly and yucky wonderful again, can't He?" Then, we talked about how ugly, yucky bananas make wonderful banana bread. (It's always coming back to food for us, evidently). We talked about each of the "fruits", what the words meant, and how we could show that fruit every day (ie, being faithful means being loyal to our brother and choosing to play with him, or being good means obeying and doing what we know is the right thing to do, even when no one is watching).

Then it was craft time! Anna-Kate colored all of the fruits, cut them out and then glued (all by myself, she said.) the fruit into a basket.









I love jammie Mondays!

Garage Sale-ing

Anna-Kate and I hit up some garage sales yesterday-so fun! A nice neighborhood was having a huge sale, so we drove over and she had her first bargaining experience. We got: a snow white doll (it's the size of an American Girl doll) and her accessories, a doll potty, doll bathtub, Gap jean skirt (for AK), Thomas (wooden) trains, Veggie Tales book, sound machine, Strasburg dress, and a box of dress up hats including sombreros and pinatas (stuff for a party) and only spent $20.25.

Clearly, she's a good student at the school of bargaining, because we were at our last house and only had $5. I wanted to get the jean skirt for next summer, (we always have one for her to wear to VBS since she only wears dresses and has nothing to wear with her t-shirt) but she was holding Snow White and the doll stuff. She had an especially pitiful look on her face because the lady let us take it all for $5.25! :) We then had an impromptu Target date and split some popcorn. Fun times.

Funnies

AK: "What's that line in your hair?"
Me: (in my head..."I just got my hair highlighted, how is there a line?") "What are you talking about?"
AK: "That line. (and points to the part in my hair) It's like my line." (and points to her own part).
Me: "Ooooh. That's called a part in your hair."
AK: "It looks like an open book to read on your head."

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Ry: "Where we going, Mama?"
Me: "Church"
Ry: "Ryan no want to go to church."
Me: "Why not? It'll be fun, your friends will be there, and there is a special snack."
Ry: "Oh yes, that's right. I want to go to church. Get special snack."
(our priorities are clearly where they should be).

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Every night, as a stalling tactic Ryan asks to count my fingers. He either forgets to count my thumb or in the craziness of moving from my pointer finger to thumb, adds one (for a total of 6 fingers, which neither of my hands' has). The other night he was counting and he got to five, then circled back around to the pinkie and said, "...six. O look Mommy, you got an extra one of those!"

Oh no!

My morning was good (despite having to remake a burp cloth and take 2 kids to the post office).

I think my luck is turning, and that isn't a good thing when I look at my to-do list. When I was making a phone call I accidentally stepped onto the side of my bowl of popcorn (that I put on the floor so I could write where the bowl had been) and sent all seeds flying around the room. I put down my diet dr. pepper to clean up the seeds and it somehow managed to fall down, hitting the chair on its way. And that was just in one minute.

Wondering if I should just watch tv so as to prevent future problems this afternoon?

I'm going crazy!

I have been doing a lot of sewing and embroidery lately. I've loved doing it, as it's been a while. Anyway. I made 5 burp cloths last night. I came in my craft room today during naptime to package them up to ship and I could only find 4 burp cloths. I have looked everywhere for the blasted missing burp cloth. How is that even possible?? I even started questioning if I'd actually made it or just thought that I had (I did, the thread scraps and fabric scraps are still out).

So now, I will make another. Sigh.

Op-some

Ryan has a leapfrog toy that has helped him learn his lower case letters (he knows them all!). Anyway, when he gets 5 right in a row it says, "you did awesome!". Ryan gets a big kick out of this saying, "I op-some, Mama!".

Ryan has been doing so well going to the potty, telling me he needs to go and not having accidents. I can't express how pleased (and relieved) I am. Anyway, I was kissing him before his nap and told him I was so proud of him and that I was going to call Daddy and tell him what a good job Ryan was doing. He said, "Umm, yes. You go call Daddy and say, 'Ryan op-som!' OK Mama?".

I about fell out of the bed laughing. I sure love this little guy!

Rainbows

Alternate title: Long Live Jammie Monday!

So, we decided to keep Anna-Kate home on Mondays. Even though she was skipping school, I still wanted there to be an element of discipline, you know, sit and follow directions, but I wanted it to be fun/special time with Mommy (in our pj's, of course!). Enter, "special projects". I shamelessly borrowed ideas from my friend, Taylor, and we set out for a day of learning about rainbows.

For breakfast we had rainbows, err, bagels cut in half with both sides like a rainbow.



During that time we talked about what rainbows meant (a promise from God) and read about Noah. What was quite helpful is that my mom got it in her head to do an experiment with the kids over the weekend, mixing colors. I had planned to do this myself, but she saved me the mess effort. We then talked about how all colors come from red, yellow and blue and the colors in between them makes up the rainbow and I told her about the silly old man, Roy G. Biv (you know, to help her remember the order of the colors) and we learned a song about the order of the colors. Both kids were highly entertained by these exercises and Anna-Kate thinks that "indigo" is the funniest word ever.

Then, it was time to begin our first project. I made "craft boxes" for each kid (cute old-school lunchboxes from the Target $1 bin last week) and put kid scissors, crayons, stickers, glue and markers--for Anna-Kate--in them. It is so the little things with kids! Anyway, I had strips of construction paper with various shapes on them that Anna-Kate cut out while I tried to teach Ryan how to cut. This was his maiden voyage in the cutting paper department. It went as well as can be expected. :) He lost interest after about 3.5 minutes. Anna-Kate did great! After all of the shapes were cut she got to glue them in the correct space, then write the words, in the appropriate color. I thought she would completely baulk at this, but she ate it up and loved it!











We took a break to run around and play a while and then did our second rainbow project. We colored the stripes of the rainbow, in the right order, and glued cotton balls on the clouds. (Sidenote, I recognize that I am cool simply by allowing there to be glue involved. I only took a few deep breaths as I let her put it on the paper. Impressed? Probably more likely...rolling your eyes. :) ).



The last part of our special project was lunch. They had their sandwich, and then got to eat (in order): red strawberries, orange carrots, yellow bananas, green grapes, blue yogurt, indigo (purple) skittles, and violet fruit snacks. Lest you think I stuff my kids, it was just a few of each. :) They thought this was the greatest thing ever! So fun and amazing how quickly they scarfed down each color to get to the next!







It really was a fun day. In fact, this morning when I took her to school she started crying as we approached carpool drop off and said, "I don't want to go to school today. I want to stay home and do special projects with you again!". This was kind of an experiment to see if homeschooling could be a possibility for us. In the past, Anna-Kate has responded much better to others teaching her (swimming etc) and from Chris as far as homework goes. I have been very hesitant to think too seriously about it because of that, but am encouraged and ready to pray about it with a truly open heart now. We shall see.