Summer Week 2 - Animal Week!

Week 2 of summer, just another week in this house.  You know, a full day showdown over cleaning their rooms that began with not being able to find ANY matching flip flops for EITHER girl (even though they each own like 5 pairs!), ended with me eavesdropping on them in Sophia's room while they talked about how I was being mean and how they needed to write me a letter asking me to be nice, and SEVERAL tears, a garbage bag full of toys that were going to be thrown away if they didn't put them in their homes within the next 10 minutes, and "promises" to keep their rooms clean from now on ;)  I won't like, I'm sure it was super traumatic for them to see all those toys in the bag since I've been known to throw away toys MANY times.  Especially for Ellie.  She knows that when mama says "I'm coming to check, Ellie!" I mean business.  If (after a couple of times asking her to clean up) I say that and I go in and find her playing instead of cleaning, I throw away a toy.  Typically something that I chose in advance because I'm tired of seeing it on the floor!  Sophia on the other hand said "That's ok Mommy.  I think you should throw away the toys because we already have enough toys."  Nice move, Soph.  The bag was mainly filled with Ellie's toys!

How about you?  Are you as sick of picking up toys on the floor as I am.  I seriously CAN'T TAKE IT!  And my kids really don't have that much stuff!

Anyway...
We definitely ended the day on a fun note.  Since it was Animal Week, we decided to watch The Lion King.  This was also fun because we are going to spend Thanksgiving in New York and we're going to see The Lion King on Broadway!!  Before the moving started, we talked about Africa and what types of animals we would expect to see in the movie.  We also enjoyed a yummy piece of chocolate cake that Grandma gave us!  :) Once we moved to the couch, Ellie fell asleep in about 2 minutes.

Totally my kid.  It's so hard for us to watch movies at night on the couch!  I kept dozing off and Sophia would not-so-gently wake me up so that I didn't miss anything.

The next morning after swim school.  We talked about the movie.  Sophia made a list of the things she expected to see then made a list of what we actually saw.  She also wrote a few sentences about her favorite part of the movie.  She really liked both parts where the baby lions were lifted into the air.  She liked that everyone was excited about a new baby :)

We also found our first tiny tomato in our garden!  This was super exciting because I'm the WORST gardener ever!  Everything always dies! Ha!  This year I'm determined that our garden will not only survive, but also flourish :)

We also found this adorable guy on our patio.  He and his mama/daddy are definitely culprits in the yearly failure of my gardens!

I had a bunch of work to do Tuesday and Wednesday and since Grandma was still recovering from a long weekend of many guests, I didn't get much alone time to do it.  We checked out several books from the library about endangered animals so I asked Sophia to read them to Ellie at the table while I worked.  After each book, she would find videos or more information about the animal on Discovery Kids and National Geographic Kids where apparently she's earning points with each activity and video she completes.  I don't really know what that means yet, but she likes it.

Tuesday night we had a FUN friend date with our pals Jianna, Alya, and Elin!  It was definitely controlled chaos but we had a blast!

Thursday we really got to business doing fun things!  One of the books Sophia read was Animals and Me by Marie Greenwood.  This book goes through all of the types of animals (mammal, reptiles, etc.).  Sophia LOVES to make her own graphic organizers so she asked me to create a form for each type of animal.  Each one had a header, a space for characteristics, habitat, food, and examples.  Then she went through the book with Ellie and they filled in as much info as they could.  Some items were not in the book so she headed back to her new favorite websites to look up info.  (Um, this is totally new and strange to me, by the way.  My 6 year old kid is using the internet to do research?)

Next, Sophia had a really fun idea.  She and Ellie collected a bunch of stuffed animals and other animal toys and brought them out the living room.  She wanted to sort them based on the animal group they belong to.  We discovered that we own a BUNCH of mammals but had a hard time finding any invertebrates.  We looked through everything and couldn't find anything.  Then Ellie held up her hand and said "This looks like a worm!"  It was her bubble gum that she pulled out of her mouth (after I had told her 8 times not to do that) and it totally looked like a worm!

Our next project I just KNEW would be fun...and I was right!  I found this on Pinterest.  They are animal activity dice!  One die has an action and the other an animal.  I swear they could have played this for hours!

Finally, for #FunFriday, we went to the ZOO with Grandma!!  It was super hot but definitely could have been worse.  There was a breeze which made it bearable :)  This was the first time we had been to the El Paso Zoo.  It was pretty average as far and the variety of animals but the facilities were great.  I found this Zoo Scavenger Hunt that we brought with us so that we would remember to actually talk about the animals as we saw them.  There were a couple that weren't available but we also saw some things that weren't on there.

They have a splash pad which was a HUGE hit after walking around all morning.  Their time spent playing was TOTALLY representative of my kiddos! Ellie charged in with no fear and Sophia was by in large dry for the first 10 minutes of play.  Ellie was plowed down by bigger kids a couple of times but in true Ellie nature, she gave it right back to them and set things straight :)

Another great week in the books. Ken was out of town most of the week so the girls and I had several sleepovers in my bed.  There is something so comforting about sleeping with your babies.  It's like you can feel their presence when you sleep.  You can also feel their feet in your back and hands slap you across the face in the middle of the night ;)

Next week - Ocean Week!