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!

Summer 2016 - Nature Week!

It's SUMMER!!  No more rushing around the house in the morning to get two kids off to school.  No more driving back and forth and back and forth across town to drop off and pick up.  No more scrambling to get my work done during the few hours of quiet time I have while Ellie is at school.  SO MUCH time to hang out with my girls, do fun projects, and so much time to fill with exciting and engaging activities for the girls so that I can still get things done. Wait.  Maybe I didn't think this through...

One of the biggest challenges I face as a work at home mom is the struggle to balance my work time and my time spent with the girls.  During the school year, Ellie was in school 8 hours each week.  Sophia was in school 35 hours.  That was a LOT of time to run errands, make phone calls, and generally work on anything that needed to get done.  I'm so excited to have this extra time with them but I'm also a little nervous about how I will get everything done with two stinky adorable faces around all the time!  It's tough to make sure I'm getting my work done when really I just want to spend my time being a mom.  But I just gotta do it ;) After all, if I don't work all of my businesses, they don't work themselves which means I don't get paid and eventually, I have to go back to teaching.  Nope.  Not happening.

I knew I needed to have a good plan for the summer.  One that gives me the time I need with my girls, gives me time to work diligently and consistently, and one that I will stick with.  They are enrolled in swim school through the NMSU Rec Center and will have class Monday-Thursday mornings through most of July.  Super excited to have them in the class and glad we will have a reason to get up and at 'em in the mornings but the class is only 30 minutes so there is still plenty of time in the day to fill.  I remembered that one summer when Sophia was tiny, we did a weekly theme thing where we focused on one theme and incorporated reading, writing, math, art, etc.  Time to bring it back!  I decided to schedule out the summer with weekly themes, activities that I can do with the girls and ones that they can do by themselves while I work at the table with them, and scheduled times for them to go to Grandma's so that I can just focus on work.  We started this week and I have to say, it was one of the most FUN weeks I've had with them!

For this week we focused on nature and being kind to the planet.
Monday was memorial day and Tuesday we had to be out of the house all day so we spent the day swimming at Grandmas.  Well...they swam all day.  I swam a little then headed inside to work.  We officially kicked off the week on Wednesday.  After swim school we headed to the library.  Ellie is in an interesting point in her development.  She is still QUITE a handful but now, as long as I give her complete instructions on how to behave in specific situations (ie church, at the store, etc.), she's rockstar!  We spent the car ride talking about appropriate library etiquette.   She rocked it and we can't wait to go back! We picked up some books about the planet, nature, and animals - for next week.  Next up, it was lunchtime and we were right by the Farmer's Market so we stopped for a bite to eat.  It was cool, cloudy, and there were some sprinkles!  Usually we go to the market on Saturday when it's super crowded so it was fun to check it out during the week!

We spent the rest of the afternoon reading our books and finding fun nature videos on http://discoverykids.com/ and http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/.  We especially fell in love with a series called Nature Boom Time which follows a few people as they tour some National Monuments and explore different and unusual forests.  Side note:  We TOTALLY want to visit ALL of the parks they highlighted!  I read Crinkleroot's Guide to Giving Back to Nature to them, Sophia read The EARTH Book to Ellie and I, and Sophia started to read Just Grace Goes Green to herself.  Later that day, Ellie told me she had the greatest day ever.  Swoon!

Thursday we focused more on math.  The girls went out in the yard and collected a giant pile of items: rocks, sticks, leaves, flowers, etc.  We used the items to create patterns, make shapes, do some basic addition and subtraction, and sort the items in to piles using different criteria.  One of the things I miss most about teaching is watching kids have that "aha" moment.  It was cool to watch that happen with the girls - Ellie while practicing an AB pattern and Sophia when I challenged her to create and duplicate a more complex pattern.  We also watched some more Nature Boom Time.

Next up was #FunFriday!  Keeping with the theme, we decided to go for a Nature Walk.  I found this cute activity on Teachers Pay Teachers and we took it with us.  Also, Sophia has been asking to go on a trash pick-up for weeks so we incorporated that into our walk.  I invited my friend Mayra to join us because she's a long-time fan of Fun Friday and we totally needed to catch up.

We went to the path down by the river to do our walk.  I wanted something that was full of nature, but not full of snakes ;)  It was so cool to see the girls making observations and not so cool to see how much trash was around.  On the way home we reflected on the week, talked about all of the things we can do to help out our planet, and got excited about next week - Animal Week!

In full disclosure, I definitely didn't get as much done on the work end of things as I wanted to but next week we will add their "mornings at grandma's house" into the mix.  I had so much fun with them and I LOVED doing things like this with Ellie.  She's at the perfect age to do meaningful activities and Sophia really enjoyed helping me guide her along.  I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel guilty about not working as much this week though. The scales definitely tipped to the girls but I'm ok with that. I'll catch up next week and for now, I'll give myself a much deserved pat on the back for a successful 1st week of summer!

Petit Ballerina Sophia is 5!!

My little girl is growing up right before our eyes!

Sweet Sophia is absolutely loving her ballet classes.  She prances around the house demonstrating her plies twirls (ok, I have no idea what those are called!) so it seemed appropriate to give her a ballerina party!

This might be my favorite yet!

I went with a combination of light pink, dusty rose, chocolate brown, and champagne.  Such pretty colors together!

Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes and a Cake with a Tutu ;)

Finger Sandwiches and Fancy Foodies ;)

This wall!  So pretty and made a HUGE impact on the party!  And oh those adorable wall tutus!

We encouraged all of her friends to wear their tutus too!

Ellie was NOT all about the tutu!

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Is her outfit amazing or WHAT?!  You have to check out Baby Bug by Jianna!  She creates the MOST adorable custom, boutique items!