Kids, Decorating, and Play

 We love to decorate our house, but that often involves a lot of items kids aren't allowed to touch. So we've been toying with having a special place in the house that is seasonal and decorative, but also a place where the kids can play. After Christmas we bought a discounted ceramic Christmas village and characters that we had set up on a table in our dining room. The table is tall enough that the toddler can't reach, but the older girls can stand or pull up chairs and play.

Since we're so into birds at the moment, we took down the winter village and set up a bird sanctuary or "Bird Village" as Ella likes to call it.
 
 As we do various crafts in our preschool time, we've been adding those to Bird Village so the kids not only get to play with it, but to participate in making pretty things to display in the house. So far it includes our wooden birdhouses with some fake cardinals from the craft store, and our nests with some other feathered birds from the dollar store. Ella added a small pond and a goose and a duck as well as a few rabbits.

I also printed out some lovely free vintage bird, nest, and egg prints I found at The Graphics Fairy. I laminated the pictures so they would stand up a little better to play. I also printed our Matthew 6:25-27.

  
On Monday, we added a spring tree to the display. We've made this craft the last two springs and it's easy and turns out quite pretty. All you need is a branch, some tissue paper, and glue. Have the kids tear up and crumple small pieces of the tissue paper and glue it to the branch like spring blossoms. We potted our branch with some stones and added our real birds nest and some more craft birds once we took it inside.

For the Birds: Eggs, Eggs, Eggs

So I'm not really a math person, and neither is Brent. Maybe that is why we discovered that Ella could write all of our letters correctly, but wrote all her numbers backwards. Yes, she even managed to write a number 1 backwards. So we thought maybe we should practice counting and writing numbers a bit.

So after reading in our DK Eyewitness book about all about eggs, we did some counting, all the way to one hundred. I printed out a couple hundred boards, one with numbers and two blank. We practiced counting with the one with numbers first. Then we put 100 tiny egg stickers on our blank hundred boards and counted them again. Ella said, "Look, Mom! I laid 100 eggs!" And we practiced tracing some numbers too.

After that we walked to the grocery store and bought a big bag of 50 Easter eggs and went on a little egg hunt. I can't believe the weather is so spring-like in February. Last year the snow was so deep, we didn't dare set foot in the backyard for fear of losing Mabel until spring time.

Beatrix helped me hide the eggs and went behind me picking them up like, "Hey, Mom, you dropped this."
 

  
When we were done hunting, we had to count up all of our eggs to make sure we found all 50. And, if you are wondering, yes, it was very strange to be hunting Easter eggs on Ash Wednesday. But good practice, I guess.

For the Birds: Nest Making

Today we decided to explore nests. We studied a real birds nest. This one came with our Christmas tree and we kept it. We tried to figure out what birds used to build their nests and were surprised at how many different things we saw: grass, leaves, twigs, wool, yarn and feathers.

So we went outside to gather materials for our nests and to do some more investigating with our magnifying glasses.
 
Back inside we gathered up all of our materials plus some leftover raffia and some wool roving. We used some old playdough for our mud and built our nests.
 
 The finished product with feathers and roving to make them very cozy inside.
 
 We take a snack break and make some peanut butter nests.

Then we gather up all of our leftover nest-building materials and make a nesting bag to hang outside. I found the idea on Family Fun. We hung the bag of nesting goodies from an old bird house in the yard in hope that the birds might find our yard even more enticing. We also threw some brightly colored wool roving to make it easier to see if they grabbed any.
 
 And the rest of the day was spent dressed as ballerinas, making nests out of blankets and hatching eggs.
 

For the Birds: Birdhouses

This is how things happen in our family. Brent is scanning the craigs list pet section for items of interest when he finds that someone is giving away two free button quail and all their gear.
So he comes home with some new pets.
So then we think, maybe we should learn some more about birds. So we check out a big encyclopedia of birds from the library because it was the only book we could find about quail.
We also find out it's the Audubon Society's Great Backyard Bird Count. So we decide to count birds. And we go outside and don't see a single bird!
So then we think, well, maybe we need a bird feeder. So we buy a birdfeeder and some seed.
And then we go to the craft store to find some bird crafts and then we think, you know, it feels like spring, we should redecorate for the season.
So we start spending a lot of time out on our back porch looking for birds, and drawing pictures in nature journals, and making bird crafts to decorate our house.
And guess what we saw birds: 2 blue jays, a pair of cardinals, a chickadees, and some sparrows, which has only fueled our interest in birds.

Our first project was painting bird feeders.You can get these cute little wooden bird houses of all shapes and styles at Michael's for just $1.00.

Ella chose a barn. Mabel chose the one with the peaked roof. And Beatrix has the round roof. We painted them with some tempera paint. And they were ready for the cute little fake cardinals we bought to live in them.
 

Overheard

Mabel: When friends come over that's called an audience.

Ella: Earthquakes make mountains.

Daddy: Yes, it's the tectonic plates moving.
Ella: So that's why I always get so hungry when I look at mountains!!
(Get it? Plates...hungry?) It was her first funny joke, until she repeated it 20 times.

Me: Ella,hurry up and clean up because Daddy's coming home with a surprise!
Ella: What is it, Mom? Enough money to buy a new house?
(Don't I wish?!?)

More Heart Art

by Mabel

This is the story of some rescue art. Our first art had the potential to be very cool. We tried to make handprint hearts for Daddy to hang up at work. But sadly, the red hearts turned out much more gory than cute. So it was back to the drawing board. We punched out hearts from our original art. Then the girls painted watercolor backgrounds and we glued them on. Much better. Mabel's picture is above.

by Beatrix

Beatrix made her first watercolor painting. She had a new technique where she painted with the brush and then slapped it with her hands. 

by Ella

Heart Art

We've been doing lots of art in our house lately. I put together a tub of art supplies they could use to make valentines: pretty paper, heart punches, heart stamps, cardboard heart templates to trace around, and glitter glue. Mabel loved just doing the heart punches, but Ella filled the house with art including this one. I love the design of it and she made one for every member of the family with the same basic layout but different papers.


We also had fun making lots of heart critters after we read the book My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall.

This is Mabel's pig who also needed a door.

Fabulous Rain or Shine

Groundhog Day

 
The girls managed to stir up quite a bit of enthusiasm for groundhog day, a holiday they never knew existed. Actually I'm not sure they even knew groundhogs existed, but now thanks to their curiosity we know the answers to all the burning groundhog questions like:

Are there any in our backyard?: No (though we didn't find any groundhogs, we did see our shadows)
Do groundhogs lay eggs or have babies?: have babies
Do groundhogs have teeth like beavers? Yes, though not quite as big
What kind of noise does a groundhog make? He grunts, squeals when attacks, and grinds his teeth
What are a groundhog's predators?: dogs, coyotes, foxes, and bobcats
What are some other names for a groundhog? woodchuck, land beaver, and whistlepig (our personal fave)

Homemade Candy Party Decorations

We decided to have a candy-themed party for Beatrix's birthday, and the older girls helped me make a lot of the decorations. The giant lollipop balloons were inspired by an article from Parents magazine I saw on pinterest. They're balloons attached to paper towel tubes and covered in cellophane.

We also decorated the backs of paper plates and covered them with cellophane to make candies. Above her name banner is the one Beatrix colored, and here's one Mabel did.
 
Ella also made some big conversation hearts and wrote some of Beatrix's nicknames like "Trixie" and "Tootsie" on them.

The girls also helped decorate her cupcakes. I did the frosting and they applied the valentine-colored m&ms. Yes, I wasn't looking too closely when they generously doled out the candy. We also have small jars of other valentine candies in pink and red out on the table. 

And the girls made a present for Beatrix. We bought a big bag of random wood pieces and the older sisters picked out all the choking hazard ones. (They got to keep those, so they were excited.) Then we put all the pieces in a box with a lid. She loves lids. Then they showed her what great musical instruments the wood sticks make.

Beatrix's First Birthday!

Beatrix is one year old! We had our small family celebration on her birthday.
She loved her special birthday dinner: yogurt parfaits with fruit and granola; popcorn and veggie chips on the side.


And there were cupcakes. As you can see from the picture, she went straight for the candy. Her sisters were in charge of decorating with the m&ms and were quite generous.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
And there were presents: something to start her library by Miss Beatrix Potter.
And her very own cozy truck!

That smile totally  made up for the two hours of sweat and tears Daddy put into building the truck. Never foolishly ask: how many pieces can a plastic truck possibly come in?

And the best part about the truck. It is the envy of her big sisters. She wasn't too happy about sharing at first, but since Ella gives her rides around the house in it, she's decided they can occasionally drive.

Old-fashioned School: Hoedown

We are winding down with our old-fashioned unit, so we decided to have a little dance party hoedown. Our musical selection was a cd we found at the library called Happy Valley: A Tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder. All the songs were ones that had been mentioned in the Little House series.

I dredged up all my memories of learning square dancing in sixth grade. It really was the worst PE time, all that picking partners stuff. But I remembered some moves including the do-si-do and made up the ones I didn't. It was a little hard to square dance with only 2-3 people participating, but a few nights later, Mabel asked me if I would do-si-do her and we roped Daddy into dancing too and had a fun family dance night.

Old-fashioned School: Sticky Quilt

 
For our final quilt project, we made our own quilts. This project was easy and baby friendly. It is basically a glue-less collage using fabric.

I cut out a rectangle of clear contact paper and taped it to their table. We got out all of our fabric scraps. (I tried to pick ones that were fairly old-fashioned looking.) The older girls cut out shapes from the fabric. We have special kid-sized Fiskar school scissors that we keep just for cutting fabric. I cut out shapes for the baby to use.

The goal was to completely cover your sticky paper with fabric, which Ella did very nicely.
Mabel was much more interested in cutting and spent most of her time cutting out pieces of fabric and then cutting them into smaller pieces until they suited her just right.
Beatrix just liked sticking. She also liked sharing her pieces of fabric with her sisters. I hung hers up where she can reach it and she still comes by occasionally and takes a piece off and sticks it back on.