We had a lovely lazy morning today. It was one of those days we stayed in our p.j.s for most the morning. It was one of those mornings I just love watching what they come up with in their play. For their birthday, they received this cardboard castle that you can color. It’s a little shorter than they are tall. Lately, they’ve been taking all their clothes and shoving them through the windows or placing them in the turrets on top. They call it their washer and dryer. Since we’ve been talking about how we’re going to a hotel this Friday and how we’re going for a week to Missouri, they’ve been playing “packing.” I brought up a suitcase for them and they shoved it full of clothes and then food from the pantry and refrigerator.
Then Alexa would bring me a shirt she said was fresh from the wash. I’d ask if she remembered to put soap in, then she’d run in the next room, pretend to put soap on, bring it to me to rub and soap in, and then start the whole cycle all over again. Jared loved watching Steve draw truck after truck before Steve said he really had to leave for work. Lately, Jared just loves watching us draw different things. Yesterday, it was castles, monkeys, dragons, tigers and lions.
They also loved tying each other up in ribbons and then dancing with the ribbons to Peter and Wolf. For a while now, they’ve loved to act out the story as they listen to the CD. Let’s see they also drew, put dresses around their matchbox cars and said they were giving them a haircut, and Jared sat with several books on CD: George Washington’s Cows, Farewell to Shady Glade by Bill Peet, and Arrow to the Sun a Pueblo Indian Tale.
Alexa set up a little tent for herself with the air mattress Steve bought. She sat in there for about an hour, just reading to herself. She continually impressed me with her reading. When she doesn’t know I’m watching her, and I can get close enough to see what she is reading, I’ll hear her read entire sentences out loud in books, word for word, running her finger under each word. Then she’ll go several pages just making up her own sentences for the story and then go back to literally reading a sentence from the page. She will not perform on cue for anyone though, besides just occasionally reading single words at a time, and even that is getting much rarer these days. I try my best to never interfere with her reading because I really want her to love reading and not see it as something I would ever make her do. A little note about her face in the pictures: it’s her tattoo art coming out again.
During lunch we read Colors of China and then Theodore Mouse Goes to Sea. Then I started to read a book about Earthquakes from the Lets Read and Find Out Science series. We didn’t get too far, though, because there were a lot of experiments in the book that we found more fun. We shook a string up and down to make pretend seismic waves and then I put sections of play dough together to make a fault line. Then I made a pretend house and put in on the “fault line.” Then I’d squeeze the play dough from the bottom until it would rise higher and then split, causing our house to fall over. Then they wanted to do the same.
More great play after lunch: grabbing things from the pantry to put in the suitcases – “Aunt LeeAnn will like this tea,” Alexa says as she runs a box of teabags into her bedroom, pretending to cut down weeds in the living room with plastic knives, that lead to looking out the window and seeing a bug crawling up the glass which led to wanting to feed the ants bread outside. They rode tricycles outside, designating different areas of the yard as different countries. First they’d ride to Australia, then Japan, then Russia and finally China. They dug in my abandoned herb pots, left outside last winter and somehow growing new herbs despite the fact that I don’t ever do anything to them.
We were going to go to the library to watch a children’s concert put on by the Wiggle worms. They really seemed excited to go, too, but when we got to the library, I looked in the back seat and they were asleep. The car almost never fails to put them asleep. So, I headed home to sit in the car with the laptop and work on this blog.
When they woke up we read two books from the library: A Blue Butterfly: A Story about Claude Monet and The First Strawberries: A Cherokee Story. Then they watched the animated 20 minute version of Theseus and the Minotaur.
It was a bit of a difficult evening. When Steve gets home, we usually eat right away, but they kids get so excited to see him and want to play. Steve’s hungry and really needs to eat, and we have a rule that they need to sit with us for at least a few minutes, but today was very hard in getting them to even sit for a minute. We all watched American Idol at 7:00. Alexa plays this cute game where she will sing for a while, then we clap for her, and then she waves her hands in the air while saying, “Thank you, everybody.”
Even though they only slept about 45 minutes in the car, they didn’t fall asleep until 9:00. We sat next to their beds and read about five books before they fell off to sleep. We read Magic School Bus the Solar System, The Big Storm, Dinosaurs Are Back, and the other titles are slipping my mind right now.
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