On The Road Again...

In the spirit of summer vacation, Little Guy and I will be taking what has turned into an annual Mommy/Son road trip.  Our destination is always the same- my Grandparent's place in the Carolina Mountains.  We really enjoy our time up there, breathing in all that fresh mountain air.  Little Guy has turned into quite the traveling companion!  He wasn't always so good in the car {visions of a screaming baby come to mind} but as he gets older, he seems to be content with entertaining himself, especially when it's just the two of us.  I have a Facebook friend from high school who will also be taking a road trip with her little this summer, and she made a car trip binder that she'll fill with all kinds of activities for her little to keep busy with while on the road.  I swiped her idea and made Little Guy a car book of his own!  We've been working on Kindergarten workbook pages anyway, so I thought he'd get a kick out of doing his pages in dry-erase format!  Thank you Lacey!!

Little Guy's Car Book (name removed)

Side View (it looks like a road, right?)

Little Guy needs a lot of practice writing his letters and numbers.  His letter/number recognition is spot on, but when it comes time to write the letter independently, he freezes and needs lots of encouragement to not give up.  I'm hoping that this project will make it more appealing to learn.  Plus it's so darn cute, who could resist?

Want to make your own?  You will need:
1 binder {preferably with a showcase cover to display your awesome handiwork :) }
Clear page inserts (ours are made by Avery- found at any office supply store or Walmart)
Several workbook pages (ours are from here and here, I found both at Target)
Dividers (optional)
Dry erase markers of your choice
A cloth or eraser for reusability of your pages

Here's a peek at the inside of Little Guy's Car Book:

Letter Tracing

Dot-to-Dot (Little Guy's favorite)

Number Tracing

Shape Tracing

Pattern Recognition

A close up of the page protector

Easy to "read" dividers

In hindsight, I decided to add some dividers (seen above) to make things easier for Little Guy to find.  In order from top to bottom: ABC's, 123's, shapes, colors, patterns.  Easy peasy!  He gets finicky about what/when he learns, so I thought this way he would think he had a choice in the matter.  Win, win! (at least I hope so!)

I am also including a little game of sorts in his binder.  Once upon a time I thought I could homeschool Little Guy (might still happen for middle school), but since we just LOVE his elementary school, we are staying put as long as possible!  I have a file on the computer full of all kinds of learning-at-home projects that were long forgotten, until now.  One of my favorite sources for anything home-learning is this blog, which sadly has not been posted on in a while.  She also has all kinds of printables posted!  I'm pretty sure I got my inspiration for Little Guy's calendar (a post on that later) from this site as well.
Anyway, back to that game I mentioned.... (sorry, I get a little scattered)
It's a number, word, letter recognition game all rolled into one!  Little Guy has cut outs of letters, which he can match on the cards, which spells out the number's name and also has pictures representing how many each number is.  Confusing?  Here's a picture to make it easier:

I didn't take a picture of the various letters, but they are safe in their little food storage container, don't you worry... (in case you haven't figured it out, we find all sorts of uses for food storage containers!)

So, this will be the last post from me for about a week, since I won't have internet access (oh, the shame!).  I will be sure to take all kinds of pictures so I can update you on our adventures in the mountains upon our return!  Have a great week!

A Father's Love

My Dad and I on my wedding day

The above picture was one of the few last pictures I have of my Dad and I.  He died 5 months after The Hubs and I were married.  This weekend makes me a little sad as I help Little Guy prepare the special things he's picked out and made for his daddy.  I can't look at Father's Day cards without getting a little teary-eyed because I no longer have a dad to give one to.  My Dad was a quiet- even keel- teddy bear kind of guy.  We never really saw him get mad, and if he did raise his voice, we knew he meant business (which he usually only did if Mom was getting upset about something we did/didn't do)!  Dad was a hard working man with an awesome work ethic that he instilled in all three of us- by example, since he was a man of few words.  He was a licensed optician, and had such pride in his profession.  He went to Tallahassee once to help fight for rights of licensed opticians state-wide.  Dad offered quiet moral support for everything we ever did, and he had his own way of showing his pride in all of us.  I miss him a lot.  I think he'd get a real kick out of Little Guy and his sense of humor.  Dad had a unique laugh that made us laugh harder every time we heard it.  There are times when Little Guy cracks a joke and I think how Dad would have laughed at it, not out of courtesy, but because Little Guy is just so funny!

Since I'm working this weekend, Little Guy and I have been busy all week preparing for Father's Day.  We did a craft that ended up being my nemesis.  I seriously hated, HATED the tedious procedure of the whole thing!  It could have been much easier, I'm sure, if we had a PC instead of Mac because of the stupid program not being completely Mac compatible.  I saw an ad in the Sunday paper recently for a T-shirt that had a cute little saying and came with paint for the kids to put their handprints on.  Well upon inspecting said T-shirt, it was pretty poor quality.  You could see through the material!  I mean, what dad wants to wear a see-through shirt?  But then the dad has to wear it because his kid made it!  Sooooo being the crafty mama that I am, Little Guy and I set off to find a good quality plain shirt and fabric paint, along with printable iron-on transfer paper.  Once we were set to do the project, I created a "world's best daddy" certificate in MS Word (for Mac) that I was going to iron on the shirt and Little Guy was going to put his handprints on it.... yeah, that didn't work out so well.  The program wouldn't mirror the image and neither did our stupid printer.  UGH.  No worries, I decided to create a stencil with the same Word program and card stock paper.... Oh, the tediousness of cutting out each letter with the craft knife!  And then I realized that anything with a circle in the letter (O, D, d, a...) got completely cut out, thus creating a huge gaping hole in the letter.  O well.  It did work pretty well when I applied the paint though, gaping hole and all!  Little Guy got in on the stencil action too, but it was very short lived because the T-shirt kept moving a little bit.  

the white is the stencil

words all done!

Once the words were all painted on, Little Guy was anxious to get his hands in the paint.  He chose green for the lettering (obviously!) and blue for his handprints (because that's his favorite color-nevermind that it's Daddy's favorite color too).  He also decided that the shirt looked too plain, so he wanted to paint a picture.  I fixed the sleeves so he could create 2 masterpieces!  Here's the finished product as it's drying:

Our finished Father's Day shirt

The painting on the left side is Mommy, Daddy and Little Guy, and the painting on the right is a clown car that we are all in because we are clowns! (where does this kid come up with this stuff?!)  It actually came out kind of cute, and I hope The Hubs really likes it (and wears it)!  I hope the two of them do something special tomorrow seeing as how I'm going to be at work all day.  They were supposed to rent a boat, but all the boats of course are booked up and they're on a waiting list.  I'm thinking the boating trip isn't going to happen :(  Dads eat free at Beef's tomorrow, so I'm pretty confident they will end up there for lunch or dinner!  Dads also get in free (with 1 paid admission) at the Florida Aquarium, so hopefully whatever they decide on, it will be fun and memorable!  Are you doing anything special for the Dad in your life?

Ice Treasures

Another inspiration from Pinterest lead us to making ice treasures!  What are ice treasures?  It's all your child's cheapy beloved smallish toys (or gems, shells, etc) "hidden" in a block of ice that they break apart to fish their treasures out.  Little Guy had such a good time with this project!  This activity does take an entire day of prep, so plan ahead if you decide to do it!  We took a leftover food container and put about an inch of water in the bottom, along with a few toys and let it freeze for a while (we did this because I wanted treasures to be throughout the ice.  If you don't care, you can just add the toys and water all at once- also all the toys we picked happened to float, so we needed a way to hold them down).  Once that section was frozen, we added another section of water and toys, and so on until the top of the container was reached.  FYI in case you forgot the laws of physics or whatever dictates that water expands while reaching the frozen state, you may want to leave a little bit of space on top so water doesn't spill over as it's freezing, thus creating some pretty cool icicles in the freezer (unless you want really cool icicles, that is!)  Once your ice block is complete, you can experiment with different methods on getting all those little treasures out:

adding salt

You could turn it into a learning experience and have your child add salt, while talking about how salt is put on roads in the winter to keep the roads from freezing over (this of course was lost on my FL boy- and even harder for this FL girl to explain!), and we added some food coloring so he could watch the ice melt (which was a slow process since we didn't have Kosher salt).  It was neat to watch the food coloring sink through the ice as it melted.  (Idea pinned from here.)

adding food coloring

the cool effects of salt and food coloring

 If your child is slightly impatient, as mine is, you could resort to more drastic measures {enter hammer here}

getting to work with the hammer

Once our block of ice was in the sun for a bit, we were able to free it from its confinement of the container and it was much easier to break apart:

chasing a stray piece of ice to pulverize it

I would however, advise against freezing a plastic bead necklace if you're going to break the ice with a hammer.  We have bits of broken up blue beads scattered on our pool deck!  The beads did not like to be hammered into oblivion, apparently!  ;)

Once the ice started to easily break off, Little Guy decided to give it a little taste test.  I'm guessing that these pieces did not have any remnants of salt on them, as he claimed that they were yummy!

He also thought it would be hilarious to throw the ice in the pool and watch it melt!  He wondered if it would make the pool cold (doubtful since the heater was on).  This kid is one smart cookie!

Gold Deb-loon!

This was such a fun project, we have another block of ice in the works for Father's Day weekend for something fun to do while Mommy is working.  Have fun hunting for ice treasures with your little!  (or if you don't have a little and want to have fun doing this, you may want to be hidden from the general public as you may look a little peculiar chasing a block of ice with a hammer! LOL)

Cookies and Books

Little Guy's Summer Reading Journal

Little Guy just LOVES books!  Like to the point that when we go to the store, we'll spend (no kidding!) up to an hour in the book section so he can browse all the books and "read" his favorites.  It's like a free field trip because he's totally ok with not buying anything as long as he gets to look at and touch everything.  We've been very blessed in that aspect because he's always been like that.  If we tell him no, not today, he says "ok, maybe next time we can get me something?"  If I had a bunch of money I would seriously buy every book in the store for him!  Good thing we both have library cards!  By the way, the library's limit on the number of books you can check out at a time is 50- yep!  We reached the limit once and had to put a bunch of books back!  When I first signed up for a card the librarian told me the limit was "as many books as you can carry."  Well, through a few trips to the library (without bringing any books back), we managed to reach our limit.  I then said "oh, I was told that we could check out as many as we could carry."  Her reply?  "Most people don't reach that point."  Well my kid has a love for books, what can I say?  Did you notice that I said we both have library cards?  You got it!  That means we can check out up to 100 books!! (NOT gonna happen!  I'm NOT going to be responsible for that many books, plus we don't have the space for that many extra books!)  I have come up with a system, however.  When we've read a book, it goes back in the library bag.  When library day comes, we know what we've read and they get checked in while we pick out new books.  I can monitor when books are due online, and I also put a reminder on my phone when books are due so I can check what we have against what is online.  Do you have a system for your library books?

I have seen all kinds of ideas on Pinterest for reading journals for the big kids, but not much inspiration for the littles who are non-readers.  I thought it would be good for Little Guy to get in the habit of reciting what was just read, thus working on retention.  What better way to do that than record it in a journal?  He has really gotten into drawing, coloring and creating lately, so we made a summer reading journal.  It's 10 pages attached to one another with brads.  Little Guy helped by glueing white paper to colored card stock, then using the hole punch to create the holes for the brads.  We then created a title page (seen above) which is a picture of him standing in front of a fire truck dressed as a firefighter, holding two books- we had just read a book about firefighters.  The next book that made the cut into his journal was Corduroy by Don Freeman.  In case you can't read the picture, Little Guy's interpretation of the book was "About a bear who sneaked from bookshelf to bed to find his lost button.  A watchman came and found him.  Then he took him back to bookshelf.  A little girl came to buy him.  And then her took the little bear to her room and her sewed him a new button!  The End"

Corduroy next to the bed that had buttons

Drawing his interpretation of Corduroy by Don Freeman

And of course, no day is complete without making some chocolate chip cookies!  We used my Mom's recipe, which gives fluffy, chewy cookies every time!  I must say, this was the best batch yet!

Mmmm!  Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Want the recipe??  Here you go:

1 cup shortening (we use butter- real, not margarine)
2 cups packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup water
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
Chocolate chips

Mix butter, sugar and eggs thoroughly.  Stir in water.  Stir flour, soda and salt together then blend into sugar mixture.  Chill 1 hour.  Heat oven to 400 degrees.  Drop rounded tsp of dough 2" apart on lightly greased or parchment lined cookie sheets.  Bake 8-10 minutes until almost no imprint remains when lightly touched.
Makes 6 dozen 2 1/2" cookies

Grandy's Birthday

Mom and Little Guy within an hour of birth

June 10th would have been my Mom's 63rd birthday.  The above picture was taken the day Little Guy was born.  (not the best picture of her, and she'd probably kill me if she were here to do so!)  I wish everyday that she were here to watch him grow up.  She would be having so much fun with him!  She was the best Mom ever.  We had so much fun growing up, because she was so creative with the activities she had us do.  You know all that really cool stuff to do with your kids that you see on Pinterest?  Well, that was my Mom in a nutshell!  She had awesome original ideas (she would seriously have been the richest person on Earth if she had patented most of her ideas).  We had the coolest parties as kids.  I still remember one Halloween party; I must have been between 8 and 10 years old.  I was a punk rocker or something because I had this hot pink dress with black polka dots (Hey, it was the 80's!) and my hair had a tinge of pink with glitter AND I was allowed to wear makeup to go with my costume!  She put an old door on cinder blocks with a vinyl table cloth and made a table out of it for crafting and eating- mostly crafting!  I'm assuming we always had a few cinder blocks lying around because Pop had remodeled the house and my parents didn't want to just get rid of them??  :)  She also (I swear she did!) invented Christmas in July.  One year we were up visiting family in New Jersey and all the cousins got together at Aunt Pat's house and we had this blow up Christmas tree and a big pile of presents.  I got a sweat band (again, it was the 80's!) and some hair clips.  (please don't ask how or why I remember this!)  Another thing Mom was big on were Unbirthday parties.  We would, especially if family from up north was visiting, have a birthday party for everyone in attendance (but only if it was NOT someone's birthday- thus Unbirthday).  We would each make our own gift bags by decorating paper sacks from the grocery store with markers and stickers.  All of this of course was an excuse to have cake and ice cream!  So in her memory, we had ice cream sundaes FOR dinner on her birthday:

Happy Birthday Grandy!!

I guess this would be as good a time as any to explain the title of this blog.  My Mom was always ill; she was diagnosed with Lupus when I was almost 9.  With as sick as she was, she ALWAYS put her kids first, like to the point where we (as young kids) didn't know she wasn't feeling her best.  She was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak.  She was also a CCU/ICU nurse and saw people at their worst, most vulnerable states- often not being able to say goodbye to loved ones before they left this existence and went on to the next.  Always with a cynical sense of humor, she would tell me that we should eat dessert first because you could literally drop dead between your meal and dessert.  I have learned, being in healthcare myself, that this cynical sense of humor kind of comes automatically.  It's sometimes the only way to deal with some of the stuff you become witness to!  Do you know that I can't remember ever eating dessert first, unless it was a picnic or something where dessert was laid out with the rest of the food?!  So, on Sunday, we had sundaes!  And then an hour later we were hungry for actual food, so we heated up some chicken, so we actually accomplished having dessert first!

Driveway Paint

The colors picked by Little Guy

We made sidewalk paint!  But since it's soooo sunny and HOT, we decided to call it driveway paint!  (we have a 2 foot section of shade in the driveway where the roof hangs over our canvas).  It was super easy to make, even a 5 year old can do it!

Ingredients and Directions:
1 cup cornstarch
1 cup water
A bowl to mix it in
Several small cups (or a muffin tin- or both like we used)
Paintbrushes that can be abused on the rough surface of the sidewalk/driveway
Food coloring
Extra water

First you want to mix the cornstarch and water in a bowl:

Stirring, stirring!

As you can see this takes tremendous skill and concentration!  It won't get thick like it does on the stovetop, it just looks like watery milk.  The more you let your child stir it, the more fun it becomes; no harm done!






Next you want to put your white "paint" into separate containers so it can be colored.  We used small clear cups inside a muffin tin (I didn't want to dye my muffin tin and it also provided support to carry the cups).  Bonus: the cups are recyclable, so when we become bored of making paint (UNLIKELY!), we can just toss them in the recycle bin (one of little man's chores- a post on that another day!)  Add several drops of food coloring to get your desired shade of color.  If you want to mix primary colors to get other colors, here's a guide in case you forgot:
yellow+blue= green
red+blue= purple
red+yellow= orange
Don't forget to leave a cup empty and put that extra water in it, so that the brushes can be cleaned in between colors!

Sitting on our shady canvas ready to paint!

Final step:
Have fun painting!!!  This was sooo cool.  When it dries, the "paint" looks just like bright chalk!  It's been a few days since we painted, and our paintings are still there!  I'm sure the next rain will wash it away, but until then we enjoy looking at our masterpieces every time we go outside!

Painting a picture of a leaf

An apple

Painting an actual leaf (it didn't stick, paint just ran off leaf)

Mommy's creation :)

This of course was not an original idea of mine... I get most of my creative inspiration from Pinterest.  The original source can be found here (at least that's where I pinned it from!)

Update 06/16/2012: It rained yesterday!  Not surprising, I know, with summer being here and all, but I wanted to let you all know that our paintings disappeared with the rain.  We didn't even have to help it along because the rain was steady enough to wash it all away :)  I guess we'll just have to make more paint! {insert sarcastic "darn!" here}

Last Day of VPK

Mrs. Palmer with the early release kids

Thursday was Little Guy's last day of VPK.  It was a bitter sweet day for Mommy and Daddy, as we realize we now have a Kindergartner on our hands!  He has blossomed beyond belief this school year!  He has gone from this shy little boy to a very opinionated, outgoing kid!  His imagination has taken off to new levels (we frequently find ourselves in a spaceship on the way to some imaginary planet to explore what lies on its surface), he has braved new foods (gator tail anyone?), and he has grown {at least} 3 feet! ;)  Don't believe me?  Take a look at this side by side of the first and last day of school:

First day and last day of school 2011-2012

You can really tell he's sprouted a whole 3 feet can't you?
After school we took Little Guy for a celebratory lunch at his favorite restaurant, Beef's (aka Beef O' Brady's) and he had his usual; mac and cheese with a fruit cup.  Daddy surprised him with a big boy Lego watch and some lego guys because this kid is ALL lego ALL the time!

I can't believe that in a matter of a couple months, my Little Guy will be in school full time- 8 hours a day!  What ever will we do with all the free time?!  Visions of a clean house and lots of completed projects are running through this mama's head, that's for sure!


Have a happy and safe summer, and follow along on our fantastically fun summer full of lots of DIY projects easy enough for the above 5 year old big boy to accomplish!