Arts & Crafts

George has been asking frequently and repeatedly to do crafts.  Poor kid, we haven't been to a MOPS meeting in ages, and we've missed a lot of church over the last few weeks...they've been totally deprived.  And as our house is still a work in progress as far as getting situated, the craft supplies are still packed away.  So I had to come up with something else.  I settled on an activity rather than an actual craft, as I had everything necessary on hand.  So we did shaving cream art.  I know it looks like a glorified mess, but in actuality it was a lot more.  We started off with just a pile of shaving cream in a dish.  Then we added some blue food coloring and swirled it around in one area.  In another area we added some yellow.  And when we swirled them together, ta-DA!  We got green.  So it was an exercise in color mixing.  

The fact that they were encouraged to play around was fun for them, though that is much more up Joshua's alley than George's.  Joshua played a LOT longer in the shaving cream.  He is much more tactile oriented, and he got really creative with it (like seeing shapes in clouds).  It made me realize how I need to make more of an effort in planning activities for them - it was simple and quick, and they really enjoyed it.  And I need to pay attention to how each of them learns - definitely two learning styles here.  I have a lot of ideas of what we will do in our pre-schooling sessions, but I NEED to get the space in order before I can focus on that.  Yes, we're starting "school" late this year, but I guess that's one of the benefits of doing it from home (especially pre-school).

Josh loving the sensation of squishy shaving cream.

I definitely gave the plastic mat to the right kid.  I couldn't find my vinyl tablecloth, and only had one of these, so we went with it.  

Tennessee Showers Bring Big Puddles

We've been having a LOT of severe weather this week.  In fact, today is the only day that hasn't seen at least some rain.  Yesterday there was a severe storm (which we had to drive through, of course) which included high winds, pretty sizable hail, rain so hard we couldn't see, and lightning every couple of seconds.  There was a tree down at one point, so we had to turn around and go a different way.  Luckily we had the GPS to re-route us (I heart my TomTom).  Then we saw a power line down, which was pretty freaky.  And, of course, our power was out when we arrived home.  This makes the second time in the two weeks we've lived here.  Only yesterday it was out for about 5 hours (the first time was only an hour or so).  I was starting to get worried that all of our newly purchased grocery items would spoil.  But they didn't, and we managed fine.  

Chris was working for most of the day (except for when we had to pick up our van from the shop and return the rental car, which was when we went through the storm), and once he dropped us off the storm cleared and it started getting sunny out.  And hot.  

Our front section of property slopes down, and the bottom part kind of serves as a retention pond.  As such, it had collected quite a bit of rain water, and the boys saw it and asked if they could play in it after lunch.  So when the baby went down for his nap, I took the big boys out to frolic in our new redneck pool.  Observe:

And then the baby got up from his nap...

So I have concluded that the boys' new favorite toys are: sticks, rocks, dirt, mud puddles, and bugs.  Good thing we have plenty of all of them!

My Latest PlayDoh Creations