Happy Holidays 2011

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. I hope you are all having a wonderful day with family and friends.

We're spending the morning with our children. They are having their first year where they are both old enough to enjoy the magic of Santa and yet young enough to be completely sweet, innocent, and expectation-free about the experience. This is a nice year.

We will have lunch and spend the afternoon with my parents and simply enjoy the time together.

At the same time we are preparing for our annual trip to New Orleans to visit family. I am excited. I love seeing my extended family. I love watching our children get to know their extended family better with every visit. I also simply enjoy being back in New Orleans. In many ways it is still "home" to me.

The end of December is always a wonderful time.

Busy Book - Barn and Finger Puppet Animals Page

This page was a little more time intensive than I originally intended, but I'm hoping that the children will really enjoy the finger puppets.

Busy Book / Quiet Book Page - Barn

This is a barn with doors that open to show a stall used to store farm animal finger puppets. I also made five finger puppets - horse, cow, pig, chicken, and duck.

The Weekly Review: Week 40

Website of the Week

I have enjoyed exploring A Little Learning for Two. Almost every post has a great activity for little ones. This mom is super creative and I found a lot of new ideas on her blog. I just kept working my way back through her archives filing away idea after idea.

The Weekly Project

You would think that this week would involve panicking about holiday preparations. Instead I realized that in less than a week I'm going to be travelling for at least 24-28 hours (12 or more each way) in a car with two very young children. Therefore, every spare moment this week I've been preparing car friendly activities. I've done a few more busy/quiet book pages, and prepped some other activities as well.

Illness Week

This week's highlight was Ava getting sick on the last morning I would have had on my own to get some work done before the holidays. Instead, the two of us spent an entire day camped out on blankets and towels in front of the television. Poor girl was so nauseous she wouldn't even eat a goldfish cracker. I'm pretty sure she at nothing other than a single bite of a saltine all day. Fortunately, she was on the mend the next day and back to normal on the third day.

Ava and Michael this Week

Pretend play has arrived. This week, mostly at Michael's prompting, the children have played squinkie school. They've also had sleepovers. They played superheros complete with capes made from blankets. They were the parents of a sick baby. They brought her to the doctor (me) in a car made from a laundry basket. Michael informed me that the baby had a torn eardrum. I pretended that a funnel was an otoscope and peered into the baby doll's ear to confirm his diagnosis. I wrote out a prescription on a piece of paper and sent the little family back in their car to the pharmacy (again, me). I then filled the prescription with a medicine spoon and empty medicine bottle and they drove off to Ava's room where I overheard them dispensing medicine to their baby. Then Michael came back down for more medicine and told me they gave it all to the baby. I explained the concept of overdose and gently suggested that perhaps they needed more because they had accidentally spilled it? He thought that was a great explanation and brought his new bottle of medicine upstairs. I'm pretty sure that bottle got "spilled" several more times before they moved on to a new game. I adore all the pretend play and hope that this is just the beginning.