Making New Friends May 23, 2013

It all started because fresh corn was on sale at Publix. H begged me to buy some and then requested them for dinner that night. I decided to experiment and asked her to try shucking them for me in the backyard while I started the rest of dinner. (H is now an expert shucker btw! Whoever thinks their preschooler is too young to help with dinner is wrong!)

Anyways. While in the backyard shucking the corn, (shucking is such a weird word. It almost feel like I’m cursing while saying it.) H noticed the neighbor boys (whom we’ve never met) playing in their backyard. And through a loose wooden slat, the kids started talking to each other. I’m not quite sure who started the conversation, but somehow my quiet shy girl turned into Miss Bubbly!

H kept running inside asking me to come meet her new friends. Then she wanted J to come outside to meet them because she had told the boys all about him. Then she wanted me to wake K up from her nap to come meet them. This request I denied of course! And finally she wanted the dog to come out to meet them. Little Miss Social Butterfly was cracking me up!

I finally went outside after I got to a stopping point with dinner. I met the boys, Elijah (5) and Noah (6). They were sweet and asked if H could come over and play. Well, thankfully it was getting dark and it was dinner time so I had a polite excuse to say no. I had now ventured into the awkward dance of having to be careful of what influences I allow H to around and trying to not squash a budding neighbor relationship.

See, I haven’t had the best impression of the adults that live in that house. Honestly, I’m not even sure how many live there and which ones are the boys’ parents. I was surprised that both boys have Biblical names since the language we have heard from the adults is anything but Biblical. And two Christmases ago when I tried to take Christmas cookies to them, they opened the door a whole two inches to ask what I wanted while I was overwhelmed with horrible smells of dog, smoke and who knows what else. So, my plan is to let them maybe hang out in our backyard with supervision in the future. And H really wants to invite them to church. I keep telling her we will work up to that. In fact, when she was talking to them she said “I’m going to take you to church!” Afterwards I had to nicely explain to her that she needs to ask them, not demand. And before she even does that she probably needs to tell them what church is since they may not have ever heard of it!

The boys told her that they could maybe come over when its not a school night. And since that day, H has asked me pretty much everyday if its a school day or not. And after about three days of this she exclaimed “there’s too many school days!!” Good thing we’re homeschooling!

Before she said goodbye to the boys for the night, they gave her two little dog figurines. She couldn’t only find one to take a picture.

About a week later, she ran to the fence excited when she saw the boys outside again. This time they gave her an armful of little treasures: a heart bead bracelet, a paper airplane, a paper star, a Lego ninja and a handful of glass piggies (most of which are hidden somewhere in the bottom of her toy chest).

H ran inside excited to show me her new trinkets. And said “Um, they told me not to show them to you. But I should obey you instead, right?”

Yes ma’am. You better. And now I definitely think these kiddos will need to be closely supervised if they play with H.

I told H that she should bring them some little gifts, too. So we quickly dug through her toys to find some boyish type things. She settled on sharing a little car, a small toy hippo, a couple play coins, and two pictures she drew (one for each). But she was super sad to find that they had already gone inside by the time she ran outside. So we put her gifts in a big ziploc bag (in case it rained) with their names on it and she slid it through to their side of the fence.

The next day she went out and found that they had left her a present in a little ziploc bag, too! She now has six Jenga blocks and a small toy space shuttle.

H then left them another gift of two Easter eggs with a bracelet in each. She made the bracelets and tried to put boy beads on it (different kinds of sports balls) but I did see her sneak a lady bug button on each. Not sure how they’ll feel about those. Haha. She left their gifts in a bag on their side of the fence.

I don’t know why I think this budding friendship is so neat. I think it’s fun and sweet that they are sharing little treasures. I like that H started this friendship on her own and that she’s excited to get to know them. And I like that H now has some friends she can tell about Jesus! So, I’m praying that she’ll get more chances to visit with them and that we’ll work up to getting to talk to their parents, too!

Blooming Onion May 8, 2013

This week I took the girls strawberry picking with a friend and her kiddos. At the farm they were selling these huge onions:

I had the bright idea to make a Blooming Onion

with mine.

This recipe was pretty easy all things considered and I actually had all the required ingredients besides horse radish (which I wouldn’t have used anyways). It was a bit spicy for my taste but I still liked it. I did have to use more oil than it called for for my small fry-daddy.

I served mine with hamburgers and corn on the cob.

How We Added 2 in 2 Days! May 3, 2013

Our family adventure began back in December.  I’ve been too busy and honestly hadn’t decided how I wanted to post about this.  I’ve finally decided its time to put into words our new family adventure…adding 2 more kids in 2 days!

At the beginning of last December (2012), we were still waiting to hear back about beginning our homestudy to adopt from foster care.  We had waited a year and a half on the waiting list to even begin the process, then had to take a 2 month parenting class and then we had to wait again to get our homestudy done.  At this point we had been waiting six months since finishing the class and I was seriously wondering what God’s plan was for our family.  At times, Seth still didn’t feel ready to adopt and didn’t want to pick out a kid “like a pair of pants at the store.” He wanted God to just give us a kid or clearly show us who we were supposed to adopt.

 

Whelp.  Did God ever answer Seth’s prayers and mine, too!  On December 8th, I received a phone call from my mom telling me that friends of theirs would be calling me because they were ready for us to adopt their granddaughter.  I couldn’t believe it.  They had talked to my mom a few times over the baby’s first year about us adopting her, but for one reason or another they weren’t ready for us to.  But now, for a number of reasons they were now ready for us to adopt her. (To give just a basic background for why the baby needed to be adopted: her mother was a teen when she became pregnant, she wasn’t mature enough to care for the baby and after getting into legal trouble was now out of the state.)

 I talked to the grandmother on the phone later that afternoon and talked through all the details of the situation. I didn’t want to even begin to get excited until I knew for sure that this would be permanent.  I didn’t want to begin the process and then have them change their minds.  I didn’t want to bring home a baby and then have to give her back.  But they assured me that this would never ever happen.  We had to trust God that this is what He wanted and that He would help us along the confusing path forward.  We would be able to adopt her and would have to take her home before the adoption would be finalized and the actual date of when we could get her was still up in the air.  We went to meet with a lawyer a couple of days later to find out about the process that would be required.  Then we received a call from the grandparents informing us that we needed to get the baby that weekend because the grandfather would be having surgery the next week.  We couldn’t believe it!  We went from having no idea when we would be adopting a child to bam! having another child within a week! And thus began the mad scramble to prepare for this beautiful child we had yet to meet.  I had looked at pictures online that the Grandma had sent me and I was soooo excited to meet the baby.  

 

I had no idea what to expect.  I didn’t know how she would react to me or all of us.  I didn’t know how Haddie would actually react once we brought the baby home.  She was super excited about having a new sister, but how would the sudden change effect her?

 

In the days that followed during that week, we skyped with the baby and her grandma a few times, but of course, a one year old isn’t too interested in skyping someone she has never even met!

 

 

And I prepared Haddie’s room for our sweet new addition.  I was so excited I couldn’t even sleep most days!  I woke up early (which is unheard of for me!) and ended up in Walmart to buy tubs to sort clothes for both girls.  And I ended up getting matching Christmas PJ’s for the girls.  I was so excited to actually be able to say “The Girls!” And imagine, learning that you’ll have another child one week before Christmas!  Yep, lots of chaos was going on in my mind!

 

I began the task of thinning out Haddie’s large clothes collection (thanks to God’s blessings of hand-me-downs).  I had to empty out two of the four drawers in Haddie’s dresser to make room.  Then we went through her toys and weeded out toys to give away and toys that would be too small and swallowable for a one year ago.  Boy, how much I had forgotten about babies already! I decided to let her keep the small toys (think My Little Pet Shop, Mr. Potato Heads, and lots of dress up jewelry) in the guest room in a section now dearly called the “Haddie only toys.”  Next, we had to make floor space for a crib and changing table.  So, we ordered a hanging net for her stuffed animals and planned to get rid of her big basket that currently held them.  And after a few room adjustments we had enough empty space and were all ready for a new baby!

 

Seth put plywood on the sides of his truckbed so we could bring back all of Kady’s stuff.  And of course, Haddie wanted to help, too!

 

And then on Friday of that week, we left to go meet our new baby!  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but as always God took care of us and made it all go amazingly smoothly.  The baby came right to me and warmed up to us rather quickly.  I just wanted to cry when I took this first picture with her (and of course she had fallen and hit her head on the couch so she has a nice welt on her forehead, too).

 

 

 

 

A number of my friends told me I look so amazingly happy with her.  And I was!  We had to accompany her grandmother on one last appointment with her.  And my heart melted as I watched my girls together for the first time.

 

 

 

 

God’s ways are so much higher than our ways. And His plans than our plans.  He knew what He was doing all along!  Here’s Daddy holding his girls together for the first time:

 

 

Later that afternoon, we got to watch the baby (whom we have now named Kady), while her grandparents attended an event at their church.  It was so much fun getting to spend time with Kady and watch Seth interact with her.  These moments again brought tears to my eyes.

 

 

And early on Saturday morning we began packing all of Kady’s things and loading the truck.  We seriously looked like the Beverly Hill Billies.  Ironically, Kady’s grandparents live in Beverly Hills…

 

 

We were so grateful to be able to have all of Kady’s baby things because we have given ours away over the years.  We honestly had resigned ourselves to the fact that we weren’t going to have another baby.  I didn’t want to go through another pregnancy, and we had it on our hearts to adopt.  But since we were planning on going through foster care, the likelihood of getting a baby was pretty much 0!  But again, God had other things in mind! But back to our story…

On the two hour trip back home, I couldn’t stop staring at my girls.  They were alike in so many ways.  Blond hair.  Blue/Green eyes.  Light complexion.  And thumb suckers, none the less!

 

 

 

Once we got home, we unloaded the truck and I began the challenge of figuring out what went where and what we even needed.  We were able to bless a few different friends with the doubles of the baby items and things that Kady had already out grown.  And in return we were blessed by others with lots of baby girl clothes.

 

I don’t even remember how we slept that night.  I know I was excited and still in disbelief that I had two kids now! But I think I was so worn out from the previous week that I slept pretty well.  It was seriously unreal to wake up the next morning and get two girls ready for church! It was a blessing to so many to see their prayers answered for us…and the beautiful baby girl that God had blessed us with!

 

The next day we unexpectedly added another blessing to our family! Jenco called us and said that he would be coming that day!  See, Jenco is a teen that we met through our youth group and had been in our lives for about 3 years.  He didn’t have the best home life and once he turned 18 he wanted to move in with us.  He had turned 18 a week before, but he wasn’t planning on moving in until the beginning of the new year.  Well, family matters had transpired and it was time for him to join our family!  So, two days after we got a new baby, we also got a new teen son!  He had already been in the process of moving in over the past month or so.  We already had his room ready for him (thankfully!), but he hadn’t yet moved many of his clothes.  So a couple of days later we ventured out to get him some essentials from the thrift store (no, not underwear from a thrift store, that’s nasty!).  

 

I loved seeing all my 3(!) kids playing together and I loved how Jenco and Haddie had taken such a liking to Kady already.

 

 

Our life had definitely changed drastically in less than a week! But God knew what He was doing!  No longer did we have a quiet house with only one child.  Now we have a screamer (Kady) and a teen who loves to blare his music!  It’s been an interesting adjustment, but God has seriously made it so much smoother than I could have ever imagined or wished for.  Of course there have been rough patches along the way these past 4 months.  I’ve needed lots of naps.  There’s been late late nights and early mornings.  More plates to fix, more dishes to wash, more toys to pick up, more laundry to do.  But I wouldn’t change it for the world and our family is now complete more than ever!

 

Not only that…but we also added a couple other additions to the family.  Meet our new (to us) van, Big Bertha:

 

She’s not very pretty, I’ll admit.  But hey, what do you expect for $900?  And she got a lot uglier before she got better.  We had to replace the two front doors (window didn’t rolls down and with no AC that’s not cool. Literally.) with ones Seth salvaged at the junk yard.  So ugly gray body plus two white doors.  Yep, even uglier.  Thankfully Seth’s dad decided to have pity on us, and helped us paint her all a nice shade of blue.  But unfortunately, I don’t actually have any pics of her finished for some reason (and its too dark outside to get a good shot).  

 

And we also added another more pretty face to the family.  Meet Justus:

 

 

Honestly, I never thought we’d get a dog.  I’m not a big animal person.  And I don’t like the extra mess that dogs and animals bring into the house, let alone the extra expenses on our already strained budget.  But Jenco really wanted a dog and Haddie had been begging for one for a long time.  So, when a friend needed a new home for doggie, we knew it was time to add one more member to our growing family!  And except for the fact that she has a knack for escaping while we’re gone, she’s been a fun addition!  The girls love her and she is soooo great with them!  And of course Jenco loves her too, although he pretends not to.

 

 

So, we now have a big happy family!  4 months after bringing Kady home, we are still waiting on her adoption to be finalized.  The lawyer seems to be taking her sweet time.  Thankfully all the paperwork is finally in and all we need to do is have the judge sign off on all of it.  As far as Jenco’s adoption, we hope to have that finalized later this year after he takes a missions trip to India, since there’s not enough time to get the adoption done, his name changed and then have time to get all the required trip items (passport, visa, tickets).  So please be praying for our family still.  For the adoptions to be finalized quickly, for God to provide for all our needs (like I’m sure He will!) and for our other house to sell. It’s hard enough living on one salary…let alone paying for two houses! Thankfully, he has provided renters for the meantime, but we’d still like to not have that extra burden hanging over our heads.  

 

But anyways, we are so thankful for this new family that God has created for us!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He has blessed us beyond measure and I’m amazed that He has found us worthy to take on these wonderful children!  If you’re waiting for adoption or adding to your family in some other way, be patient and know that God has a plan.  Do your part and wait for Him to do His! 

 

 

 

 

 

HS: Mirette and the High Wire (FIAR) April 23, 2013

Day One
We started of by reading Mirette and the High Wire and its two
Sequels– Starring Mirette and Bellini and Mirette and Bellini Cross Niagara Falls. Then we read Dr. Seuss’ “If I Ran the Circus” since tight rope walking is usually associated with the circus.

Next we learned about compound words since there are a number if them in Mirette and the High Wire. We used a worksheet I found online (can’t remember where now).

Day Two
Today we read a book about Paris since that is where Mirette lives and a couple other circus books.

Day Three
Today we started out the day on a family adventure. We finally hooked up H’s bike “carriage” (as she calls it) and took the girls on a bike ride to the park.

When we came home (and after naps!) we read “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers,” by Mordecai Gerstein. And then we watched the video by the same name from the library.

Day Four
Today we read two more circus books and listened to the CD that came with one of them. We also read a story about a pig that learns to walk on a high wire and then colored a high wire walking pig picture.

H also did a word group worksheet with a popcorn theme (since its a typical circus snack):

Day Five
Today we focused on art. We colored and painted with watercolors.

Haddie painted someone walking on a hire wire with a waterfall behind them.

Then we both painted the Eiffel Tower:

Day Six
Today we colored a picture of Niagara Falls:

Then we mapped out Bellini’s career on a map from homeschool share’s website.

Then we reviewed France and Europe on our map. Next we made a plate model (thanks Pinterest!) to help H learn the relationship between world, continent, country, state and city:

Then we learned a little about copper since Mirette’s mother’s pots are made from copper. I challenged H to find anything made by copper in our house. We found things that were the same color but nothing copper except for the bottom of our pots and pennies. Then we did an experiment of trying to see what would clean a penny the best:

Day Seven
Today we started out school watching some YouTube videos about tight rope walkers:

Wallenda Prepares for Niagara Falls walk

We also found some YouTube videos of Nik Wallenda walking the tight rope across Niagara Falls.

We also read a few different books:
High-Wire Henry by Mary Calhoun (I highly recommend, it was cute)

Where’s Our Mama by Diane Goode (based in Paris, nothing spectacular)

Circus by Lois Ehlert (interesting pictures)

Later in the day we made some Funnel Cakes since they’re circus food and popcorn.
Funnel Cakes

The oil was too hot the first time and burnt the funnel cake:

But the second and third tries turned out great:

While we ate our snacks we searched Netflix for some circus movies or shows. We found a PBS documentary series called Circus about the Big Apple Circus.

Then we Daddy came home they played circus and H practiced her balancing skills:

We took a week break here in the study to get ready and go on a family camping trip! The first family trip with all 5 of us and in one pop up camper…but that’s another post…

Haddie made sure to practice her high wire walking on the curb by our campsite:

Day Eight
We read the story about the real Bellini:

Then we read two different books about copper:

And then we did a copper experiment from one of the books. We found a few screws and nails from Daddy’s garage. Along with some dirty pennies.

Then we put in them in a cup with vinegar and left them for most of the day.

And here’s what happened:

Day Nine
Today we finished up the Mirette by reading all three Mirette books. Next we read a book about France and colored a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Then we talked about talents, boasting and practicing like Mirette did.

At some point during the study (I don’t remember when since I’m posting weeks later) we also cooked some
elephant ears since they’re carnival food like the funnel cakes we made.

A couple of days later we were at a friend’s birthday party and H had to practice her tight rope walking on the balance beam:

HS: Babar- To Duet or Not Duet (FIAR)

(We rowed this book about a month ago, I’m behind on posting!)

After a couple weeks of a break, we are back to studying another book

Day One
Our FIAR book hadn’t arrived at the library yet so we just read a couple other stories in the Babar series from the library.

Day Two
Today we started off by reading the Babar: Duet or Not to Duet. Then we read “Orchestranimals” by Vlasta van Kampen. We stopped after reading each animal and their instrument to look up each instrument on YouTube. It was really interesting and we both enjoyed it. Here are some of the best ones we watched:

The Cello Song

Violin Dubstep

Next we colored a couple of instrument coloring pages and talked about each one.

And right before nap time we read “Babar Visits Another Planet.” And later we watched the first few episodes of Babar on Netflix and learned how he came to become king and wear clothes like humans.

Day Three
Today was a bit of a weird day so we ended up just reading a couple Babar stories and watching some Babar episodes.

Day Four
Today we made up for yesterday. We read this great book about elephants.

I’d highly recommend it. It was simple enough to understand but still very informative and interesting.

H did some elephant worksheets I found online including a maze, puzzle, dot to dot and a page about what elephants eat. When she finished the dot to dot she colored it like an Indian elephant complete with lots of decorations and paint (like we saw in the book)

Later with daddy (while mommy was napping!), she colored a Babar page, practiced some Hebrew and drew her own elephant.

Day Five
Today we read another library book about elephants. Well, we more so looked at some of the pictures. This book was a bit over her head and way too wordy to read out loud. Then H made her own elephant by using a cut and paste worksheet from education.com

We got out our setting notebook we use for all our books and figured out the setting for Babar’s Duet or not to Duet book. This time the setting was fictional Celesteville. We talked about some other stories or TV shows that H watches that have fictional settings. She did a good job naming some different ones and their settings:
My Little Ponies–Equesteria
Strawberry Shortcake–Berry Bitty City

And then she chose a vocab word to draw:

And we finished up by reading a book about manners.

Day Six
Today we read a great book about fractions:

H played with a felt fraction set I made last night (with inspiration from Pinterest):

Then we worked on some fraction worksheets and used blocks to help her better understand the concepts.

After a little while we got distracted and used the blocks for all kinds of other fun things:

Then we read this great book on manners. It’s written by Whoopi Goldberg and its hilarious:

Day Seven
Today (Sunday) we did a little bit of school because H requested to read a few books. We read another fractions book:

This one was good but too complicated for my 4 yr old. It would be good to use in a few years.

We also read this fun book on manners:

Day Eight
Today we did a couple more math worksheets from education.com. We did a fraction and an instrument subtraction sheet:

We played with playdoh and I gave her fractions to cut it into:

Even K got in on the fun:

Then we spent time reading this great book and learning about the different groups of instruments:

Then we got on the computer and played on the San Francisco Symphony website. You can click on each group and then individual instruments to hear the sounds and read more about each. Then we spent some time searching for instrument apps on my phone. We downloaded and played with a few. It was especially fun playing on this piano that made different dog barks for each note. We laughed at lot at our dog’s reactions!

After this week, we took about a week break to get ready and go on our camping trip, but that’s another post!

Day Nine
Today we focused on music theory a bit. I wanted to introduce some of the basic ideas such as the music notes are letters, the names of the notes (whole, half, quarter), etc.

I showed her what the notes look like and what the different cleft symbols are and we practiced drawing them:

I also used a couple printouts from
Education.com. We didn’t fully do them of course, since she’s only four, but she practiced drawing notes on the lines and writing a little bit of what some of the notes are worth.

Then we spent some time playing on the piano. She wanted me to play a couple songs for her while she had a stick and pretended to be the conductor. Then we switched roles and she got to bang on the piano for a bit.

Day Ten
Today we focused on manners some more. We read another manners book and talked a lot about different situations in which manners are needed. I had her role play some situations as well.

Next, we talk about lying. We discussed how Pom and Baba lied and the consequences they had. We talked about how God wants us to always tell the truth.

Then we read a book about shapes and played I-Spy with shapes around the room and in the Babar book. We also tried to find music notes in the book.

Day Eleven
Today we read another shape book, practiced drawing different types of shapes, even some 3-D shapes (cube, pyramid, etc).

Then we each drew a shape on two different pieces of paper. We switched papers and tried to draw a picture from the shape.

Next we painted them with watercolors and water color pencils.

Then Haddie wanted to paint on her own:

Day Twelve
Today we read two books about hearing:

Then we finished up our Babar study by reading another shape book an searching for 3-D shapes while we read Babar one more time.

We had a lot of fun studying Babar! And I’m excited about our next book and the field trip we get to go on!

Tot school February 11, 2013

Reading a few posts recently about another homeschool mom’s tot school, inspired me to start being more intentional about some of the time I spend with my 14 month old. I know she’s young and I don’t plan on being too organized with school as of yet with her, but I do want to get her sitting still longer and focusing a little better. I feel like my 4 yr old did a lot better with these things at her sister’s age, but maybe my memory is a bit honeymoon-ized.

We’ve been playing in the sandbox a lot. She enjoys it like nothing else. I was amazed the first time I introduced it to her. I expected mixed reactions as a lot of babies seem to not like the feeling of sand. But she dove right in, literally.

We’ve also gone to the beach a few times and she seems to enjoy that for a while.

Don’t you love Florida. I mean, where else can you go to the beach in January and February?

I’ve tried coloring with her a few times. She does get the idea of putting the crayon to the paper and taps it on there a lot. But after a while the crayons do end up in her mouth. So, yeah, gotta watch that closely.

We’ve also focused on playing with her pop up toys (the ones where you push or turn the buttons and an animals pops up) and a weeble type set where you put the weebles into holes and watch them slide down.

She loves pulling books out of the book basket and looking at them on her own. She can sit for quiet a while just flipping through books. But she still doesn’t sit still enough to actually read more than one page together. That or she tries to grab the book out of my hand or close it. She’s done surprisingly well with H’s paper page books. I put them all up for a while fearing she’d rip them up, she only a couple pages have suffered in the past couple months. Pretty good track record I’d say!

Tonight I cut a whole in an old (clean) coffee can and gave K some puffy balls to stick into the hole. I was amazed at how well she did. She focused really hard on it and she only attempted to put them in her mouth twice. But apparently she didn’t like the fuzzy feeling.

We also used an empty tissue box and some of the single duplo blocks too. She seemed to enjoy using both and the resulting rattling noises that came from shaking them afterwards.

I plan to keep researching and coming up with some new fun (and cheap) activities for her. And I’ll be sure to share what we try!

HS: Make Way For Ducklings (FIAR)

Day One
Haddie had been begging to start this book over the weekend. So she was excited to actually do it today. After reading the book for the first time, we did a number of worksheets I printed from online like a duckling maze, find the different picture page, a graphing page and some others. She put the ducklings’ names in alphabetical order (with a lot of help)

We worked on grouping and counting by giving the ducklings dried beans and peanuts:

Then we read some duck stories and a veggie tale book about being thankful.

Day Two
Today we started out by reading the theme book and a nonfiction duck book. Next Haddie worked on some duck worksheets. She did a maze, a real vs fake duck pics sheet, worked on writing “d”s and the words “ducklings” and “ducks.” Then I had her go around the house to find things that started with a “d.” She of course found her duck stuffed animal first. Then she had a hard time finding anything else. She kept naming things with a d in the middle of the word and she kept pronouncing the words emphasizing the middle syllables. But eventually she got the hang of it (with help) and we found door, dresser, dress, and dog (toy).

Next we set to on an adventure to find some real ducks. We went to a little lake and thought we had found some geese type birds.

Only to discover they were fake birds! Haddie was quite disappointed. Notice her staged sad face.

We tried to find another lake. I remembered another little lake nearby with a park so we went there. And thankfully we finally found some ducks! We had fun feeding them bread. We tried to feed them peanuts like the ducks in the book, but they didn’t seem interested in those.

And of course our bread attracted plenty more guests.

After having lots of fun and going through half a loaf if bread, we walked around the lake and Haddie enjoyed playing on the fitness equipment and playground.

We also had fun collecting some treasures along the lake’s edge, including a couple duck feathers.

We had a lot of fun watching the ducks as they swan, waddled and preened themselves. Haddie asked where the ducklings were. So we talked about what seasons ducks lay eggs and how since its fall, they are done laying eggs until spring. We also tried to decide what genders the ducks were based in their feathers. We guessed that there was one drake and three hens. I’d say our duck adventure was a success!

Day 3
Today we read another book about ducks. Then we did an experiment with oil and water and talked about how oil helps keep ducks from getting wet. First, we tried putting food coloring into some vegetable oil. Since the food color is water based, it wouldn’t mix with the oil. Then we used a 2-L bottle filled with water and mixed in some oil. We tried dying the water to see if it would help us see the oil better.

Unfortunately coloring the water made it worse. The oil didnt stay in little droplets like I had hoped. But it the illustration did work well with the oil and food coloring droplets.

Next we experimented with two different feathers. We put one in oil and then put them both in water. We tried to see if there was a difference in how they floated.

The experiments didn’t work out as I had hoped, but I think they’ll still help her remember about the oil on the feathers.

Next, she worked on some worksheets

We learned about what baby birds eat versus what they don’t eat, about different animals and how they raise their babies, and some bird vocab.

Day 4
Today we read “From Egg to Duck” by Sally Morgan and Haddie cut out and put the stages of a duckling’s growth in order.

We also read “Minnie’s Diner: A Multiplying Menu” by Dayle Ann Dodds then used dried beans to figure out how to convert days into weeks so she could see how many days vs weeks it takes an egg to hatch (28 days=4 weeks).

We also read “Bus Route to Boston” by Maryann Cocca-Leffler. I had hoped that the book would talk about some of the places in Boston we learned about in Make Way for Ducklings. But unfortunately, it didn’t actually talk about the city’s landmarks.

Haddie also did some other worksheets from the Make Way for Ducklings preschool pack

While making breakfast, we looked at the eggs I cracked and talked about what the yolk was for and why there wasn’t any chicks or ducklings inside of them (they hadn’t been incubated).
And we started an experiment I found on Pinterest to make a “naked” rubber egg!

See, the vinegar is already starting to dissolve the egg shell!

Later Haddie learned to draw a duck from this book I found at the Dollar Tree. I was quite impressed with how her duck turned out. She decided to make it a drake (male duck) complete with a curly feathered tail.

She also drew a picture of her favorite part of the book. Although her picture veered a bit from the story. She started out saying it was the lady watching the ducks on Beacon Hill, but then she said the lady took the duck as a pet.

And since we’re having an impromptu movie night at Nana & Pa’s we couldn’t resist making a Boston Cream Pie (first time ever!) to bring along!

I looked at a number of recipes online and all the from scratch ones just seemed to complicated for our purposes and some of them didn’t get very good reviews anyways. So I opted for an easier version.

Day 5

Our egg experiment completed:

We then decided to dye it and make it grow by soaking it in water.

The next day we took it outside and attempted to make it bounce. Well, it didn’t bounce, but splatted. I think it would have done better if it hadn’t been weakened by growing more.

We also mapped the parent duck’s trip through Boston on a printed out map. Then we made our own map of the town we live in:

Well…here’s where I stopped working on the post…3 months ago! Our life got quite busy and I slacked in posting. I honestly don’t remember what else we did and I don’t have the photos on my phone anymore. Oops.