Project 52: week twenty-three

November 24-30

This week was one of those 'don't plan too much because the baby could come any day' type of weeks.....but here we are the last day of November and he still isn't here.  I guess he wants a December birthday.

 

 We had super duper special visitors on Monday.  Ally and Ryken came over for a visit to our house.  It was a such a delight to have them both here and for the kids to play.  Sweet Ally was so thoughtful she not only came with a strawberry limeade for me, but also two freezer meals for after baby comes.  She is such a blessing and always thinking of others. Truly blessed by her friendship. But now they are back in Fargo!

ALL 4 children are looking!!!!! That camera man must be a professional:)

Wednesday we broke tradition! We never have or want to ever again put up our Christmas tree before Thanksgiving.  BUT, we figure this year is an exception because baby brother was due the day after Thanksgiving.  We wanted to be able to take our time and enjoy putting up the tree with the kids so we did it the night before Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately this is the only picture I got of Elliana! She enjoyed crawling around getting into boxes.

SO fun to watch them decorate.  Declan kept putting on the ASU candy canes and footballs then would take them off and put them on again.  Raelynn loved putting the ornaments on, but would sort of just shove it on the branch.

And after the tree was up we enjoyed some hot chocolate! Raelynn's first time for that and she loved it, of course:)

Thursday was Thanksgiving....and I have no pictures! It was a fun day at Grandma and Tank's house.

The kids making a turkey craft together

Friday Daddy put up lights and Raelynn supervised in the chair:)  She was able to help with the bushes and had a fun time doing it, of course.  The house looks great--pictures to come!

This turkey is still cooking! 40 weeks here.  Happy Due Date.

Mimi came on Friday!!! We are SO excited to have Mimi here!!

Saturday Raelynn's buddy Josiah had his 3rd birthday party. So fun for all the little friends to get together.  They had a balloon artist--the best I've ever seen!

 

Declan and his Elmo balloon

Raelynn showing her butterfly wings

 

Project 52: week twenty-two

November 17-23

Whew! I am behind. And the camera wasn't out a ton this week, but I did capture some cute moments from the kids.  It was a busy week with appointments and some last minute spontaneous plans (which we figure we won't be able to do once baby brother comes!)

 

I was putting laundry away in the other room and could hear Raelynn singing...I came in to Elliana's room, where the rocking chair currently is, and saw this:)  Love it.

Painting pumpkins! Declan is always practicing his catcher stance.

We read Caps For Sale! this week and had fun doing activities with it. Even Daddy got involved!

Raelynn is doing a great job with cutting! Even straight lines.  We discovered paint samples are perfect for this, so now she likes to get them when we go to walmart.

So concentrated. Stacking cheerios on a spaghetti noodle.  He has great hand coordination. But with his feet--not so much.

It rained for a couple days. Really the first time Declan has seen rain.  First thing we do is always open the blinds in the morning.  Right away, he ran over to get the towels and pointed out the window.  He thought he needed to go clean up that water! (Which he does clean up very well when there is a spill on the floor) And sadly, it made the backyard so muddy that we haven't been able to play outside.

But they did get to play outside when Daddy was out of work!



Here is one of those melt my hearts and I never want to forget it moments....we were watching our wedding video with Raelynn and as she is watching her daddy spin her mommy on the tv she says to him "spin me, daddy! I want to dance with you!" So precious. Too soon he will be dancing with her at her wedding. *tear*

 

Home Improvements:

Pretty cool, eh?  This is the new décor in Declan's bedroom.  These are all autographed ASU photos of Brent's that are special to him.  And now Raelynn always points to James Harden and says "It's the BEARD!"

Elliana update:
Still cuddly. Still happy. Eating all finger foods.  Drinking from a sippy cup.  Still hates to be forced to stand.  Crawling everywhere.  She often goes in the other room and plays with toys from the toy bucket, which we consider to be a great stride because she is comfortable enough in her surroundings that she can venture around.  We had her 6 month post adoption report with the social worker this week and it was great to report how well she is doing.  (and no, she hasn't been home 6 months yet but we have to get it done early enough that it will arrive in Ethiopia at that 6 month mark).  We told the social worker that we still think the hardest thing is not knowing if certain things are attachment/adoption related or just the nature of her.  And that is something we will never know, and that is what makes adoption hard.  But we just have to trust that God will continue to guide us and give us grace, patience, and wisdom as we raise her just as we do her siblings.

She loves playing outside and playing peek-a-boo in here!

BFIAR: Caps for Sale

Age: 33 months
Book: Caps for Sale
Bible: Proverbs 29:11

I love BFIAR! I was given the actual BFIAR book and should correct what I said in an earlier post---BFIAR is NOT a curriculum! They make that clear in their manual.  However, it is exactly what I thought it was--a collection of ideas that go along with the story list.  I think it will be a great tool to have with the stories, but as I said before, with the internet and resources available online--there are so many ideas out there already that you can totally do these stories without the manual.

BFIAR is made for 2-4 year olds, but Declan had a fun time with it this week too!


First of all, Raelynn has never really asked to read a book over and over again.  Until we read Caps For Sale! She loved the book! Declan loved the book! We would finish reading and she asked for it to be read again right away.


We 'rowed' the book Caps for Sale, which means we read it every day.  In addition to reading we did some other fun activities and printables that I had found online:

Our Bible memory verse for the week.  The peddler in the story shows anger, so this went along with it perfectly.

Day 1:

Painted a monkey mask.  Cut it out and taped to a popsicle stick.  They both had fun with these ALL week.  Especially when we would read the story, Raelynn liked being the monkey.

 

Day 2:
Homeschool Creations has a great printable Caps for Sale pack.  Find it here.

putting different hats on a monkey and making up where he was going to go
 

Roll and graph:


I colored the coins so it would be eaiser. Declan had fun playing too!

 

 

We also finally got to some of the pumpkin activities I had planned. 

sorting small, medium, big

painting pumpkins

stamping the letter P

Other random activities:

Day 3: Read and acted out the story. Matched upper and lower case cards that had monkeys on them

Day 4:

They both had fun stacking caps on their head

 

she has her little handlebar moustache under there...do you see it?  :)

Daddy works from home on Thursdays! They LOVE when he gets involved:)

Printables from Homeschool Creations:

she's doing so well at drawing lines!  Has a hard time with the zig zags though.

Counted the pennies and marked the number that were there.

Stacked the caps in the same order as on the peddler's head from the story

On the back of each cap I wrote a number 1-10 and then put them on the tree.  She had a bag of pennies and had to 'buy' the cap that she chose based on the number that was written.  She really liked this a lot!

 

They love sitting at the table playing together now!!

Apparently I need to be careful when choosing library books to go along with the story!

This book was a really great counting book with beautiful pictures and all the different types of monkeys....
But then the last page is this:

So my children got a little lesson on creation vs. evolution:)

Raelynn is doing SO well at cutting! I have to admit, I was surprised she  cut these so perfectly when I gave them to her.  They are paint samples--perfect for straight line cutting practice:)

Stacking caps...aka cheerios on spaghetti noodles.  Declan and Raelynn both did great and kept asking for more.  I wonder if the fact they get to EAT the cheerios had anything to do with it? :)

This was fun! I didn't have a brown stamp pad, so I just colored her thumb and she made thumbprints in the tree.  We turned them into monkeys and she colored leaves and later added caps on the monkeys too.

This was also something she did really well that I wasn't sure how it would go....I've seen these many places online and I know you can make your own out of popsicle sticks.  I think I will have to do that!