Busy Week

We had a busy week this week despite the fact that both boys came down with Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (for the second time in 2 months) on Wednesday.   T was pretty miserable for all of Wed-Fri and we had a few sleepless nights.   R on the other hand bounced back after about 6 hours.  At 4:00 in the afternoon on Wednesday he was laying on the floor sobbing barely able to move, he had a 103 degree fever even with ibuprofen in him.  By 6:00 that evening he was running around in the back yard collecting wood for a fire.  Kids are amazing. 

I was very happy that I had some individual time to spend with each boy this week.  In my last post I realized that I got very few pictures of what T and I do together, this week I made an extra effort to spend time with him, and get pictures of our time together.

I attempted to make a sensory box for the boys.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to control the mess?  I initially made this box, it had counting chips and beads in it.  I intended the box to be for R, but T was much more into it.  Unfortunately it was full of choking hazards that he was scattering across the room so the box did not last long. 

I then made this box; it has small pieces of yarn, some glass gems, and cinnamon to give it a bit of a smell as well.  This box was not as popular as the chip box, but it was easier to clean up and I could watch T while he was playing in it and didn’t have to worry as much about him spreading beads across the house to choke on later when I wasn’t watching as carefully.  

 T had a lot of fun playing with an old medicine bottle with marbles in it that I found at my grandmas house.  The bottle was from 1964 and I believe one of my aunts had saved it as a child.  He spent a lot of time putting the marbles in, dumping them out, putting the lid on and taking it off.  I watched him very carefully while he played.  

My dad’s birthday was this week so R made him a card.  He cut out all of the pieces all by himself and glued them on.  He loves cutting.  It is a picture of a “happy birthday cake” The purple blob in the middle is the cake; all the other pieces are candles.  

We really try to stress independence in our boys which came in handy a couple of weeks ago.   I was prying hamburgers apart with a sharp knife and nearly sliced the tip of my finger off.  Needless to say dinner did not go as planned that night.  Unfortunately my husband was not home and I was not able to get a hold of him.  I managed to toss R some peanut butter and bread while I tried to decide what to do.  R successfully made himself a peanut butter sandwich, though I was not able to convince him to make one for T as well.  This week I bought him his own jar of peanut butter, we are still working on not licking the knife and putting it back in the jar, thus his own jar.  Here he is proudly eating a sandwich he had made completely by himself. 

On Monday I noticed that T kept getting a hold of some stickers.  The first few times he got them I took them off of him because I did not want him to destroy a whole sheet of stickers.  It finally dawned on me that he was trying to get the stickers off and that it was a great fine motor activity that I should not be stopping.  So, Tuesday afternoon, while R was napping I gave T his own sheet of stickers and he spent a good 10 minutes taking them off and putting them on paper.  The picture below is his final product, and yes it did take him a full 10 minutes of a very concentrated effort to produce this one piece of paper with 8 stickers on it.   

One of T’s favorite activities at the moment is climbing.  The kid cannot walk yet, but he is an expert climber.  He has learned how to push chairs around to get things off of the refrigerator and counters.  Here he is pulling down one of R’s crafts.  The highlight of his climbing this week was when I found him in the bathroom sink.  Now if he would stop focus on going up so much and instead focus on going forward and start walking.

T and I also played with this puzzle, worked on a shape sorter, and read some books.

I bought some cornstarch at the store this week which I have been meaning to do for some time.  We made corn starch paintings.  Correction, T and I made corn starch paintings by mixing water, corn starch and food coloring and dribbling it on paper with a spoon.  R spent the time mixing the colors together.  I made the picture below in case you were wondering what it looks like.  Neither of the boys produced anything worth showing beyond a yellow blog and a bowl full of purplish goop, but they sure had fun with it.  

Wednesday Morning R and I had a good time together while T napped.  His aunt gave him a book of extremely simple mazes a couple months ago which he was not yet ready for at the time.  I ripped out a few of the pages of the book and laminated them.  He did the one page 5 times in a row.  He got mad at me when I tried to take his picture which is why it looks so funny, he was pushing the camera away.  I personally think he did a great job on the maze.  

After he got bored with the mazes I let him write on the white board on the fridge.  We practiced making vertical and horizontal lines.  I tried to show him how to make a T but it was still a bit beyond him.  He was also getting bored with the activity by that point so he was not very focused. 

I found these 4 puzzles at a thrift shop this week.  They cost $2 for all 4.  They each have between 4 and 6 pieces.  R still has a really hard time with puzzles but I did convince him to try the horse one a few times this week.

As a family we go to a bike path near our house about once a week.  This particular path has parking about ¾ of a mile from a built up area with a bunch of shops and restaurants.  We regularly eat at one of the fast food places in that area.  In the past the boys took turns riding on one of these bikes that my husband and I can actually push and steer with a broom handle. Both boys started on the bike at about 11 months old.  This is actually our second bike because the first one no longer goes straight which makes it really hard to steer.

R was getting a bit big for the bike so he just moved up to this bike.  He is now in control of the steering which is a big step for him.  We have tried this bike a few times over the past few months and up until this week he had no idea how to steer it which made it impossible to push him on it.  My husband still uses a broom handle to push it because the handle on the bike is way to short for him.  I am 5’5” and I find it uncomfortable low, my husband is 6’2” so he can barely reach it.  I do apologize that the picture is so blurry, my camera was on a strange setting and this is the only picture I got.  

 

We made cookies this week.  Here is R mixing them with an egg beater.  I was very proud of R counting the cookies when they were finished.  We made a total of 16 cookies.  He correctly counted up to 12, using proper 1 to 1 correspondence; I had to help him count the last 4.  Now that he is pretty good with 1 to 1 correspondence up to 10 which is what we have been working on for the past few weeks, I think I will work on getting him more solid on the numbers up to 20.  

I made a Tot Book for R this week, though we didn’t get to a lot of the activities.  I found the book here.

http://www.homeschoolcreations.com/firemanlapbook.html

We did this matching shadows activity (he did a great job on this).

 

And this fire truck puzzle which he really struggle on.  Due to all of the illness this week we didn’t get to the inside of the book at all.   

While R and dad were out at the store, T and I worked on his Montessori Mini Cylinders.   

And then we went for a walk.  First he rode his bike.

Then we practiced walking.

That was pretty much our week.

go to 1+1+1=1 to see what other toddlers did this week.