Crafty Boosie

I haven’t posted in a couple days and I apologize.  We’ve had a lot going on and by the time I’ve had time to make a post, I’ve chosen to go to bed instead.

Here are some photos from Friday.  This first photo is a puzzle that I bought Paige at our local dollar store.  Paige seriously played with this thing the entire day.  She’s stop periodically to do other things but she kept going back.  She was so excited to show Daddy how she could do the puzzle when he came home from work.

We are definitely going to buy her a lot more puzzles.  She currently only has three but since she loves them so much we are going to purchase her many more.

While Paige was eating lunch, she saw the leftover F projects on the table and decided she wanted to do them. I’m pretty sure all of these came from DLTK except for the Kumon workbook pages.

We have had many late nights since Thursday and we are trying to stop that.  I’ve been doing a lot of research and compiling of new projects for Paige.  I just need to start printing and cutting them out for her use.  I am planning to start up the lessons with our new plan in a week.

I think part of why I haven’t posted lately is because I’ve been dealing with some hurt feelings and I didn’t want to post while I was in such a blue mood.  Some things have happened recently that have been hard for me to deal with.  I had my feelings hurt several days in a row by some people that I love and I’ve been trying to work through those feelings and get to the point of acceptance.  It’s not always easy to move past hurt and anger when it is involving people close to you but I’m trying.  I’m not really there yet but I’m feeling better at this moment than I have been the past few days.

What a weird day!  My husband was going to be late again and Paige was having issues with Daddy being gone so much.  Throughout the day she kept asking for Daddy and was melancholy.  She was definitely “off” and that didn’t help our day much.  Yesterday, my husband worked all day and then went to a Jays game with some guys from the IT Department.  They do a lot for his department so he didn’t want to turn them down.  Tonight, it was his monthly dinner with his core group of friends at work.  He had skipped out for the past couple months and he didn’t want to do that again.  It was just bad timing that they happened two days in a row.  Normally, it wouldn’t be a big deal but it was to Paige.  She missed her Daddy very much and it showed.

I realized early on that Paige was not going to be very cooperative today so I decided to set aside most of the plans for the day and wing it instead.  The only “project” we did today was a Fairy Wand that I had to make for her.  She enjoyed it just the same… for all 37 seconds before she destroyed it.  HAHA.  The glue wouldn’t stick for some reason so I taped it together.  I thought the tape would make it last a little longer but it didn’t.

F is for Fairy Wand

We played games such as hide-n-seek, tea party, she made me food in her kitchen and told me when food was hot so that I could pretend to burn my mouth.  We threw balloon up towards the ceiling in the hopes of trying to make it stick to the ceiling.  We danced to songs from Imagination Movers.  We made up our own silly songs and more.

Ignore the fact that her dress is hiked up around her waist. This is how Paige hides when we play hide-n-seek. It cracks me up.

We also read many, many books from her collection.  In honour of “F” week, we made sure to read “The Big Wide-Mouthed Frog”.

Paige wasn’t overly interested in this particular book, other than to look at the pictures.  I’d start to read a page, she’d look at the page, tell me what was happening and then flip the page.  Eventually, I gave up and we made up our own story.  This book was given to her for Christmas from her daycare.  It was right at the time I was laid off from my job and pulled her out but they wanted her to have the book.  Maybe she will like it when she gets a little older.

We couldn’t sit down and read books without reading her favourite book.  “A is for Adventure”, a Backyardigan alphabet book.  Paige absolutely loves Backyardigans and she has several of their books.  Unfortunately, one of her other top books, “Jungle Colors” was ruined quite a while ago and we’ve been trying to find a new copy in the stores but haven’t been able to get a hold of one.  I might have to make a special request to have one shipped to the Chapters store near us.

We also worked on Paige’s number puzzle.  She loves this puzzle and will tell me what colours the numbers are and once in a while she will tell me what numbers they are too.

Paige stayed up VERY late waiting for Daddy to come home.  He insisted that I keep her up and that he would only be home 30 minutes after her normal bed time but he didn’t arrive home until 10:15pm and he and Paige played for 15 minutes or so before she finally went to bed.  Tomorrow is going to be interesting because I’m going to have a tired and cranky toddler on my hands.

Paige was ready and eager to get started on her activities this morning.  She practically begged me to get going.  Hehe.  I makes me feel good to know that she’s enjoying the projects.

The first thing Paige asked for was the fish that she saw prepared from the day before that we didn’t get to.  It was just a simple fish that I added some glitter glue (my glue stick was broken) and gave her some cut up magazine pages to put on it.

We then headed outside to gather some sticks for a fireplace project.  Paige had such a blast.  Apparently, the sticks wanted to go down the slide many times before coming indoors to be used.  I had a hard time convincing her that the “baby” sticks were happy to participate but the “mommy and daddy” sticks (as she called the really big ones she found) wanted to stay outside in the sun.

The fireplace is a work in progress.  We are waiting for the glue to dry before we can finish it.

Our next adventure was a fishing game that I grabbed at the dollar store.  Unfortunately, the magnet parts are so small that she had difficulty getting them to pick up.  She eventually just put them onto the magnets herself and would yell “I caught one!”  The game did not survive long, she managed to break the pole after 30 minutes.

We continued on with a flower crown.  I painted the paper plate it the night before since Paige and paint do not mix.  She put the flowers on with glue dots and I hot glued the flowers on the rim for her.  Unfortunately, it didn’t fit her head and she didn’t want to wear it anyway so I don’t have any pictures of her with it.

After nap, we headed out on a field trip.  Paige was pretty excited about it when I told her.  We were heading to the fire station for a tour.  Paige happily donned her fire chief hat and practically ran to the car.

Heading out to go see the fire trucks

She was thrilled to be sitting in the pumper truck

Look at that smile

Paige also got an opportunity to sit in the antique engine.  The engine was brought to the station, which also has a museum currently under renovations, but once it arrived they realized it wasn’t going to fit in the museum so it now sits in one of the bays.

Sitting in the antique engine

She started flirting with the firefighter at this point

They offered to let Paige stand in their boots but Paige was a little nervous still so her Pepper, her stuffed cat, did it instead

Showing Paige how the tires on the pumper are taller than her.

Our awesome firefighter tour guide. He was really nice and good with Paige.

Checking out the master controls for the pumper.

She really wanted to pull the lever but couldn't reach. HAHA

Unfortunately, our tour was cut a bit short because they received a call and had to rush off.    Paige was very sad to leave, she was having a great time and really loved the big engine.  I had to tell her that a kitty cat, much like Pepper, was stuck in a tree and they were going to save the kitty before it fell.  That calmed her down.

While at the station, I took every opportunity to point out all the “F”s that were on the truck and the building.

It was a fantastic day and we had a lot of fun.

We hope you all had a fantastic weekend.  The same illness that I developed on Tuesday and Paige on Thursday and then my husband was hit with it on Saturday.  Our house has been a regular nightmare for the past week.

Monday brings us a new letter, “F”.  I have been looking forward to this one because I have some fun things planned for Paige.  I’m not totally sure she understands why we do these projects but it is mostly about introducing her to letters, repetition and fun.  As I often say, I let Paige guide how much and how far we’ll take the lessons.  Today, is a perfect example of Paige guiding the lesson plans.

We started the morning with some fish.  I made two fish projects using the same template.  I laminated each goldfish and cut them out.  One of them, I used a hole punch and made a lacing card.  The second, I cut up into 4 pieces and created a puzzle.  Paige was not interested in the puzzle at all.  She was definitely interested in the lacing card but she couldn’t seem to grasp the concept.  She would push the string through the hole but then couldn’t figure out what to do next.  I tried showing her a number of times but she finally tossed it down and said “all done”.

We next moved into what turned out to be an extremely messy project.  We made a Letter F suncatcher.  I cut up some red, yellow and gold tissue paper and put it into a small box.  I cut out the letter F out of some card stock and applied contact paper to the back.  She had a great time dropping the tissue scraps onto the contact paper.  She had even more fun picking up handfuls and tossing them in the air.  I have a feeling I will be finding tissue scraps for ages.  This evening I found some in my bed.  Oh joy.  At least she had fun.

The next project was something I found at Confessions of a Homeschooler.  This is a fish colour matching puzzle.  Not only was this a HUGE hit with Paige, she refused to do any of the other projects and activities planned for the day.  She wanted to do nothing other than this puzzle, over and over again.  She even insisted that Daddy (who was home still recovering) come downstairs to watch her put the puzzle together.  She told him the colours and showed him how the pieces went together.  It was very cute watching her show off for him and it gave him a chance to see her in action.

I think the most hilarious part of the day was when she decided that it was Pepper’s turn (her stuffed cat).  She would hold the piece in his stuffed paw and put it on the correct fish.

Paige – 28 Months

Paige is doing much better today. The resilience of children is absolutely amazing. As sick as she was yesterday she woke up happy, bouncing around and full of energy. While her outward appearance and energy was great, she was still not feeling well. Every now and then she would stop in her tracks, whimper and say “Oh mommy! Tummy! It hurts.” and she was fairly cranky and unable to focus on anything. Despite it all, she is soooo much better than yesterday.

We skipped out on Indoor Playground at the Community Centre (as I mentioned yesterday), she wouldn’t have been able to focus and I didn’t want to risk her still being infectious.  It was a very evil illness that I wouldn’t wish on any parent or child.  We did free play which was rough because her mood turned horrible after Daddy left for work.

After nap time, Paige was not in the mood to eat anything but she saw her projects sitting on the table.  I wasn’t going to use them.  I figured that I would save them for a future day but she decided she wanted to work on them.

E is for Elephant.  She started out with a simple colouring exercise.  We discussed the name and I tried to get her to repeat me but she simply said, “No, thank you.”  We also talked about the sounds that an elephant makes (my rendition is horrible, haha) and how they live in Africa and the zoo.  She ignored me on the last part and that was fine.  She’s a little sponge and even when I think she isn’t listening I will find later that she did and will bring things up at random times.

We proceeded into a couple eagle projects.  Both of these eagles came from DLTK.  We chose to use handprints cut from lunch bags instead of the wings provided in the template.  When we did the paper bag eagle, we got about halfway through and she decided she wanted Mommy to finish.  She played with the first eagle and closely supervised my progress.  She put the eyes and beak on but left the rest for me.   She told me which pieces she wanted me to put on next.

I called it a day on the activities.  I knew that she really didn’t want to do the activities but she insisted so we went ahead.  I told her to let me know when she didn’t want to do any more. I don’t ever want her to feel like she has to do these things.  It’s about having fun and learning something at the same time.  She really does enjoy doing them and so it is a fine line to walk.

Incidentally, the leftover strips from the glue dots provided Paige with the most entertainment of the day.  She kept putting them on herself, her stuffed cat and me too.

While I was preparing dinner, Paige saw her Kumon workbook on the table.  I had been flipping through it to see if there were any “F” projects for next week and forgot to put it away.  Paige loves the Kumon colouring activities so when she saw the book she immediately begged me to colour.  I quickly pulled out some pages for her that also worked well in our Letter of the Week and let her have fun.  No guidance, no instructions.  I simply gave her the pages and told her to just have fun and she did.  She was very happy and kept asking for more.

I was really impressed with the number of projects that Paige did.  I woke up planning to save them for another day or even for the weekend if she needed something to do.  The only thing we didn’t do that was in the  for this week was a trip to the park to gather nature items to create a collage in honour of Earth Day and an egg hunt in the backyard with the plastic eggs leftover from Easter.

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Have you done a similar project with your child? It could be an eagle craft, eggplant, egg or elephant related craft/activity or any letter E activity, If so, Click here to enter the link to your related blog post.