Her First Favorites.

Pin It

This past Christmas the first thing my mother-in-law bought for anybody was a small, cotton-pink rocking horse. It had Scarlett’s name written all over it, she said - which was totally true. (In fact, we almost bought it for her ourselves!) It took her a little while to warm up to, but now - after a good three months of sitting idly untouched in the corner of her room - it is far and wide, her absolute favorite toy. (Sorry, babydoll, we've officially moved on.) She scoots that thing all around the house, whinnying the way it does when you press the little button on it’s ear. And oh, how she grins when you whinny along!

It occurred to me yesterday that she’s actually old enough now to really have favorites, which is new.

Kittens; her silky Dora nightgown (coincidentally my least favorite, of course); her Dr. Suess’ ABC’s book; her blue headband; oatmeal topped with strawberries; the letter A; her bare feet; a capless marker to wield; and dresses she can lift over her head to play peek-a-boo in -- all things that have the power to turn her mood in an instant.

She likes other things too, like carrying balls half her size around the yard and picking dandelions to gift and anything that roars.. But these are her favorites: Nightgowns she can sway in, headbands she can almost put on herself, and fluffy pink rocking horses she can hit her brother for daring to even look at.

Interview With Matthew: 4 Years Old.

Pin It (First, Matthew when he was 2 months old!)
This video has nothing to do with anything. But I just found it buried somewhere I'll probably never be able to find again on my computer, and I'm excited! No, by the way, I am not secretly a ten year old. I just sound like it on video. I would warn you to turn the sound down when you listen to this because my voice is really THAT ANNOYING, but his little voice makes up for it, I promise. Feel free to tell me how cute he used to be before he learned to throw temper tantrums and have opinions that get on everyone's nerves. And to also ignore my voice. Thanks.


How old are you?
4

How old will you be in ten years?
Um, I think 5. (counts on fingers.) Yeah, 5.

What’s your favorite food?
Pizza.

What’s your least favorite food?
Lots of stuff that you cook. Like noodles with cut up meatballs (ground beef, lol)… Just everything pretty much. But also, it takes too long for the green bean casserole to cool down so I can eat it. I like that stuff. But sometimes I forget how long it takes to cool down, and I’m like: COOL DOWN!

(Matthew makes me ask him what a Whale Shark likes to eat.)
What does a Whale Shark like to eat?
Plankton!

What do birds like to eat?
CATS. (what?) They eat their ears! Well, that’s what I thought. Remember? When we saw that ugly cat with no ears? I think a bird ate them off! Hahahahaha..

What’s your favorite dinosaur?
Big Al! (Allosaurus.)

Favorite thing to play?
Cars. ‘Cause I do have a lot of cool cars.

Favorite book?
Two of my books about dinosaurs.

Favorite song?
Racecar Theatre 2 song. Daddy has it one his phone. (The original song Weezer re-did for the Cars 2 soundtrack.)

What is something you’re pretty good at?
Painting scary stuff. Like someone’s driving in a car, and a zombie is coming up to the car and climbing on the car.. But sometimes I paint other stuff too.

What is your mommy’s name?
Alicia Mommy Stucky.

What’s my favorite food?
Um, dinner. Like, mashed potatoes.

What is my favorite thing to do?
Workout and watch 30 Rock. (I do like the show, lol..)

What about me? Am I good at anything?
You’re good at EVERYTHING. Like putting on shirts and stuff.

What is Daddy good at?
Driving trucks and stuff. Cause he’s not crazy like that crazy guy and that other crazy guy that always crashes to him. (He runs around the living room pretending to crash into stuff for about 10 minutes.)

What’s daddy’s job?
A trash truck driver!!

What’s mommy’s job?
To put the trash out.

When you grow up, what will you be?
A school bus driver!!! But only when I grow up like an adult.

How old will you be when you’re an adult?
Maybe ten or eleven. Wait… (Counts in his head for a long time, moving his lips a little and looking up at the ceiling.) Yeah. Maybe ten or eleven. (I laugh.) What?!? THAT’S HOW YOU COUNT! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11! ….. Well actually… Okay, maybe 12.

What do you think happens when you get married?
EWWWW! That’s disgusting and inappropriate, MOMMY! (Kind of worried about why he thinks this, but moving on…) Well, I already have a girlfriend anyways. So, it’s no matter. (Again, moving on…)

Wait. Why is it okay to have a girlfriend, but not to get married?
I don’t know. Maybe I will just fall in love. (He groans and rolls his eyes.)

What would you do if there were no rules?
I would just do all the bad things and you would not even put me in time-out if there were no rules. Also I would put orange juice in my Spiderman water bottle and not just water. And I would drink chocolate milkshakes (Pediasure vitamin supplements drinks, lol) ALL DAY, and all crazy like: (pretends to drink crazy).

What would you buy with a million dollars?
(He names his friends, very excitedly.) So I could play with them whenever I wanted!!

So you would enslave your friends?
I would slave you too, like a dragon! Hahahaha..

What is an onomatopoeia?
Like POP! AND BANG! AND SWISH! AND (makes crazy, sloshing, spitting sounds, like someone’s being gutted alive.)

What is 32 divided by 6?
Um, the cat.

What is 1 million plus 1 million?
2 million…. Or 2?

What do you think Mary learns in school?
Her friends.

What do you think Heaven is like?
Heaven is eating a hot dog.

What’s the scariest thing ever?
A zombie with blood on it. Seven years ago the zombies lived.

Who’s faster? Superman or Santa?
I think Superman. Or God. No, wait. Probably Superman.

What’s the first thing you think about when you wake up?
Cars.

Is it better to do the right thing or to not get in trouble?
Not get in trouble. Cause then you throw away my cars.

How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
What kind of question is that? I have no idea.

Nevermind. What is love?
It’s like, when you love somebody.

Can you elaborate?
(Groans.) (Hugs me.) (Rolls his eyes.) It’s like that. That’s like love.

Matthew's First Morning Journal!

Pin It

Matthew’s best friend right now is a 1^st grader who lives down the street from us. They play together everyday, and because they have uncannily similar personalities for all the differences between them, his friend LOVES to talk about everything they do in school. (When we were learning about insects, she taught ME things to teach to him.) One of the things she’s talked about a lot is journals.

For the past week, Matthew’s been writing as much as he has been drawing during his free time. I’m not talking about during our pre-school lessons either; I’m talking about choosing to sit down and write out words over choosing to build with his blocks or capture our cat under overturned laundry baskets. They say that there’s a strong link between reading and writing, but I expected that to mean that he’d be open to learning how to spell words. Probably even words above his reading level. I didn’t think it meant he’d become obsessed.

Matthew has A LOT of energy, even for a four-year-old. To see him sit still, enthralled and content, long enough to fill 10, 12, 14 pages of notebook paper with words is spellbinding. He’s been on this kick everyday for a week, so first thing Monday morning, I started researching first grade curriculum for writing. A lot of stuff about journals came up, so I gave it a whirl.

I drew a box and I made a few lines underneath. Nothing fancy. No line-dot-line handwriting grid or anything. Just a box for a picture and some lines. Just to see what he’d do with it.

-- Matthew, do you want to learn how to write today?

-- YES! I’ll go get the pencils!! (Thunders through the house. Comes back with pencils.)

-- Okay. We’re going to start doing something called JOURNALS today. And if you like it, we can keep doing them. Does that sound fun?

-- MY FRIEND DOES JOURNALS! In REAL school!!

-- I know!

-- (Big grin.)

-- Okay, so first, we’re going to think of what we did today. Then, you can pick your very FAVORITE thing that we did, and in this box, you can draw a picture of it! After that, we’ll use these lines to write a sentence, telling about the picture you drew. Does that sound fun?

-- (Jumping up and down in his seat, nodding his head like a crazy person. It sounds fun.)

-- Okay, so can you think of some of the things we did today?

-- Weeeeeee…Hm,… made bird crafts! We… read Pop Goes Another Balloon! I taught Scarlett how to, how to draw the right way on the paper. We… brought all my stuffed animals to the couch and we, we, we, we made a what-do-you-call-it? BAR, bar graph-thing about the stuff about them… like their colors and like, stuff like that. But I was worried cause I left Puppy at Granny’s house, and I was worried about him so that wasn’t my favorite. We… taked, I mean, we took a walk and played that game with the numbers on the houses. I found a BIG clover! And I went fast down the hill with my bike cause… but my training wheel got loose again and you had to fix it. But without the wrench cause we weren’t by the garage. We were too far to get it. When is Daddy coming home? Can we have pizza for dinner?? How do dinosaurs swim? Can we go swimming??

-- Great! You thought of so many things. So, what do you think was your favorite part of today? It doesn’t have to be something we did for school. It can just be breakfast time, or something you built with your legos, or a song you heard on your radio…

-- PUZZLE SANDWICH!!! You made me a cool puzzle sandwich - REMEMBER? - out of my turkey with that, that cutter thing that looks like a puzzle. Oh my gosh! That’s my favorite! That’s my favorite!




　

After he drew his picture, his pencil went right to the line underneath and I almost stopped him. I almost said: Wait, buddy, wait. Let’s talk about what you want to write. Maybe we can think of a sentence together… Something that won’t be too long, you know? Something nice and easy that you can try to spell yourself -- but I can help you with if you need it….

But it was too late. He was already writing, sounding the words out loud as his pencil dug into the fiber. I let him go. It didn’t matter, I reminded myself, if nothing about his letter combinations made sense at all. If not a single word was spelled right or if the sentence he tried to write had anything at all to do with the picture. This is just to see how he likes the activity; to determine if it’s worth making an everyday exercise, to make sure his mistakes don’t drive him to tears.



He did ask me if sandwich was spelled with an m, at which point I helped
him to hear the nd. But other than that, he thought of this and wrote
it completely on his own. Periods and all!

In the end, there were no spaces, his I’s were not capitalized (even though they usually are, even when they shouldn’t be) and his first “had” was spelled with a b.

But he wrote a complete thought. In fact, he wrote two.


“I hab a sandwich. I had sandwich at muy house.”

......

*Chairs are tricky to draw, he says. So are pieces of sandwich, cut into the shape of interlocking puzzle pieces apparently because he describes them as being “stupid and wrong.”

His words on the drawing, exactly?: “I was excited to write so I didn’t fix my picture. It’s supposed to be me on a chair eating my sandwich. I screwed it all up, but that’s okay. I rocked at my sentence. That’s ‘cause I’m four.”

Our Week in Snapshots.

Pin It

A recap of our week in pictures:





Mary got glasses! EVERYONE loves them. (Me, most of all.) I cannot get over how simultaneously grown-up and seriously ADORABLE she looks in them. They are just so pretty.

(She also got a new haircut last week. Even though she doesn’t love the bangs she wanted as much as I do, I really love the way she’s been wearing them clipped back - especially with those new specs!)

We also decided it’s time to put her into catechism classes, which means that when she’s finished she’ll be able to do communion with us on Sundays (on the Sundays we actually make it to church, that is.. *ahem*) and (more importantly to her right now) to go on annual trips around the country with our church to meet other Lutheran teens once a year.







Some of our instcts "caught" in a spider's web: reinforcing that spiders are not actually insects
themselves. Matthew inspired this activity himself when he noticed that our spinning
clothesline actually looks like a web.

Matthew learned about insects this week!

We made an egg carton/pipe-cleaner insect (to reinforce the 3 separate body parts and number of legs), an antennae hat, a 3D spinning ladybug, a butterfly out of coffee filters and a clothespin (unfasten the coffee filter and you have a caterpillar!) and a cocoon from yarn. Matthew’s friend (who’s in first grade) came over and taught us some things about insects that even I didn’t know, too! Matthew’s favorite to learn about was the spittlebug.



Daddy got a new truck… again. Two, in fact: two of the same 1960 Chevy, which he’ll basically be combining into one. Nothing makes him happier than a car project, and he’s been wanting an old pick-up like this one for a long time. We also decided over breakfast that Spencer will be making more time to let Matthew “help” him around the garage. Needless to say, Matthew’s all about it. (Unfortunately the truck doesn’t have seatbelts, but Matthew had fun playing around on it in the driveway.)



We’re introducing Scarlett to Starfall.com letter activities in small doses now. Not all the time, but once in a while. She’s already learned to interact with the screen by touching the letters in order to move onto the next video!



I try to make a large batch of smoothies every Monday for us to snack on throughout the week. This week our recipe was: banana, mango, strawberry, celery, vanilla yogurt and honey. We froze half the batch into popsicles and drank the rest. The kids couldn’t get enough!





Scarlett had a few really cool firsts:
She jumped! (on command!) And picked dandelions for me! And got a scrape from falling on the sidewalk! And has started actually repeating new words! And jumped! (Haha, I like that one.. :-P )



Spencer and I have actually had two weekends in a row with a night to ourselves. We are so fortunate to have two sets of grandparents to rely on for trustworthy babysitting… Honestly, I don’t know how people without that recourse survive marriage. The best part is that the kids get an exciting night out of the house - we’ve never had to worry about how they’d fare apart from us - and Spencer and I get a peaceful morning the next day, which we usually use to go out to a quiet breakfast. Whether our night was a blast or a total bust (which happens from time to time), breakfast the next day is usually our favorite part. I like that there isn’t so much pressure to cram all of the excitement and adventure and romance and relaxation we’ve been missing into such a small pocket of time. It’s just us, being us, alone.
How was yours?

The Written Word. Or Close To It.

Pin It

Monday morning Matthew sat down at the table with a fat, red marker in grip and an old notebook. And just because he felt like it, wrote a nine page “story” while I was in the shower. Nine pages of actual words. For me, he said.

It went something along the lines of: MY MOMMY IS NOT TAKNG SUMTHNG IN ON TO AT THE TRASH HOT BUT WILL BE ON IN! IS IN IS IN ON THE MRNING TO THE TRASH. TRUSH TRUD TRUCK CAT CAR BECUS IT IS IN GBTH A HIT CUP! BUS STOB BLOG WILL MATTHEW SUMTHING AT OF MOMMY? NO TV IS ON SPHT END DADDY MARY SCURLIT THE PEZZA IS HAPI MATTHEW THE DOG GO VAN SIPICH FOR BRTHIDAY IS TO GO.

Good stuff, right?

My fridge is completely cluttered over with more paper than I even knew the number of magnets we had could hold, but I can’t take myself to bring them down. When I got out of the shower that day, I saw that he’d hung them all up himself (which, of course means that each lone magnet is pinning down three sheets of paper a piece…) and he was rightly proud of what he had done. By Thursday he’d nearly gone through the entire notebook. Loose leaf papers crammed from top to bottom with like-sized words (Real words! Well, mostly.) litter the house like fallen leaves, and picking up stray pen caps before the baby chokes on them now is among the many full-time jobs I have around here. If I thought the drawing obsession was bad, this is worse. He. Will. Not. Stop.

Yesterday he kicked it up a notch. He asked if he could write words on his boot. I said no. Then he looked down with an expression that effectively read: Oh. Oops. Having the foresight to know exactly what I was walking into, I put down my lunch, went to his room and found a ribbon of half misspelled words written all along the top of his desk, the side of his dresser, and of course, two pairs of shoes. Like I said, this is worse.

Obviously, though, there’s a pretty well-worth-it up side. Wanting to write for himself has suddenly illuminated all these reading concepts that, until now, were just something he knew. Not something he got. And even though I love to teach him, I love the most when things click for him without my intervention. Even having read something like 10-15 books on his own from start to finish, little things like remembering which combination of letters actually makes the “th” sound or the “ch” sound was hard to remember. Words like THE and THEY and THEN have been memorized for so long that reading them now barely elicits even seeing the letter combinations they’re comprised of. So when he had to sound a word out, he didn’t see the T and H together, he still read them as two individual sounds. After a day of writing, (which actually translates to A LOT because he did it all day) he had TH down pat. The next time we sat down to read, he sounded out the word BATHROOM without separating the sounds.

In little ways like this, he’s spiraling so far away from being a baby. It’s funny, too; I’ve never really been the type to fuss over the fact that my children weren’t babies anymore. The other day Scarlett wore shorts for the first time this year. She wound up with a scrape that bled a little on her knee and I took a picture of it. I thrive on evidence of their growth. I love watching them learn to elaborate onto who they are… unfold into real people. I wouldn’t dream of holding that in or of keeping them from expanding. But once in a while it hits me.

Incorrigible, endearing, gregarious, unwittingly brilliant - in that perfect little way that all of them are.

Four, people. My boy is four. In every sense of the age.

IF: Shades.

Pin It

This week’s Illustration Friday topic: Shades! I could not have found a more perfect reference photo than this contest-winning photograph taken by the radically talented Pam over at Pieces of Me.  Dabbling in watercolors again -- I'd love to know what ya think!

When Matthew Draws.

Pin It

A fleet of rocket ships blasting off into space from a park
below. Most of the circles are planets, but the one with four
smaller circles within it is the moon.

This is the drawing he describes below.

A one-eyed alien driving our van. (This one even has exhaust pipes!)

Our house, if we had an elephant and a giraffe living outside. (All those circles are bricks.)

If I had to guess I’d say Matthew probably draws somewhere around 850 thousand different pictures a week… more of less. To save on paper we make as much use of his dry erase board as humanly possible -- which is AWESOME because it means that I don’t have to save every last one that he makes. It is also terrible because it means that I don’t get to save every last one that he makes… So I’ve started taking pictures of them.

Two days ago Matthew stole a paper towel and, in an effort to procrastinate the chore that is finishing the fruit on his breakfast plate, started doodling. So, in an effort to procrastinate the chore that is making him finish the fruit on his plate, I started recording the process on video. This is what he had to say about it.

(Forgive the stuttering; he’s very particular about wording things juuuust right, and I wanted to get an accurate account of his exact words.)

　

“This is our house. I put spikeys on it so it could be a scary, scary, scary, scaryyyy looking spider house.

And, I’m almost finished this rocket ship. ’Cause, it has to be a spider too. And it, and this one, and this… and this one, and this spider has to be a dead, broken spider rocket ship with… with juice comin’ out of it. Because, because it, because it got bent. That’s the bent one. See that drip right there? That’s blood.

And that’s, that’s a machine shooter outer in case you see something in the road that doesn’t belong there, if, if anybody is a litterbug, throwing either on the street… or the sidewalk… or the grass… or the concrete.

And this is the old plug. NO. Actually… THIS is the old plug. To the rocket ship. And this is the new plug connecting to it. And MOMMY, it has to go UNDER the house because um, because it can’t fit all the way up of the house because then it will break the chimney.”

(Me: Ohhh… and who are these people, here? Are they people? I see this one has wings.)

“Mommy! I’m drawing the same thing as I drew on my board! This is the things where the -- you know, that Wendy drew.”

(Ohh… It’s the drawing Wendy drew in our Peter Pan movie? The one of her and Peter?)

“Uh-huh. That’s Wendy laying in her bed, and that’s Peter Pan. I can’t draw um, um, um, um, um, uh, um… whatever it is you call it that comes with Peter Pan. Oh yeah. Tinker Bell. I can’t draw it because I don’t have enough room."

(Me: Well tinker Bell is pretty small though, isn't she?)

"Yeah but she makes a big light.

And um… that’s uh, these are -- these are numbers and that’s a boy.”

(Me: Cool. I really like your house. I like that’s it’s a neat shape. And look at all those windows! It’s as big as a tower, it looks like. And you have that really cool door right there…)

“No, that’s not a door. That’s a remote and that’s a T.V. It’s a T.V. hanging on the wall. And that’s a couch. For jumping. I’m almost done drawing the T.V. up there…. [draws some more]

THERE. I decorated the T.V. so it could look like a creepy-looking finger T.V. with this, this… with another, with that finger all, all, all broken and blood dripping out. These are blood cells but you can’t see it. They’re too small.”

(Me: Blood? Wow. That’s creepy.)

“Uh-huh. It’s a dead-looking zombie T.V.”

(Me: So where’s the door? There’s no door? Or is it somewhere where we can’t see?)

“Um. I’m gonna draw a door.” [draws a door.]

(Me: It’s cool if there’s no door. It’s your drawing; make it however you want.)

“This is the cat’s door so it can poop in it’s thing. And this is the door the cat tried to sneaked… sneaked… sneaked -- SNUCK! in when I tried to pet it with that stick.”

(Me: Pet him with a stick?? You don’t pet our cat with a stick.)

“Yes! I like to pet him… -- It’s my petting! It’s no matter how I pet it. Okay? Would you, would you just let me draw in silent? I need to concentrate. I’m not finished…. I have to draw a door. A zombie door.”

World, Meet Scarlett.

Pin It

Dear Scarlett,

In a few days you will be eighteen months, and I wanted to share with you my favorite “you” song right now. What I Wouldn’t Do, by A Fine Frenzy. Every time it comes on when I’m cleaning the house, (which, sticky fingers, only happens when you’re napping now, thatyouverymuch..) I think of you. I bumped into it right around the time you started really making waves around here, hobbiting in and out of rooms undoing any and everything it was possible to undo; emptying cabinets, pulling clothing out of drawers, spilling anything left unattended for even a second, climbing things you shouldn’t, and falling to pieces over the smallest slights -- which, of course, usually had to do with intercepting one of these mischievous ventures in action.

I listen to it everyday now when you sleep and I clean, because something about the pretty, swinging tempo just brings you and all of your licit meddling immediately to mind. And goodness knows when that happens, there is just no fighting back a feel good vibe… even when I’m in the middle of cleaning up after it. You are rhapsody, clever girl, lilting and melodious, like a silly, sweet song that makes you want to whistle to it’s tune. And I love you for it.

Happy Eighteen, kiddo.

Home Schooling, Spring '12.

Pin It

Matthew deciding to “write” an impromptu story yesterday afternoon.

I know that I can expect this to happen to me a lot over the course of the next year, but last week it dawned on me that very soon Matthew will actually be in school. He’ll wake up everyday to ironed pants and a packed lunch and he’ll tackle the world a whole city away from my side. (Don’t let me get off on that though because I’ll never find my way back..) This means that I have less than a year and a half left with him all to myself.. Less than a year and a half to prepare him for life outside of my camera’s reach.

Since our Reading Eggs subscription expired at the beginning of the month, I’ve been really trying to give our activities more of an experience-based focus than an educational one. I want to make the most of our time together and at this point, teaching him stuff isn’t nearly the priority that just having fun exploring the world with him is.

We’ve deviated a lot from doing specific themes each week, which I have mixed feelings about. Sometimes being invested in a particular theme really got in the way of more spontaneous learning oppurtunities, which I hold in the highest regard. Then again, not having a schedule of themes to follow has definitely made it more difficult to keep a steady rhythm. I find there’s a lot of seesawing to how deep and for how long we delve into things. Sometimes I wish I were doing this more officially (purchasing an actual curriculum or something), but most of the time I’m content to remember that all of this is really just icing on the cake for him. He’s more than prepared for kindergarten right now and he’s definitely already assimilated any of the concepts he would have learned in preschool. We’re in a good place, where right now it’s cool for us to squander all the time in the world at a neighborhood park if that’s what we want to do instead of cut and paste worksheets. Then again, when we want to cut and paste worksheets, the opportunity to do it is always there too.

That being said, now that spring is here, and Scarlett’s simultaneously reaching an age where she can get a little out of the experiences I lay down for Matthew, I’ve decided to put together an actual list of the activities I want to carry into this next season. It’s not a schedule per se, but it’s a more put-together version of the routine we kind of fell into by chance when we navigated away from the schedule we used to have. So without further ado, here’s what I’ve come up with, broken down categorically for Spring ‘12.  Yay!

　

　

Art:

We paint together at least a few times a week, always first thing in the morning. When I’m not writing, I paint before any of the kids wake up and when he wakes up, he paints next to me. We also use this time for unstructured crafts a few times a week, which means he picks a handful of supplies and just goes to town making whatever he wants without having to follow any specific instructions. (I like the way my internet-buddy Sarah put it: we should prize their creativity because it is theirs, not ours. Words well said.)

We learned all about the origins of St. Patties
Day this week (also, my birthday!). Matt's all
into Castles, so he really liked the legend of the
Blarney Stone. Here, we painted our own in the
colors of the Irish flag.  

Music:

Matthew has an old guitar, a keyboard, a harmonica and a recorder that he plays with all the time without any instigation on my part. As far as I’m concerned, this is a plenty-good foundation for music at four. The only thing I really do here is borrow one CD from the library whenever we go, and try to incorporate a variety in the selection I make. His CD player is going almost as often as it’s not around here… The boy loves music.

We also have song and dance time with Scarlett. This is really just a fancy way of saying that we sing songs that have corresponding hand gestures or dance moves with Scarlett, but it’s good for Matthew because he gets to be in charge of what we sing and to feel like he’s making an impact on his little sis. (Precious, right?)



Outdoors/Exercise:

When the weather gets above 55, we’re (more or less) outside everyday rain or shine. We don’t get out as much as I’d like to in the winter, but we make up for it tenfold at the first sign of spring. We walk trails, visit a number of nearby parks, of course take the occasional zoo trip and ride bikes or skate through the neighborhood. Matthew always helps with the gardening, which we’ll be doing more often now, and everyday the neighborhood kids meet at our house between the time daycare/school lets out and dinner.





I used to really try to make little things like bug collecting and butterfly catching a priority so that he’d have this profound appreciation for the outdoors, but I’ve definitely learned that if you leave a four year old and his buddies to their own devices, they’ll do plenty of that stuff on their own, making it a better experience anyway. Sometimes we take our lessons outside, but as a rule of thumb we don’t turn outside “down time” into a bunch of lessons. I simply provide the space and let him and his friends do their own thing, offering a hand or a pertinent explanation when the situation calls. (For all the stuff I do with Matt, I also believe that children do a lot of important growing when they have the opportunity to be bored once in a while. I don’t want to monopolize his every waking moment.)

Oh yeah, we also attend Tot Skate Lesson on Tuesdays, but we end up doing it a lot less after the harsher winds of winter stop sucking the life out of everything that is awesome about being outside.


　

Read Aloud:

One short Bible story in the morning, from a book tailored specifically to three-year-olds. (Each story is only a page long. Morning prayers afterward.)
A few picture book stories throughout the day, both for Scarlett and Matthew.
A chapter or two from whatever novel we’re reading. (Currently: Pippi Longstocking.)
Poetry from our Shel Silverstein collection. I also try to collect different poems relating to whatever it is we’ve gotten interested in lately. Ideally I’d like him to know a wider variety of poets, but I also think it’s nice to have a favorite.
On that note, Matthew is also (kind of oddly) into having articles read to him now. A few weeks back Spencer told me to look up an article about something he heard going on over the radio that morning. (A lobster as big as a 3 year old -- for anyone who knows us personally you’ve probably already heard Matthew talk about it.) Ever since Matthew’s asked me to look up the article and read it to him like half a dozen times. Now, if I find something online or in a magazine I know he’ll think is cool, we’ll make time to read it.



Reading Together:

Matthew reads one (level 1) easy reader aloud, start to finish.
(Or) we read a level 2 or even sometimes 3 together. I read a page, and then he reads it back to me himself.
Sight Word Bingo.
Theme word scavenger hunt.
Scholastic I Spy books: perfect because he has to read the riddles - which are at exactly his level - in order to “spy” the objects.

We let our free Reading Eggs subscription run out recently without renewing or choosing to buy just because it was kind of monopolizing all of our “school” time. It’s only downfall was being enjoyed TOO much, which made for a little more screen time everyday than I was comfortable with. Still, he made it almost all the way through to map 10, and finished at a reading age of 6 and a quarter.



Math:

I use Math Practice IXL.com to get ideas about what he should be learning at his level, and then try to make up games based on the material he’s ready to learn or practice.

Starfall.com math games.

Pick an activity from a stack of Umi-Zoomi Mighty Math Mission cards.

We also have a closet full of elementary math tools (measuring devices, charts, etc.) that I picked up from our local Becker’s Parent/Teacher Store. Some of the best learning he does is when I take them down and let him investigate all the stuff they can do without any direction at all.



Craft/Activity:

We leave a slot open everyday for doing some kind of miscellaneous activity, either related to whatever kick we’re on that week or not: A scavenger hunt, holiday craft, a board game, a snack recipe, or maybe just a recent Pin.

I'm always amazed at how much he can actually do on his own as he grows.

Storytelling:

He tells me a story and I write it down. He illustrates the pictures, and every week we pick one to make into a little book. (This actually got started because he’d do it on his own a lot. He’d get a whole stack of paper and draw what almost looked like the same picture four or five times on separate sheets of paper, and then he’d scribble on the bottom, saying that it was a story. Then he’d explain what was happening on each page.) Now that he’s more efficient with his spelling, in no time he’ll be putting his own short sentences to them. (Which, can I just say?, is going to be ADORABLE.)

A "character" for one of his own stories. A boy
with paws like an animal.  

Science/Social Studies:
What we do with this is take whatever kick it is we’re on at the time (volcanoes, nocturnal dinosaurs, bridges, WHATEVER..) and sprinkle it into our reading, math and craft activities.
We’ll trace and then learn to write a few theme-related words.
We’ll read books, articles and poems about it and search videos online.
We’ll make up our own stories affiliated to it.
We’ll record what we’ve learned in his field journal using his own depictions.
We’ll bar graph, add, subtract, measure and categorize relevant objects.
And of course, we’ll craft it!

A "green" scavenger hunt we took with us on our morning walk. Matthew
read the words, then taped the treasures we found into a homemade book
where he wrote each word himself at the bottom of the page.  

Self sufficiency and chores:

Matthew’s chores are to:

Feed the cat.
Bring the garbage can up from the end of the driveway.
Pick up his toys - which he is terrible at, by the way.
Make his bed.
Help move laundry from the washer to the dryer or the dryer to a folding basket.
Put his shirts on hangers when I’m putting away the laundry.
And in the spring/summer he waters the flower bed with me and picks up sticks from the yard before we mow the lawn.

Matthew's friend writing "I <3 Math You"

The Hokey Pokey, Gone Askew.

Pin It

Recently Scarlett learned how to (kind of, sort of at least) mimic the Hokey Pokey! It’s awesome. She picked it up from watching Matthew and his buddies do it every week at their Tot Skate lesson. I promised Spencer the first week that she actually danced along that I would get it on video one of these days.


This was supposed to be one of these days. Clearly it didn’t go as planned. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t the most true-to-life video I’ve ever taken in all my life. Cracks me up every time. Especially the end, where Mary’s response to Matthew telling her “It’s not funny!” is: “your mom.”


In other news Mary was suspended from riding the school bus on Thursday for horsing around too much. HARD TO IMAGINE, isn’t it??

IF: Yield.

Pin It Four is an incredible age for making friends, isn’t it? Social awkwardness doesn’t exist. Everyone is a friend, indiscriminately, within five seconds of meeting. And because all four-year-olds are oblivious to how incredibly dorky they are, everyone is cool completely by accident. Girls don’t even have cooties yet!

I kind of hope that once Matthew’s old enough to be afraid of girls, that a little bit of that nervousness around them never goes away. Because if he remains as much of a flirt in his adolescence as he is without knowing it now, we are in BIG trouble.



Illustration Friday:
This blog has always been a collection of stories from our family life, and I want from now on to keep the illustrations I do on here more tightly based on exactly that: the stories I tell about us. My aim with this week’s challenge was to try to break out of the true-to-life spectrum a little more; something I apparently love way too much to give up with any ease. I kept my doodles doodlish, and I wanted every element to feel more loose and spontaneous than I would normally make them. I would have gone with more of a comic-book type layout but it turns out that I have no idea how to do that yet. Who knew? That’s what I love most about this weekly challenge though… finding out how much of what you thought you’d be pretty good at, you aren’t. And then tackling it to the ground until you are.

Last year one of my favorite illustrator’s, Abigail Haplin gave herself an interesting illustration challenge: to document her life comic style every week for a year. It came about as a way for her to try her hand at a new form of art -- something she wasn’t entirely comfortable with when she started. (You should definitely check it out.. I’m kind of in love.) Sequential art is way out of my own artistic league, but where’s the challenge in sticking to only what you already know, right? Illustration Friday, for me, will always be a place to test new waters.

Even though I had pretty much no idea what I was doing here, I had fun putting this together, and as soon as I’m not busy tending to a house that’s been ravaged by two merciless stomach viruses in a single month, I’ll come back to this and repost whatever it is I come up with. Until then, at least I got my feet wet doing something with which I am devastatingly unfamiliar, and can say that week two of IF participation is down for the count. Sometimes it's about the little victories..



IF: Intention.

Pin It

I love this little shit, bigger and bigger, everyday.

With the extra time I had during his sleepover at my mom’s, I wrote a blog post, describing what happened the day before at the eye doctor as “epic.” He acted like a derranged circus animal that day; it was a disaster. On Friday afternoon my life changed a little that way. Epic has taken on a whole new dimension of fucked up since then. On Friday afternoon, after I picked him up from my mom’s house, my son - my own son - called me stupid. He kicked me. He told me, screaming at the top of his voice, to crash the car as I drove him home. CRASH, STUPID! CRASH, STUPID! On Friday afternoon, my son completely lost his shit on me.

It didn’t even sound like him… a small part of me even considered for a minute that I might really be dreaming. Other children do stuff like this, sure, but not my kid. I mean, MY kid is the one I sculpt snowmen out of ice cream for when he mentions missing winter in August; MY kid is the reason I learned to make homemade sidewalk chalk-paint. This is not the relationship we have. Short of maybe cracking open a can of beer from his booster seat, that boy must have crossed every line I have ever drawn for him in his entire life that day.

Sometimes, in the middle of a really cantankerous moment, I think about when Matthew was an infant. All the noise around me slows to a swim, and the world spills into a blur of indistinctness behind his perfect face. He’s in my nervous arms, all twenty-one inches of him, and he can’t walk or talk or make expressions on purpose. I don’t even know him yet, and that’s a strange thing to digest about a person you’ve given birth to. I’m trying hard to imagine what a feeling (oh, what a feeling!) it’ll be to know him on the day that he’s big enough, strong enough, himself enough to butt heads with me - to really show me his spirit, in all it’s surly glory, for exactly what it is. And I kiss him, love-drunk and calm. And I tell him out loud that I can’t wait.

It’s hard.. Realizing that that doesn’t go away. He’s four years old, and I still have a hard time shifting between the role of protector and disciplinarian. It’s got nothing to do with being afraid to discipline him either, which is not what I expected. I always kind of thought that must have been the reason parents "let" their children act like wild animals. I knew, watching him on the day that he crossed all those lines, that I could have spanked him into submission. In thirty seconds flat, if he’d have made me angry enough, I could have already come out of the situation on top, if that were my principle goal... to come out on top. But standing there in the driveway, watching speechlessly as the very person I birthed into being seethed at my feet - disheveled, exhausted, red in the face and sweating so badly from all of the crying that the hair over his forehead suctioned to his skin - all I could feel was compassion.

Coddling him wasn't going to calm him down this time. He wanted to make me mad. His intentions were what they were. I could sympathize with their immaturity, but they weren’t pure, and no amount of me trying to see them that way would change that they weren't. He was looking for a fight. He wanted to see me fight back. He was taking the bull by the horns, and he needed to see if he could win.


My biggest fear regarding my children has always been that they would not respect my authority. It’s not the biggest priority I have as a parent, but it’s the one I’m least certain that I can handle without reaching, at least a little outside of my own, natural instincts.

I’m not exactly of a very threatening appearance, and truth be told, I was a total Goody Two Shoes if ever there was one, growing up. I don’t know a lot about what goes through a person’s mind when they just NEED to push limits, like people often do. Especially kids. Children crave structure, even if they fight against it in the name of testing the security of it’s foundation, and if I can’t provide that security for them, then they’ll be lost. I’ll have failed them in a major way. I think about this even when… no, especially when I sympathize with the intensity of their emotions. But that’s where I’m comfortable; sympathizing.

By the end of the day, I had laid down the law, and we were back to normal. It was an exhausted, slightly shifted normal, and it took until nearly ten o’clock that night to reach… (He’s taking prescription medicine for a stomach virus (that Would. Not. Die.) which makes him extremely tired; as soon as we got home, he fell practically comatose, which meant that bedtime was pushed back.) But he was in my arms, fingers woven into mine, and we were talking to each other the way only the bestest of buddies can.

“Tomorrow, Mommy,” he asks in a very tiny voice, “can we fix my telescope? I broke it when I was angry at you. I’m really sorry I did that because I suddenly remembered that you, you, you… (his lip quivers) you gave me that for Christmas, and now I feel like I might of broke your heart.” And with that, he cries into my chest… the biggest, fattest, baby boy tears you’ve ever seen. He is truly sad, in a way nothing has made me sad enough to cry like that over in any frame of time I can remember.

Rocking him back to contentedness that night, lulling his cries and kissing his hair, I thought to myself,
                        It sure was worth waiting for, this spirit of his.

                                          I just can’t help it, I love it for all that it is.

Take That, Life!

Pin It


I had a good reason for putting Illustration Friday on the backburner; nobody would argue. For those of you who don’t know, my daughter was hospitalized the last few weeks of summer back in August, at which point I stopped submitting work into the online illustration community, Illustration Friday. (The community to thank for my “meeting” dozens of professional and aspiring illustrators alike, dedicated enough to be living my dream, who inspire and even personally encourage me tremendously… and who even surprisingly gave a shit when I stopped submitting.) Once we got back home, any kind of unnecessary deadline that detracted from the attention I could give to my family just wasn’t a priority anymore. I decidedly never painted unless she was asleep and Matthew usually painted with me, but still: my daughter was on a feeding tube. My life wasn’t exactly an irrupting source inspiration.

The very last painting I did before our stint in the hospital was this breastfeeding portrait, which made a little bit of a buzz. I think it took me a single morning to throw together in time to meet the deadline. As luck would have it, my favorite blogger ever, (actually one of the only more professional blogs I read) and someone I very much admire on a personal level, unexpectedly took the time to notice it and even dedicated a post to it! (Sarah has about a gazillion dedicated readers, so that was pretty cool!) And since then a few people have even paid me to mail them copies.

Then, I joined Pinterest.

And turns out, our breastfeeding momma has made quite the impact over there too! A friend of mine recently pinned her, maybe a week ago, which of course, I thought was a super-sweet gesture, and I thanked her for at once. Turns out though, Breastfeeding Momma was actually pinned quite a number of times - the original pin dating back months ago! And has been re-pinned in total something like a hundred and fifty times. (Seventy-four repins from one original pinner, twelve from another, thirty-six from another.. I don’t even know how many times it actually has, because every time I try to search it, a different pinning pops up!) I mean, WOW. Just. WOW.

It hit me all at once when I told my husband about it happening: that was the last painting I did before I stopped. I’m ready to get back on the horse. Now is not the time to sit idly by, upholding myself with a bunch of reasons.

Obviously, Scarlett has been very healthy for a long time. But the issue now has become that she’s no longer the easy-going, dilatory nine month old baby she was when I left off. She’s seventeen months and thirty solid pounds of yappy, grabby, filth-generating destruction. (You know, the good kind, though.) Take it from me, the only thing kids know how to do quietly is kill themselves, and at this age, it’s practically a hobby. Take your eyes off of her for fifteen seconds, and she’ll find thirty ways to kill herself without you ever hearing a thing. Plus, Matthew’s a four year old boy, which basically means he’s got the energy level and capacity for obedience of a rabid squirrel, and doesn’t nap unless he’s treacherously ill. Mary may not beg for my attention, but she needs it all the same. And Spencer actually kind of expects me to… you know, DO stuff while he’s off working 60 hours a week to pay the bills.

But DAMNIT, I really, really miss painting.

So yesterday afternoon I looked up the topic. “Intention.” I brewed a pot of half-calf Maxwell House, drafted up an idea on a sheet of Bristol board, and painted until Spencer came home that night with dinner that didn’t have to be cooked. (Score!) The cool thing is that ten minutes in, Matt hopped up into the chair across the table from me and started drawing. Twenty minutes after that, so did Mary. At one point, Spencer even set Scarlett up at the table with an abandoned No. 2 and let her go to town, delineating a sheet of printer paper next to mom.

There’s a reason I miss painting so much. And it’s got very little to do with anything artistic. Illustration Friday, I am back.

(Submission to follow... I'm just too excited to wait!)

On Learning The Ropes Of Life And Little People.

Pin It

I'm pretty sure this is the easiest thing I've ever made
in my life that people have loved this much.
The turorial is here at SweetAprils.

This is my friend Layla. Over the weekend, I threw her a baby shower with my mom. (I think I’ve found a new hobby, by the way. SOMEONE ELSE HAVE A BABY, LIKE, NOW.) If anyone in the world deserved to have party thrown in their honor, with toilet paper games and little stuffed ducks on motorcycles made of disposable diapers it is this lady, let me tell you.


The only way there is to describe my friend Layla in a nutshell is to say before anything else, that she is infectiously nice. There’s a lot more to her, obviously, but her niceness permeates it all. It’s the first thing you’re hit with at meeting her, it’s what stays with you after she’s gone, and it’s the kind of thing that changes the way you see all the people you meet after her. Yes, even the cruddy ones, especially the cruddy ones. Because you start to notice that that’s what she would do… she’d see them differently than anyone else would.

I can honestly say she is probably the only person I can sit and talk with for an entire day without half of our conversations falling into being about all the things we can’t stand that other people do. In fact I know she is. Not to say that I can’t complain to her as openly and honestly as I can to anyone else, because she could tell you: I DEFINITLY DO; but all of our conversations seem to quickly just find their way back to a positive place, and you know, that’s just a really nutritive thing to be around.

She has a heart that bleeds practically to a fault, an open mind, and a readily available hand at all times. I’d probably run out of fingers before I ever ran out of times that she’s gone out of her way for me. She’s the kind of unselfish that goes just a little deeper than you even thought it was possible for a person to reach within themselves enough to be without becoming insincere. But she is always sincere, and it’s one of my favorite things about her.

What really just blows my mind about her though, is that if shoddy luck, I mean really just crappy luck, were a person? They’d be on a first name basis, the two of them. Last year was a bad one for her, even before she was hit with the unthinkable torture of having to bury her first son, William, who was born sleeping around the exact time Scarlett was conceived. Even to us, it wasn’t fair. Nobody deserved that happiness more than Layla. Certainly not us, and nobody knew that more than me and my husband. To us, Layla is family. So when this year promised to bring with it a little bit of magic in the form of a princely little guy named Charles Edward, I called my mom and we immediately started putting Pinterest to action, planning a The Best Baby Shower Ever, in the name of celebrating someone who couldn’t possibly deserve it more.

Okay, okay, so it’s the first baby shower I’ve ever thrown and maybe there weren’t hot air balloon rides or anything, but it was definitely awesome. There was an incredible turn out of super great people, and cupcakes with pacifiers in them. I mean… come on, does it get any better than that? I think not.

Oh! Except for the fact that when all of it was over, and Layla stayed to hang out after Spencer returned from a picnic at Battery Park with the kids, I felt the baby kick TWICE!

Now if that isn’t a sign of good things to come people, I just don’t know what is.

　

　

For the past few months, we have talked about everything, everything, everything motherhood. She asks me questions. I give her clusters of unsolicited advice. And we laugh about the things in her life that’ll change. (Along with some of the things we all WISH will, but probably won’t.) It’s very backward to me that I’m laying so much advice on her, because if truth be told, I’ve learned some of the most substantial views I have on life from her.

And let’s be honest, when you whittle it all down beyond the BPA’s and the butt creams and all those other little nuances of new mommy-hood anyone with access to the internet could teach themselves about in under ten seconds flat… At the core of it all, if motherhood is anything, it is a lesson on life.

And friends, there is not a soul on Earth more quipped to teach that lesson than this kid’s mom.



I actually didn't make these people. But the lady on
the right made me: She's my Momma!
 (Sometimes she comments.)



Mary making a ribbon hat. Aren't her necklaces cool?  

Okay, so budgeting was getting kinda tight toward the end there, but I found these
gift tags at the dollar store for like half a cent per pack of a thousand.
They ended up making really cute cupcake toppers that matched our theme.

I like my tissue paper pom-poms. Mary helped me make them!

 Layla has a blog too. If you should happen upon this little corner of the internet today, you should then hop on over to hers real quick and say HEY, CONGRATS ON THE LITTLE POOP-MAKER, LAYLA. (Alicia told me to say that.) Because she is awesome and would totally get a kick out of that. The end.