Monday, Monday

I feel like such a slacker. Here it is, the start of another week, and I'm still in my pajamas savoring my first cup of coffee at nearly 8:00. This is not acceptable! I was doing so good about getting up every morning between 5 and 5:30, but lately I am just exhausted. Last week was "D" week, and as you can clearly see, I have no post prepared to showcase our work. Sorry. There wouldn't be much to see anyway, though, because I didn't take many pictures, but also because it seems we didn't do more of what I had planned than we did do. Didn't quite get to all of our read alouds, for example, nor did we ever make the cool dinosaur diorama I had envisioned, and I completely abandoned the density experiment due to insufficient supplies and lack of time. The donation box I started earlier in the week is sitting, not nearly full enough for my liking, in the garage that was also supposed to be cleaned this weekend and wasn't. But! It's all good. We enjoyed the things we did do, including a fun desert walk on Darren's day off (and can't forget those donuts from Daddy!) and we finally, at long last and after much pleading on Dylan's part, got our Halloween decorations up.

Also accomplished this weekend: a visit to the pumpkin patch (So fun! Post coming soon!), front flower bed cleaned completely, and a superfluous trip to Hobby Lobby, after which I now have the most gorgeous yarn and crochet needles, never minding the fact that I don't know how to crochet, replenished scrapbook supplies for our geography lessons, and the most beautiful new art supplies including oil pastels and watercolors, both of which I rely upon heavily, especially since I so love this website, which also employs the use of those same mediums in so many projects. Whew! That was a long sentence. Which probably means it wasn't grammatically correct, but I hope you'll forgive me. Anyway. Off now to find some breakfast. Chocolate Chip Malt-O-Meal, anyone? Fine then. More for me. :)

Yummy.

Caitybug's ladybug birthday!

Caitlyn turned six last Thursday and she had such a fun birthday! She had requested french toast for breakfast so I made a delicious french toast casserole that I'd made once for Kristen's baptism. (I'd link to it, but the blog on which I'd found it seems to have been deleted!) It was so yummy! We had eggnog, too, one of our favorite treats this time of year! After breakfast she wanted to open presents, and was so happy with the gifts received from her brother and sisters! Darren and I didn't have a gift for her to unwrap from us, because we had something special planned for later!

After getting dressed, we headed up to the mall, because her only other request was to have lunch at Chuck E. Cheese's! I just love watching my kids play there. It really is a special place "where a kid can be a kid"! I had printed some special coupons from their website before we left, so we had a LOT of tokens for them to use...one hundred and forty, Dylan just reminded me! What a blast!

It was before lunch, however, when Caitlyn received her special surprise gift from us:

A trip to the jewelery store to have her ears pierced! She has been wanting for so long to have earrings, and Darren and I decided that her sixth birthday would be the perfect time to do it! We were so proud of what a a brave girl she was! She is so happy to finally have her ears pierced; she keeps looking in the mirror to see them and says how much she loves them! My sweet, beautiful baby is becoming such a big girl!

The big kids had gymnastics that afternoon, so we saved the cake and ice cream until after dinner. (In fact, Darren took them by himself so that I could stay home with the little girls to decorate the cake!) She loved it! Happy sixth birthday to my sweet, sweet girl!

Happy Birthday to the sweetest six year old in the world!

"C" Week

What a fun and busy week! It began, of course, by presenting the continuing tale of Michael and Mrs. Applebee. This week they met the Columbine Flower Fairy, who told a story about St. Cecilia, and so we, too, read about her from our book of saints and colored some lovely coloring pages to add to our alphabet. I was so happy to learn of a wonderful resource site this week, too, from which we printed a few worksheets. (Thanks again, Blair!) On Monday, we read "The Crow and the Pitcher" (for letter C!) from our book of Aesop's Fables, and the children copied an accompanying verse (print for Caitlyn, cursive for Dylan). Our math focus this week was on coin values and calendar months, so I was happy to also find some nice month of the year handwriting practice sheets. (Again, in print and cursive.) Since Columbus Day is coming up on Monday, Christopher Columbus was the subject of our history focus! We have many beautiful books which focus on him, but mainly used A book about Christopher Columbus and Three Ships for Columbus because they are written at a level that Caitlyn could appreciate, too. (Although Dylan is also enjoying this graphic novel in his free reading time!) We learned about and scrapbooked Connecticut and Delaware this week, and had lots of fun with the rest of our "C" studies! This week, "C" was for...

Constellations!

We read Find the Constellations, The Big Dipper, and "Our Universe" from Science 2 for Young Catholics, and Dylan and Caitlyn made these beautifully sparkly Big Dippers with glue and glitter!

Letter C collage, and the Ten Commandments!

I loved some of Caitlyn's choices for her collage! She knew that "bunny", for example, does not begin with the letter C, but since it was "so Cute", she included it anyway! And I just love the way Dylan's Ten Commandments lapbook turned out. Now we have another to add to the two we made last year! (We also read Living the Ten Commandments for Children; I just love all the books in that series!)

Cats and kittens!

We love our feline friends so much! It was fun to read books such as Cat, Cats, Cats and Kittens, Kittens: A very first picture book, and A Kitten's Year.

Color!

This was a fun one! We read Camille and the Sunflowers, Do you know colors? and "The world of Color" from Painting: A Young Artist's Guide before practicing our own color blending techniques! Painting is not something we do often enough; my three older children LOVED it!

Clouds and Climate

We read The Storm Book, What Will the Weather Be?, Down Comes the Rain, The Cloud Book, and we tried the experiment "Water in the Air" from The Usborne Book of Science Experiments. (The only link I could find was for a whole kit; we just have the book.) Although we were a little disappointed that our experiment didn't work quite like we expected, we still had fun trying! And we learned the valuable lesson that experiments don't always work in the ways we expect! We also did a cute little craft making the three main types of clouds (cirrus, cumulus, and stratus) out of cotton balls glued to blue cardstock.

Chocolate Chip Cookies!

We had fun with this one! We read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies! I can always count on my sweet little Meggie to help me in the kitchen when I'm baking!

Kitchen Chemistry

We read The Magic School Bus Gets Baked in a Cake: A Book About Kitchen Chemistry, and tried two little experiments. Both involved filling a balloon by stretching it over the top of a bottle in which a chemical reaction takes place. Our first bottle was filled with a mixture of vinegar and baking soda, and that balloon filled really well! Our second bottle was filled with a mixture of warm water, yeast, and sugar, then left to sit in a bowl of warm water for fifteen minutes. (This experiment was found in The Usborne Big Book of Experiments). This balloon filled partially, but not nearly as well as our first!

Cinderella across different Cultures!

Just for fun, we decided to compare how the story of Cinderella is retold in various cultures! I can't even remember where we got these books (you can click the covers for links) but they were probably found at either a yard sale or the used bookstore that's like a second home to us!

Other Letter C storybooks that we read this week included many old favorites, appealing to my youngest through oldest children: Chrysanthemum, The Cat in the Hat, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, Chica Chica Boom Boom, Corduroy, The Very Quiet Cricket, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Next week is "D" week! I'm thinking we won't do nearly as much, though, because it will be a short week for us; Darren is off Monday for Columbus Day and there are a number of household projects we're tackling this weekend! Thursday is Caitlyn's birthday, and I just hate having school on birthdays! We don't usually do school on Fridays (I slept in until 7:30 this morning!) and it's probably just as well, because I have to work next Friday night and I don't want to be exhausted! So we'll choose just a couple of things and work with those. It should be another fun week! Now I'm publishing this without proof-reading it because I'm tired and I've already spent way too much time at the computer! Hope you're all having a wonderful weekend!

"B" Week

We're loving the alphabet path! We're looking forward to starting "C" week on Monday, but first, here's a sampling of the fun we had during "B" week!

B is for...pattern blocks, and balancing bears!

B is also for...building...

...and barbies!

Homemade butterfly crayons

Butterfly nectar sippers (h/t Jamie!)

Bubble art

And, Braille!

We read lots and lots of books!

Among these were some wonderful science read alouds, as well as numerous picture books that I still love reading aloud to my children. I don't often enough make time for these, though, so I really enjoyed choosing specific titles from our collection to follow our "B" theme! I planned to list them all here with links, but there are just so many; I'd rather go spend some time with my family in the living room and brainstorm ideas for "C" week!

Hope you're all enjoying a wonderful weekend!