New Hot Gluing

Here Ria enjoys coloring from a standing position. Honestly, she was originally in a chair, but had far more interest in drawing after getting down.

Over the weekend I went to RAFT and replenished my supply of hot glue gun craft supplies. Needless to say, Iain was anxious to get started.

Lucas joined Iain at the table and created an elaborate home with multiple rooms.

Meanwhile, the girls enjoyed a quiet afternoon playing with dolls in the bedroom.

Rock Candy!

Today we experimented with trying to make sugar crystals. We followed the instructions closely, but the solution seems to be SUPER SATURATED . . . practically a syrup. We'll see what happens . . .

Before the end of the afternoon, small crystals were already beginning to form! We'll check it again tomorrow to see what becomes of it . . .

This Week's Guest Contributor: Josephine

One day J. Emily and Anna played with My Little Ponies and one of them was having a party because J. Emily went to the dentist and found a pony and they had fun.

No School . . . Butterflies and Other Bugs

It's 3 a.m., I can't sleep, and I'm two months behind on the blog, so what better activity right now, eh?

We had no school this week, and it is a typical cold and rainy February. To take advantage of the rain and help to nudge spring along, the children made coffee filter butterflies. They took coffee filters cut out in the shapes of butterflies, colored them with washable markers, and set them out in the rain.

The rain transformed them into gorgeous tie-dyed butterflies.

Here Claire and Josephine are filling up little pots with dirt and grass seeds. In about a week there should be some beautiful spring-like grass.

And then later in the day we made soap. I had a bunch of leftover orange soap from a previous pumpkin soap stint, so we made shapes using ice cube trays, and then we buried some plastic insects as well--reminiscent of amber.

Fairy Beds

This afternoon Georgia and Anna went out into the backyard and collected a basket full of sticks. I then trimmed these sticks and hot-glued them together to create a little fairy bed for each of them. Afterwards, they glued silk leaves, feathers, and ribbons to them to decorate them. Here is Georgia's bed before being fully decorated:

And here Anna works on embellishing her bed:

No School -- Cuesta Park

Today is officially the first day of the school's winter break, and our last day of Children's Garden of 2007. We decided to all walk together to Cuesta Park. Here is everyone before the walk (Anna, Eden, Ryan, Lucas, Holger, Gabriel, and Katie):

It was soooooooooooooooo exciting tromping through all the many piles of leaves on the way to the park.

At the park, brother and sister Gabriel and Eden do some spinning together.

Katie and Eden on the suspension bridge . . .

Anna climbing . . .

Katie, Holger, and Anna

Anna is a very strong little girl!

Here Ryan, Lucas, and Iain enjoy a moment atop the climbing structure . . .

. . . and are then joined by Gabriel . . .

. . . and then Holger!

Meanwhile, the girls )Anna, Eden, and Katie) are on the other half of the structure.

And now the whole gang is together.

Halloween

Due to it being Halloween, we had absolutely no children (except for Josephine, of course) at the Children's Garden this afternoon. But I did go to school to watch the Halloween parade, and in doing so, I got photos of most of the kids that are in our program. The 5th grade DI class came over to Ms. Bonnie's kindergarten class to help them change into their costumes and then to escort them during the parade. Here are some snapshots of the day:

Anna gets into her costume.

Ms. Bonnie dressed up as Ms. Frizzle from Magic School Bus.

Eden the cowgirl:

Claire (David's big sister) dressed as Belle and Josephine as Dorothy Gale in the parade:

Princess Monica

Jacob dressed as Julius Caesar, of course:

Marie as a renaissance princess and her mother, Nozomi:

Dylan the pirate and his pirate mother Sandy:

Orianna, more beautiful than Cinderella herself:

Georgia, appropriately enough, was Pippi Longstocking:

Pirate Katie:

And Lucas was a bat:

Check out Katie and Lucas' teacher, Mr. A:

The principal, Carmen Mizell, was the Cat in the Hat.

And could there be a better photo of Ryan as Anakin Skywalker, with his future self approaching in the background?

A New Little Friend

First I must explain how I got so far behind in my blog posts, which I am now trying to remedy. I do all my posting on weekends, and the first weekend of November, we went out of town, so that put me a week behind. The very next weekend, we had company from out of town staying with us, so that put me even further behind. Then, to make matters oh-so-very-much worse, my digital camera simply stopped working. Fortunately one of the parents has since allowed me to borrow her camera until we find a replacement (my hubby is an electrical engineer who cannot simply buy a new camera, but instead has quite the checklist of requirements and must thoroughly research products first). So last weekend, my first "free" weekend, I spent my time emptying out the memory card of the broken camera (200+ photos on it!!!) and then uploading pictures from the borrowed camera. Now it's time to catch up on the blog . . .

Quite a change from my usual school-aged-children-in-the-afternoon scenario, Mondays now consists of two one-year-olds: David and Ria. David's mother is working in her daughter's kindergarten classroom (which is also my daughter's class), and Ria's mother is working in her son's preschool class, which happens to be the same one my daughter was in last year.

In the afternoon we were back to school-aged kids. Here are Marie, Josephine, Lucas (no longer scowling into the camera), and Anna working on a very long sheet of paper.

New Feature . . . Labels

I've added a new feature this weekend to the blog . . . LABELS. At the end of each entry, you will see the word LABELS, followed by names. If you click on a name, you will get every blog entry containing that person. I'm putting all the labels at the end of this blog entry so that you can give it a try.

Walk-A-Thon

Today was the annual Walk-A-Thon at Josephine's school. I met up with Josephine and Eden after school, and they had each already walked about 10 laps. I joined them on the track and we spent the rest of the afternoon (and early evening!) walking.

Every 5 laps, the kids would earn a prize. Once they hit about 25 laps, they were eligible to have their hair sprayed with colored spray. They loved it. Here is Eden getting some color . . .

. . . and Georgia . . .

. . . and Josephine!

Here Josephine meets up with some of her friends and classmates . . .

. . . and they pose for a group shot: Josephine, Orianna, Claire, and Georgia.

Josephine and Eden both ended up walking until the very end, 6 p.m. (and they'd started some time around 2 p.m.!!!). Josephine completed 50 laps, while Eden did 52. They were absolutely fantastic!!!

Homework, Flying Angel, and the Art Table

Just a few randowm snapshots from the day . . .

Josephine "helping" Lucas do his homework (she is really intrigued by the fact that he has homework and likes to watch him do it; however, for his sake, after this photo she was removed from the couch so he could continue without interruption) -- Lucas is behind the paper, hiding from the camera, as usual.

Anna is wearing a beautiful white dress and wings. Very angelic . . .

Art time . . .