Dolls, Fairies, and Popcorn

Early in the afternoon Orianna and Josephine played with eachother and with their respective dolls. Here they are, all four, swinging together.

Later on the imaginary play of the day was that the children were all in Pixie Hollow, part of Tinkerbell's fairy world.

Here Ryan, Eden, and Marie enjoy a late afternoon snack of popcorn and apples.

Happy Birthday, Eden!

Today was Eden's 8th birthday. Yesterday Katie had talked about surprising her with a party, but we didn't have any concrete ideas of exactly what to do. After school today we were all sitting out by the field at school, enjoying the beautiful sunshine, when my phone rang. It was Melanie, Eden's mom. She told me she wanted to get ice cream to bring over to share with everybody and wanted to know what time would be best. I told her what time, but then purposely didn't tell Eden about the phone call. I told Katie about it, and we decided to make it part of the surprise.

Once home, party preparations were soon underway. Katie enlisted everyone to help in decorating the playhouse. All the children made birthday cards for Eden and signs to hang up.

Eden was made to stay in the bedroom so she wouldn't see the preparations. Surely she knew what was happening (as we do this whenever a child's birthday falls on a family child care day), so she patiently lay in Josephine's bed and strung beads.

When Melanie arrived, we made sure to keep it a secret from Eden, and we took her around the side yard into the backyard to hide in the playhouse with all the kids. I went to get Eden, to reveal the surprise. She knew that all the kids would be in the playhouse waiting for her, but she was thrilled to discover her mother there as well (with a vast array of ice cream!).

Katie helped to scoop up the ice cream (so many flavors to choose from!) . . .

. . . and the birthday girl enjoyed the celebration . . .

. . . as did everyone else!

Guest Contributor: Eden

Katie invited all the kids to "Club Calm." Everyone enjoyed it.

Katie and I had to make some rules or they would go crazy! I was the "helper." We had a really great time.


Drawing was one of the most faivorite activities. Orianna and Ryan liked drawing.

Katie and Gabriel were playing with the Litebrites while waiting for room at the drawing table.

I had to read because they didn't want to do Litebrites while waiting for drawing, so I read them two books.

Jo got her report card for being very good in Club Calm.

The people who drew and didn't want their pictures let us hang them up on the bulletin board.

Marie, Jo, and Orianna decided to bring out the tunnel and pretend they were animals.

I made puppets from a book that my mom gave me called 365 Things to Do and Make. I had the same idea as Rachel, because she had the same thing in her idea book.

Here are my two girls that I made. The one without the bow is Mary Jane, and the other one with the bow is her sister Fancy Nancy.

Jo decided to make puppets just like I did. I don't know the names of hers.

Here are the back sides of her puppets.

Backyard Exploration

We have a plastic bin in which we keep binoculars, magnifying glasses, bug-catching paraphernalia, compasses, etc. It is Iain's favorite bin, and he asks for it at least once a week, and he asks for it always by calling it "Compass and Stuff," which is now what it is officially called (yes, I put that on the label on the bin). Today, somebody besides Iain asked for this bin. It was Katie. She then asked all the kids if they wanted to go exploring with her. So that was the major activity this afternoon . . . exploring.

Here Jo explores Mamma taking pictures with the camera.

Meanwhile, Lucas worked busily away with the hot glue guns and a large amount of popsicle sticks.

Gack, Butterfly Hair, and Baylands Park

There was no school today, and not a very large crowd here at Children's Garden, so we started off the day playing with blue gack and red marbles . . .

Ryan, Iain, and Jo enjoyed their snack out in the playhouse . . .

. . . meanwhile, Katie adorned Ria with approximately a million butterfly clips.

After lunch we explored a new park in Sunnyvale, Baylands Park.

After I took some pictures, Katie borrowed the camera and added these:

Guest Contributor: Katie

Today we had our first annual art show market. From yesterday to today we have been making arts and crafts. There was everything from paper drawings to colored cds.

Here is Ryan making our famous colored cds:


This is a sign I made advertising my both. Rachel let me put it on her door only if I took it down after. It says, "Buy from Katie she has awsome stuff," which was very true.


We made all of our stuff by hand. Some of the art took awhile to make. We were allowed to use anything we wanted to use. I am pretty sure that we bought everything there was to buy.

This is a photo of my booth. Eden and I got the biggest booths.The younger kids used stools and chairs. I had made some colored cds, bookmarks made out of string, some cds glued together, and some hot glue gunned art.


Jo sat outside about a hour before the art show even started. I do not know how she did it. She just sat there very patiently and it was cold out there! Jo was one of the kids who managed to fit all of their art on a little stool.

Ryan got the picnic table. His art was colored cds and a lot of them. On the table was Rachel's watering can. He took a cd and voila! -- it projected off the watering can. So then people started buying cds from Ryan, not me. Later we found linoleum in the hot gluing stuff. Then I got an idea that if we propped it up on the table we would have a projecting screen.

Lucas and Iain shared an area in the art show. The way it worked was that you would get your area and would use it to put your art. Iain was not here yesterday, so Lucas got to share his area with Iain. Since Iain did not have a place to put his art, I gave him one of my stools. Iain also got to make some art. So we had the art show later in the day.

I made up some rules like: only these tables can get up when these people are selling, no running, do not say mean things if you do not think the item is priced right.

This is Eden giving Gabe an item. Gabe used up his money a lot so Eden and I gave him some more to buy with.

Eden is giving change to Lucas in this photo. The change part was hard for the kindergartners and 1st graders. So we kind of just did the change part ourselves.

We had wallets to keep our money in. The money was paper. To start off you would get one 5$, four1$s, and 25¢. You would make more money so some of us ended up with about 20$ at the end.