Wife, Then Mama

Polar Bear and Quail Day was a LOT of fun!  This month our  Mother Goose Time theme is A to Zoo animals, and although we have not been going in order, or doing everything, we are having a blast with the activities we have been doing. The first thing we did was play ZooGo - which was a zoo themed version of UNO.  We talked about how animals like to play, and remembered what the Polar Bears at the zoo were doing when we saw them.  Then we played.  Thankfully the girls have been playing lots of games with Little Guy lately, including UNO so he had some idea what was going on. Little Guy won the first round, so I challenged him to a rematch.  Which he also won.  So basically I got my demolished by a three year old at ZooGo.  While playing this fun game, Little Guy worked on matching colors, matching animals, taking turns, and being a good sport. Next we played a fun game about eggs and letters.  I didn't feel like...

I love the Storytelling Sets and Participation Stories that Mother Goose Time includes in their curriculum.  My son doesn't think they are as awesome as I would have as a child, but he does enjoy playing with them.  This month, our Participation Story was The Three Little Pigs.  I cut out the pigs, their houses, a fireplace, and the animals.  Then I just had to read the story.  Okay, I lied.  I didn't really read the story.  When we do fairy tales and fables I always go with the old-school endings.  Little Pigs get eaten, Goldilocks suffers the same fate.  In my opinion the point of these stories is lost when everyone lives happily ever after, so I tell the gritty tales the way they were originally written. But, as usual, I digress.  Little Guy liked the story and had me tell it to him twice (the kid likes repetition), and had fun playing with the pieces. At the end he was supposed to tell me the story himself, w...

Summer has started around here, which means that I am not doing a super great job of keeping up.  Usually I have Little Guy and another small child.  During the summer I have Little Guy, Hadlee, our three foster daughters and usually another small child.  This summer we bought full curriculums for the four girls.  A couple of the girls are not quite where they should be academically, and the others may as well get ahead.  The problem with this is that it takes a lot of my day to teach the little girls and correct/assist the older girls.  Add in Dollar Movies, Day Camp, Lunch at the Park, and Water Parks, and poor Little Guy isn't getting as much school time as usual.  He does ask for " My Mother Goose Time " sometimes, and I feel pretty bad when I tell him "Later" and a few days goes by. We have managed to do some really fun activities, including some math, art, and dramatic play. This was a math game where we "fed the birds"....

Most of the time when I write about Mother Goose Time I tell about the activities we do during the course of a day, or even a week.  Today, while we did quite a few activities, Bird Colors really stood out. We were talking about what colors birds can be, and then we got out all these colored birds.  I turned them over, then Little Guy picked one out and "tweeted" the name of the color.  Then he "flew" around the room finding things that were the same color.  In this color collage you can really tell if we are in a school or homeschoolers LOL.  The first color he drew was brown.  I loved that he wanted to put it on the picture of Michael and I, although it was up a little high so I had to help him.  Our furniture as well as a bookshelf are brown, but this was what he noticed first.  The Mother Goose Time box served as the colors for both yellow AND white.  Books were easy targets.  My pink (decade old) purse was easy to see ...