Wife, Then Mama

Butterflies are one of the only tolerable bugs in my opinion.  Ladybugs and bees are the only other bugs that don't send me in the other direction.  Butterfly day with  Mother Goose Time  this month had such fun activities! We started out with Camouflage Matching, which was a matching game focusing on the way that butterflies can blend in with their surroundings.  Little Guy doesn't LOVE matching games, because he is always a bit perturbed when he doesn't get a match and I won't let him flip over more until he gets a match.  However, he actually is very good at the game after the first few turns.  After we played I had him count how many cards I had and how many he had, then tell me who had a greater amount.   Then we played Butterfly Migration.  After talking about what kind of weather butterflies like, as well as what kind of weather Little Guy likes (sunny on both counts), I had Little Guy go clean up his playroom while I hid the puzzle pieces around the r

We have had many, many foster children.  Since July 2013 we have had more than 20 children live with us for some period of time. I am going to be super honest here.  We are not amazing, selfless people.  The reason we started doing foster care was to adopt a baby.  I can't get pregnant, and I wanted to be a mother.  Out of the 20 plus children we have had, only a handful of them have felt like "ours".  Miss Baby was our first placement, and it killed me inside when she left to go live with her grandma.  Little Guy never left, he really is ours!  In March 2016 Bitty Baby went to live with her dad.  Although I was sad to see her leave, I was very happy that her dad was going to have her (he wanted her as soon as he found out she was his).  Tomorrow, Baby Girl is leaving.   The fact that this was surprising to me is my own fault!!  There was a family member that wanted her, but wasn't able to get certified.  Once they told us that she wouldn't be leaving to g

Last April we did an entire unit on Bees & Butterflies , so Little Guy has had a fondness for bees since then.  He was quite happy about Bee Day being included in Bugs & Crawly Things.   We started with There Are Bugs, which is our storybook this month.  Each month we get a new book to add to our collection.  It is great because they are unique books, most of the time created specifically for Mother Goose Time , plus they offer a lot of variety.  Some months we get fiction books, others the book is non-fiction or a concept book (like the alphabet, counting, or mixing colors).  I always leave the Mother Goose Time books out for Little Guy to look at when we are done.  *I have also recently found that the binding is ideal for reading aloud to groups of children.  They are sturdy enough to stand up without much support, but light enough to hold comfortably in your hand.* There Are Bugs is a fun book that mixes the Mother Goose Time illustration style with photographs of b

This month we are learning all about the types of creatures that I hate.  The theme is literally called Bugs & Crawly Things.  YUCK! However,  Mother Goose Time  can make even the grossest things interesting and fun.  For the first week we were learning about Backyard Bugs. Let me start by stating the obvious:  We are behind (again). I started baby-sitting this week, and although I had planned on bringing the MGT goodness with me to do with the boys, they simply tore apart all of the art projects and chewed on the manipulatives.  But we are gone all day, and getting up early, so finding time for MGT is problematic.  We leave at 6:30 am, and get back around 5:00.  After dinner it is basically bedtime for the kids. Change is inevitable.  I hate that.  I don't function very effectively without a schedule, and every time I get something set up that is working, something changes, and I fall apart. Anywho.  Bugs, yucky stuff. Let's start with the tiniest little b

We did it.  We were a week late, but we finished our Birds & Eggs curriculum.  Yes, the art projects were skipped, but a lot of learning and a lot of fun were had.  For the next unit, we will just make sure we do a bunch of the art projects to make up for it! Our last week was all about Exotic Birds.  I think this was Little Guy's favorite week, just because he knows the names of most of them.  We didn't do the Birdwatcher day at the end, although I might let him make the binoculars another day, because he made a pair last winter during "Going on Safari" and promptly broke them.  Which he still talks about.  That and his rhino horn that he took to my mother-in-law's house and left there. Ostrich: Bird Egg, Big Egg was fun.  We talked about how big an ostrich is, as well as how big their eggs can get.  Mother Goose Time provided us with a photo of an ostrich egg, and we compared other items in the room (a really weird assortment of items including our poc

I know it is May now, and we SHOULD be moving onto Bugs & Crawly Things (EWWWW...), but we are still doing catch-up for Birds & Eggs.   Today we went even more against the grain, and we did a Mother Goose Time marathon after dinner.  We learned A LOT about Tree Birds yesterday, and I was amazed at seeing some of the things Little Guy has caught onto recently! Bluebird: Our first activity was Word House, which was a phonological awareness activity.  Little Guy knows all of his letter sounds, but struggles with putting them together to actually read.  This time we were focusing on the -it family of words.   We had a bird house, a lot of letter cards, and a card with a blank space and -it on it.  Imagine my surprise when Little Guy first drew an "s", stuck it on the blank space, and said "S it.  Sit."  He continued to read all of the words correctly, without any assistance!     We also did Bird Patterns, which was our pattern card for the