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 ...

Each month, along with the preschool curriculum from Mother Goose Time  we get the Experience God add-on pack.  It is full of games, crafts, and devotions, all designed to help small children understand God.  We don't always do everything in the guide, but we do quite a few activities, Little Guy learns the Bible verse*, and we read the story multiple times. This month the theme was that God is all-powerful, and the story was Jesus and the Fish - because Mother Goose Time is the BEST at maintaining a cohesive theme!  I love the story cards that we get.  The pictures on the front help Little Guy remember the story, and the story on the back (with interactive prompts) helps me tell the story fluidly rather than rambling.  This month to go along with the story cards we got some story telling pieces, which was fun.  He did pretty well at accurately retelling the story without much prompting, and it was pretty cute! *Little Guy learns the vers...

Most things I review get positive reviews.  Some things do not.  This book is one of the "do nots". How to Weep in Public was SUPPOSED to be a funny book about depression.  I know, I know, not politically correct to joke about, but then I am not politically correct.  Instead it was a depressing, offensive book about depression. Funny books make me laugh.  This one didn't even make me smirk (in its defense, I only read about 1/4 of it before I gave up) so it wasn't that funny.  It wasn't my mood, because the book bored me so much that I read it over the course of like two months.  It was offensive.  Lots of sexual jokes and disrespect for religion.  But in all honesty, offensive things often make me laugh.  These didn't, they just made me offended or uncomfortable.  I wanted to like this book.  I really like humor books, and I am not actually very easily offended.  I was very disappointed by this book, and certain...

Bubbles, Boats and Floats has been such a fun theme!  Rainbow Day was really fun.  The first thing we did was talk about how rainbows were made.  First I asked who made rainbows, and he knew God did, so I was happy about that.  Aft er we established who created rainbows, I told him that when rain and sun are out at the same time it makes a rainbow.  Mother Goose Time provided us with Rainbow Weather pieces.  We were supposed to put them in a bag and draw two, but I just laid them face down, and we flipped over two of them.  If one was rain and the other was sun we brought out the rainbow. Then we played Rainbow Dominoes, which doesn't really need any explanation.  Rain, Rain, Go Away was a Rhyme Time poster with a letter matching twist.  We just laid the poster on the ground, because I seem to be out of scotch tape.  After we said the rhyme a few times we got out the hands-on letters and he matched them to the letters on ...