A Short Update

We have been making a ton of presents.  I can't reveal most of them because it may ruin surprises but along with all of the Christmas presents we have been making we have been doing full days of school as well.  We are trying to stay ahead so that with all the trips we're planning on going on this next year we don't have to go into July.

Here are the girls making homemade play dough.  So much fun!!

Playing with Homemade Play Dough.

We have a Girl Scouts Troop that is for homeschoolers.  I love it.  I love the people, I love that it's during the day and only every other week, I love that my girls get some awesome interaction with some awesome people from 5-17 years old.  I love that they have people to look up to and can strive for littler girls to look up to them.  ...And this is how my girls are.  They are snuggly and huggy, almost all of the time.  Okay well, maybe it's just these times that I like to remember. Haha.

Making handprint angels.

Just a few things we have done this month.  Maybe I might post about our trip to Rockport. We'll see.  I've been kind of spotty with my blogs so you never know what might happen.

Making cookies

I posted the other day about how we made and decorated sugar cookies, so as promised, here are some pictures of the fun.  I didn't get any pictures of the girls doing the cookie cutters.  They made a huge mess but it was so much fun and so worth it.





Mara took her time and made them look as pretty as she possibly could.

Nattie had a blast too!  She couldn't stop licking her fingers!

Syssa concentrating on getting her cookies just right.



Yummy!!!

First day of Christmas Break

I absolutely love having my girls home with me.  There is arguing, messes, and kids having too much fun to listen, but most of the time they are so much fun!  Today is the first day of their two weeks off of school and it's a success so far.  We made sugar cookies and decorated them.  The girls had so much fun.  Samara was super focused and concentrated the whole time, it was kind of funny.  We plan on doing many other fun things, none of which are planned on paper, all of which are chaotically (I make up my own words now and then) scrambled in my mind.  I will post pictures of todays cookie making fun a little later for all those who want to see.  Until then, I better go get my house vacuumed... then again maybe I'll eat another cookie and lay on the couch watching more Christmas movies with my girls. 

Samara's Class Christmas Party

Samara had a Christmas party at school so I took Natalie so I could help out.  A class full of Kindergarteners is a LOT of fun.  They decorated two sugar cookies, made a snowman from a sock, and colored a picture and made a "trail mix" of sorts (that's the station I was at).  Natalie got to help Mara out with all of these things.  She looked like one of the crowd... only a little smaller.

Decorating the cookies together.  Samara did a great job in letting Natalie help her out with all of her fun things.

My Mara

My Nattie

Making the sock snowman.



They did a musical chairs book exchange and this is the one Samara got.



All in all it was a great day.  It wasn't as messy as it could've been for a classroom full of kindergarteners.  I'm so glad that I got to go and help out.  Mara was so excited that her mommy got to be there.  Nattie had a great time too!

A day of learning fun

We played a game when the girls got home from school which you can get at http://thoughtsofesme.blogspot.com/  This blog always has fun things for the kids to do.  We did this with all the girls and one of our friends too.  What you do is take the printout and 25 M&Ms per child and a die (sp?).  Then each child rolls the die and puts that many M&Ms on their paper.  Then when their paper is full you roll the die to take them off and EAT THEM!  It is a lot of fun.  I had a 7, 5, 4, and 3 year old here playing it and they all had a blast.  It made it better that they got to eat the M&Ms at the end.  They didn't understand why I kept telling them that they couldn't eat them M&Ms, then when they got to the end they understood.  It was brilliant!

The game board with the M&Ms.

Stocking Full of Candy

Nattie won!  And no she did NOT cheat.  I thought she was going to so I sat really close to her and she only ate the amount she rolled!  Way to go Nattie!

Syssa adding her M&Ms.

Mara adding her M&Ms.

We have been working with Nattie on writing her letters.  Mostly by tracing the dotted lines, or sometimes even solid lines, but sometimes, for some letters, we just draw a letter at the beginning and ask her to copy it, and she's doing it!  Not just doing it, DOING IT WELL!  We got these white boards in the dollar section of Target over the summer and the girls LOVE them.

Nattie's beautiful handwriting... the first letters are mine but the rest are hers!

Then we did lacing cards.  I made this particular set about a year ago and can't remember where I printed off the designs.  All the girls loved them.  Nattie has always struggled doing them... she's only 3 you know... but today as I was showing her how to do it, she was picking it up VERY quickly.  It's so much fun to watch her grow in the things that she can do!

I had to help her by holding the card at first.  After a while though I started just taking pictures and she was doing them all by herself... well, with a little help from her big sister, Alyssa.

This is something that Syssa loves to do!  I'll bet she's going to be a great seamstress when she grows up.

My Mara doing a flower.  She said that the remaining string looked like a stem.

Some of the lacing cards I made.  They were kind of hard to punch the holes into.  I didn't realize that it was going to be that hard.  My hands definitely hurt afterwards.

Advent Calendar

Nattie and I have been working with this "advent calendar" since the beginning of the month.  It's really more for learning where the numbers go, in what order, and things like "put the number 7 after the number 6".  She's really catching onto number recognition and is starting to really understand cues such as after, before, and between.  I printed this out at http://www.childcareland.com/.  Shelley Lovett has a bunch of printables for free and videos for some to show you how to use them.  This is my idea tagged off of her printable. :-)

Here are the numbers.  I wrote Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve on the ones that were such.

Nattie trying to find the next number.





A close up of the actual calendar. 
I think you can print them in black and white as well.







Mara's Christmas Tree

Samara had a project she had to do for school.  (She's in Kinder at the public school.  For those who are wondering why I have a homeschool blog, I am planning on homeschooling next school year.)  She came home with a tree shape and was supposed to decorate it with whatever she wanted.

The tree template that we got from school.

Samara had so much fun decorating her tree.  It was so cool to see her face light up as she put each "ornament" on the tree.

I printed the tree out on cardstock to make it thicker.  Then we put glue all over it and sprinkled green sugar sprinkles all over it, we didn't have any green glitter.  Then she put red hots on it.  Then she put on some paper circle ornaments (not pictured here) and a yellow star on top (also not pictured here).

I'm a little bummed that I didn't get a picture of the final project.  I don't know what I was thinking.  If it hasn't fallen apart when she gets it home from school I will take a picture and post it.  Don't get your hopes up though.

The Nutcracker Ballet

This day was so much fun. On Saturday the 4th of December Micah and I decided to take the girls to the Nutcracker Ballet.  Since they go to ballet at a church up the road they were really interested to see what it was going to be like.  Nattie is still a little too young so we decided to ask a friend of ours, also the girl's piano teacher, if she wouldn't mind doing something dress-up and fun with Nattie since she wouldn't be able to go.  She agreed and so off we went.  Nattie stayed with her babysitter and had a tea party, watched a princess movie, and of course ate tons of snacks.  The others of us started off in traffic.  We ended up sitting in it for about 20 minutes so needless to say we were a little bit late to the Ballet.  I know I know, bad etiquette.  It turned out to be really cool for the girls, and for Micah and I.  We had to sit in two different rows (discounted tickets) but it wasn't too bad.  It struck me as we were sitting there though that I didn't know the story of the Nutcracker.  *gasp*  How could have I missed that.  So this week Alyssa picked out the Nutcraker book so I could read it to them.  Thank you to my 7 year old for keeping me up with this stuff.  Anyways the day was super fun and I got to spend it with my favorite people!  We will definitely do this again next year... if we can get discounted tickets again.

The girls had fun taking pictures before we went to the Nutcracker.

We had such beautiful clothes on so before we went and when we got back we decided to take family pictures.  I think they turned out so cute.  Mara had a hard time in the morning so we only got a few smiles out of her but when we got back from the Nutcracker she was a happy girl so the pictures turned out much better.

The girls by the pool at our friends house.  All dressed up and ready to go.

Our beautiful Family

My Wonderful Husband and me on a swing in front of our friend's house.

Mara and Mama at the Nutcracker

Syssa and Daddy at the Nutcracker

I'm so glad I get to spend my life with these 4 beautiful faces!  I can't wait until we get to add to this family the two beautiful faces in Haiti!

HomeMade Playdough

Just a few pictures of the girls playing with the playdough that I made yesterday.

I didn't put the complete finished product on my blog yesterday so I thought I'd do it today.

Nattie

My Mara

My good friend at http://ourdayinschool.blogspot.com/ introduced me to the blog http://countingcoconuts.blogspot.com and she has a ton of ideas for Sensory Bins. (I think she calls them sensory tubs but I like the word bin better, not that it really matters ;-) I thought it might be fun for Nattie our 3 year old so I decided to put one together. I didn't want to go out and buy anything, I just wanted to use what we had laying around the house so she could use it today. This is what I came up with:


I put plates, forks, and spoons in there because everyone knows that in December we eat. Well, at least at the Jones house that's what we do. I put in some ornaments from the tree and some keychains as well which she liked putting on the plates and then burying them in rice. I put the rice in there as "snow". I put the little stocking in there and then (not in this picture) I also added a pinecone. I thought that would be fun. She loved it! I honestly thought she'd get bored of it after a couple minutes but boy was I wrong. I think she played in it for a good hour and then stopped and cleaned up (she had to vacuum a little bit because she did get some rice on the floor, and yes I have my 3 year old vacuum... she loves it and she knows that if she makes a big mess she's the one that will be cleaning it not me, she has a little vacuum she uses and not the big heavy one Mommy uses.) Anyways...


I put another bin next to her sensory bin so she could measure and scoop rice and whatever else into it and then dump it back. She had a blast. Her favorite thing was to use the spoon to put rice into the dish she has in her hand.


Here she is after she put the rice on the plate with the spoon and now she is dumping into the play pan.


And then she'd dump it out and start again.

When she got the pinecone she had a blast with it. She wouldn't look at me directly for a picture of this however. This picture is one of my favorites though so I'm not complaining.

When my two older girls, Syssa and Mara, got home from school they loved playing with it too. They weren't has happy to clean up after themselves but after a few whines they did it. Thank you to the people who brought this idea into my life... I will be doing a new one every month now!

December Play Dough

Today I decided to make playdough. I got the recipe off of http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/

I use a lot of her stuff for my 3 year old. They have a different recipe for every month of the year. The recipe for December is Peppermint. I ended up using mint because I didn't have any peppermint extract. Anyways it's pretty easy so enjoy! Remember if you want to enlarge an image just click on it and then to get back just click the back button.

The Recipe

The ingredients:

The almost finished product is below. It cooked for a little bit longer and then I let it cool down. I then stored it in two ziplock bags. I used this recipe in two different pans, so this is how much a doubled recipe would be. Just so that you know. It's super easy and the kids have super fun. By the way this is not an edible recipe. I have some of those but this one is NOT one of them. Happy playing!