I’m not sure how this little game started, but they were laughing hard and enjoying themselves.
Isaac was burying Gracie with books!
I don’t think she minded much. After all, this is how she sleeps:
Isaac and Grace love going to playgroup. Whenever I mention it on Tuesday mornings they get so excited! They should get excited, we’ve done some fun things lately!
Janeece had such a great activity for us right after school started. She read the kids books about apples and let them eat homemade applesauce while they listened. Then we picked apples from their apple trees.
We made yummy apple pies with those apples. Isaac and Grace loved turning the apple/peeler/slicer and did pretty good with it! They were also excited to share one of their apple pies with a special person.
A few weeks later Janeece led another fun activity involving leaves. The kids gathered leaves and made a leaf book. Then they made painted leaf prints. Grace especially loved that activity! Thank you Janeece.
We took advantage of the nice fall weather and went to Fir Point Farms one week. Isaac and Grace love going to the “farm” as they call it whenever we pass by. They can’t get enough of feeding the animals.
Of course they played in the nut house and on Noah’s Ark, and just explored.
We also went through the corn maze, but we had to turn around and go back the way we came when we couldn’t get out…=-)
The weather foiled our outdoor plans one week so we went to Pump It Up. That was ok, Isaac and Grace were thrilled to go again (although they kept asking if Granny and Ryder would be there).
They wore themselves out and took a great nap that day!
This week we had a beautiful day to spend at the pumpkin patch (or “pumpkin catch” as Isaac and Grace call it).
Isaac was beyond thrilled to see the train..
…and even more excited to get on it.
Grace was pretty much screaming when we got on the train, but settled down quickly and really had fun.
They loved the pumpkin on the front of the train, but wouldn’t get close for a picture with it.
Once we got to the pumpkin patch we climbed on the giant hay pyramid. Actually, Gracie and I climbed, Isaac didn’t want to get very high. He liked going through the tunnels.
They both liked looking at the different pumpkins and picking them up. Thankfully they were just fine to leave the overpriced pumpkins where they were!
Isaac could not wait to get back on the train when we were done at the patch.
We are so thankful to have fun friends to go on outings with. Thank you Aspen for heading up the group!
I’m not much of a canner compared to some of my friends. Most years I only get around to doing peaches. This year peaches were harder to come by and I didn’t can as many of them as I usually do. The ones I did get were beautiful and yummy. Emma helped me with a few of the batches, it was fun to do it with her.
I really wanted to try canning some pears this year, especially since I didn’t do as many peaches. A sweet friend said I could have some of the pears from her trees. Instead of bringing me pears, she ended up bringing quarts of already canned pears! My kind of canning!
I am the only person in our family that will even get close to tomatoes. I usually only plant one tomato plant in our garden, just for me. This year however, I wanted to make salsa so I planted a few more. I only made one batch of salsa, I could have made more if I had kept up with the tomatoes, maybe next year. Actually, I would like to plant enough tomatoes to can tomato sauce as well.
I bought some of the most delicious Honeycrisp apples this month that made really yummy applesauce. I should have got more, this applesauce won’t last long!
I had a cute little helper when I made applesauce.
It feels satisfying to add even a little bit to our store of food! Not to mention it all tastes so darn good..
Isaac and Grace loved the two weeks we spent on bugs for Mommy School. We read tons of bug and spider books. I think our favorite was this one:
It made the kids laugh and had fun illustrations. Of course, we had to eat our own buggy lunches and treats.
I think Isaac and Grace liked eating bugs just like Beetle McGrady! Actually, they had some funny responses. Grace said “they’re going to crawl on my tongue!”. Isaac commented that “the caterpillar tasted like chicken nuggets”. The chocolate spider web caused a little bit of a problem. Isaac was afraid to eat the spider in the middle of his web so he asked me to eat it for him. I asked him about three times if he was sure he wanted me to eat it, he assured me he was. So, I ate it. THEN he decided that he really did want to eat it and he proceeded to have a huge meltdown because it was gone. Sigh.
We made some fun art projects. Grace loved making fingerprint bugs, Isaac wasn’t quite as impressed.
They both loved making ladybugs (and counting the spots), handprint spiders, and handprint bees flying in the clouds.
The favorite art project was making fireflies. We decorated some plastic Easter eggs to look like fireflies and then put flickering LED candles in them. Isaac and Grace were thrilled to see their fireflies actually glow and played with them in the dark bathroom for a long time! idea found here.
We pretended that we were bugs by using the bug action cards found here. They especially liked rolling like roly poly bugs and spinning like spiders.
We played the dead fly game where we counted how many flies were belly up vs. still alive (good thing we had our Halloween decorations out!). This game was pretty hilarious, as morbid as it sounds. The counting didn’t last long, they just liked to play with the flies.
We found some bug games in the playroom that worked well for our bug weeks.
Grace takes Mommy School seriously…
We passed a bee around while we listened to a recording of Flight of the Bumblebee. I was excited about this activity and thought it was perfect after we read the book Berlioz the Bear by Jan Bret. I recruited Emma to help with this one so we would have more people. I made the huge mistake of telling the kids that if they were holding the bee when the music stopped, they were stung and out of the game for that round. Isaac was afraid to touch the bee after that. Another sigh. He did dance like a bee to the music though. Grace loved both of those activities.
We also made a yarn spider web around the table. They pretended they were spiders as they played under the table.
We carried our bug theme into Family Home Evening. I dusted off an old bug lesson that Emma loved when she was Isaac and Grace’s age. The kids pretended to search for bad-mannered bugs that could be exterminated from our house. It’s actually a fun lesson and we’ve talked about what kind of bugs we should and shouldn’t be several times since.
I think the favorite activity by far was digging through the bugs that I added to our rainbow rice. It was perfect for some sensory play. They played with that for hours over a couple days. That made it an activity we ALL could enjoy!
Of course, we couldn’t let the two weeks go by without watching A Bugs Life!
What fun we are having with Mommy School. They both ask every day if we are going to have it, and Grace is especially loving the art projects and is bummed if we don’t do one. Next theme: Pumpkins!
.JPG)