Pay it Forward: Toddler Style!

This year, I have a 5, 3 and 1 year old boys who are all so excited, in each their own way, for all the holiday-ness that is about to come our way in December. A big part of what Christmas means to me is giving. I love making hand-crafting girls, making homemade body products with essential oils, and chocolates for friends and family! My kids are already going on about all the things they want Santa to bring, and although I love playing along and letting them have their Santa Clause fantasy, I really want to instill in them that this time of year we should focus on blessing others and being good people in conjunction with Santa bringing us a gift.

After scouring the internet for ideas on how my 5 and 3 year old's can bless others, I come up pretty short on ideas that A) didn't cost us tons of money (hello, raising three kids isn't cheap!), and B) wasn't super involved or over their heads.

So here is a list of 25 ideas on how 3-5 year old's can bless others this season that will make an impact on them, as well and help your community!

1. Learn a few Christmas carols and visit a retirement home

2. Draw pictures and mail to family and friends with your holiday cards

3. Ask friends who do not celebrate your same holiday traditions to come over for a play date and to teach you about their traditions

4. Bake cookies with mommy or daddy and share with neighbors

5. Offer to babysit a friends children for a few hours and do a holiday craft with them

6. Visit your local animal shelter and pet animals (bonus: buy some pet treats to take and give!)

7. Go for a walk and pick up garbage (Caution!! Watch your kids close and have them wear gloves!)

8. Sort your toys and books and clothes and donate those you don't need to a shelter, children's hospital, or local consignment store

9. Make bird or squirrel feeders and place them outside for the animals

10. Visit a pond and take stale bread to feed the birds

11. Paint Love Rocks and leave around your park for others to find

12. Put change in the red bucket outside grocery stores and talk about how the money will help others

13. Put together a box of food and drop at the local food bank

14. Make treats or pictures to take to your local librarians, nurses at the pediatrician, teachers, or babysitters

15. If you have yard space, plant a Christmas tree to grow for the future

16. Smile at everyone in the grocery store and say something nice to them

17. Make a video with mommy of you singing a Christmas song and email to grandparents

18. Leave a treat in the mail box for the mail deliverer

19. Take homemade goodies to your local fire and police stations

20. Invite friends over for a holiday part

21. Leave some puzzles or coloring books in a children's waiting area

22. Take chalk on a  walk and leave pretty pictures on the sidewalk for others

23. Learn a new joke and recite it at family gatherings

24. Take bubbles to the park and share them with kids you don't know

25. Help decorate for the holidays


I hope you and yours find time to bless others this time of year, as well and take time for yourself as a family to celebrate. Leave some comments below of more ways small children and bless others!

Go to jail, directly to jail, do NOT pass go.

Teasing one of the boys this afternoon, I said they were going to go to jail. Monkey got super serious and started to tear up, "I don't want to go to jail, mommy!".

"If you are a good boy, you will never go to jail!" Then I had an idea. "Why do people go to jail, what do they do that is bad?"

Monkey: If they messer or explode like a ball-cay-no!!! (read: volcano..."messer" has no translation)

Monster: Well, bank robbers go to jail. And, actually, bad guys go to jail.


We discussed robbers, and why stealing is bad. Then we talked about how sometimes it's ok to take things that aren't ours...like the time we found an old discarded toy a the park, or the time the dog brought a ball home that wasn't hers (they still go on and on about the ball and how the dog who had it before is probably really sad our dog took it!). Suddenly, I remember something from long ago and told the boys this story:


Once upon a time I had this doll. She had long blond hair and a small red heart on her chest. When you pushed the heart it would glow, and the doll would sing. I loved her so much and took her everywhere. One day I took her with me to the park. When I got on the swing set, I laid the doll beside the swings on the ground. Right after that it was time to go and as I jumped off the swing and ran to the car, I forgot my heart doll, leaving her behind. At home, I remembered my doll and cried until my dad took me back to the park, but by then someone else had taken my doll home with them.


I told them this story, because it happened to pop into my head, but also to help teach that if it's not yours, don't take it. But, what I didn't realize, was how they would respond! Both got really sad, and then both started to talk at once! We had to take turns so I could hear both their responses:

Monkey: Mommy! We can MAKE you a new doll. We will sew her and put a little heart on her. And we can make her out of WOOD!

Monster: I know! Let's call everyone in this town and ask them if they have seen your doll! And if no one in our town has, well, though, actually, we would have to fly in an air plane or maybe ride in a boat to the next town and call all the people there!!

Monster was very adamant I get my phone and start calling people. I tried to explain it was over 23 years ago, and more than likely the kid that took my doll didn't have it anymore. But, my goodness, what huge hearts my new little "dolls" have!

Make your own Geodes!

We try to cover a lot of earth science projects in the spring time. It just seems to fit in nicely with Earth Day and the fact that we are spending more and more time outdoors as the weather gets nice. 

A few weeks ago we decided to try making our own crystals and geodes. Following a few other blog posts off of Pinterest, we came up with this experiment. 

We saved egg shells for a few days and we were careful to break them open leaving 3/4 of the egg shell still intact. Monster then helped me mix different ingredients from the kitchen with hot water. 

We decided to try the following:

• Sea Salt
• White Sugar
• Brown Sugar
• Canning Salt
• Ice Cream Salt
• Borax

We adding food coloring to each liquid so our crystals would have some color and filled our egg shells with the concoctions. 

We waited a LONG time for our crystals to form. It took over two weeks for any activity at all. Finally small crystals started to form on the outside of the shells. After another week all the liquid inside had evaporated and crystals had formed inside the shells as well.

The sea salt and canning salt made the best crystals on the outside of the egg shell. 

 The borax and ice cream salt made really cool crystals on the inside of the egg shells. And the sugars really didn't do much.

The salt separated the colors in the liquid making some really pretty egg shells. 

After we were done exploring the boys used the egg shells as a sensory experiment and did lots of smashing, stomping, and breaking of the crystals and egg shells. It is a great way to get rid of some pent up energy, ;)

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New words: Geode, crystals, evaporation, dissolve

Foresight

Me in the morning vs. Me at the end of the day.

Tea for Three

It is another rainy spring day here. That and the boys are still tired from camping over the weekend, and I am sick, again. Trying to come up with calm, non-argument inducing activities that doesn't make too big a mess isn't always easy. Usually we stick to movies, playdough, puzzles, lego towers, and books.

Monkey asked last night if we could have a tea party, at approximately 7:30PM. Half an hour from bedtime, just after dinner, and me barely keeping my eyes open and myself upright from the cold I am fighting. "Maybe tomorrow" I suggested. Lucky for him I had enough rest, and gumption, to set up our tea for three this morning.

Monster likes his with milk, Monkey drinks his plain, both have chamomile and I drink a caffeinated green tea. I even broke out a silly British accent "Good day, sirs! Would ya like a spot o' tea? Are you enjoying the weather?!" Monkey told me it was a great tea song, and Monster asked me to please stop. I guess they were not impressed.

Of course we don't do much without some sort of educational aspect to it, and we did a big lesson on tea a few months ago, so I just touched on what we had spoken about before: where tea originated, how it traveled around the world, what tea comes from what countries today, and how different people drink their tea.

If Monster wouldn't gag at the thought, we'd do a history of coffee and have a decaf party next week!

up, Up, UP and AWAY! A exploration of Rockets.

The last few weeks of May we are studying outer space and all things planetary. Today we had a fun day of rockets!

Monster and Monkey made name rockets to hang on our art wall. Monkey still has a very Picasso approach to his art work, ha ha, and Monster really wanted to put all the letters from bottom to top, so we had a lesson on what direction we read and write. (That spider is fake, by the way...)

As they glued their letters on, I opened our Usborne book of Earth and Space, and we talked about the planets in our solar system. They boys really liked learning how big each planet was, how many moons each planet has, and how many earth years it takes each planet to go around the sun.

We created some toilet paper rockets, which they stapled flat, because stapling is super fun. Monkey layered his rocket componenets and stapled them together as more of a rocket "pile", because, you know, Picasso. ;)

Next we tried out an experiment I had read about online: seltzer water and Splenda. Supposedly, when mixed together, it has a similar reaction as baking soda and vinegar. We wrote out graphs to track how much of each substance we put in the bottle, and then the results. Monster practiced writing numbers and we talked about how you write out one half, something we hadn't talked about yet. Monkey scribbled some lab notes:

First we sampled the sugar substitute and seltzer. Monkey really liked both, Monster wasn't so sure about the seltzer, and I missed getting a picture of the awesome face he took after trying the "sparkly water".

The results were not as cool as we had hoped, just some fizzling. I have has the Splenda for a while though, so maybe it is better fresh?

I asked both boys if they liked the experiment:
Monster- Yeah, but it just went splat.
Monkey- Yes! It was good. And a VERY BIG explosion!!!

Three year old's are pretty excitable creatures. ;)

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New Words/Terms: Galaxy, artificial sugar, seltzer, carbonation, orbit,  and Galileo (he discovered some planets moons).

Four is the new cool.

I love babies. I love, love, love, LOVE babies. I loooooove them. They are the best. All snuggles and warm baby smells and just all around nice to hold, look at, kiss and love on.

BUT. Babies do not stay babies forever. Soon they start rolling, and walking and talking...and then, then they turn two.

But they do not stop there! Oh no! It gets worse! They turn three-going-on-thirteen with attitudes to put teenagers to shame!

 And then one day you wake up, and your chubby cherub, your precious pumpkin, is now four. He's a kid. A for real, talking back, making up his own rules, child. You can barely remember those sweet days rocking him to sleep or kissing his pudgy cheeks as he depends on you day after day for everything. And instead your memories are being replaced by day after day of argumentative come backs that are better thought out than you ever would have imagined from someone so small.

Some days I wish I could magically send us back to the beginning where it was just me and my tiny newborn, getting to know each other for the first time. No four-year-olds demanding things at the top of their lungs. Asking for things not politly, but by saying one word in a totally demeaning way. "MILK!...MILK!...MOOOMMY! I SAID MILK!!"

BUT. Four-year-olds are amazing. The imagination, the ideas, the intuitive-ness of them is overwhelming some days. They come up with interesting thoughts that are all their own and you are blown away by how all that knowledge you had been stuffing into their little brains for YEARS has finally been taken, rearranged, and spit out as totally their own conscious thought.

Monster has been amazing the boots off me recently.We had a day discovering Martin Luther King JR. and differences in people and how we are all the same in the end. And he came up with these ideas for how to make the world a better place:

-Everyone should put lids back on pens so they don't dry out
-Keara-dog should stop getting everything dirty, like the windows
-Everyone charge your phones, wash your windows, and eat and drink
-Talk about it instead of fighting
-Everyone should wash their hair
-Say nice words to people instead of mean ones

If you ever wondered what four-year-olds thought was important in life, there you go.

Bike bombs.

It all started at Christmas. Santa Clause and his idea of a "good" gift. Monster had asked for a train set (to, you know, go with his other five train sets), but Mr. C thought he might like a bike better.

Great. Perfect. We could all use some more exercise. New Years resolitions and all, you know.

So here we are, two sleep deprived parents, way past our bedtime, building this awesome bike. It does not even dawn on our tired, slow functioning minds what having a bike in the house on Christmas morning might involve. Obviously we could have put a stop to it right away, set rules from the beginning. "Take your bike outside to ride", but then there is no place outside to ride at our house. A sloped driveway leads to a sloped road, which ends on a flat, busy street. So that isn't happening.

This bikes sole purpose is for walks, fun times at the park, and camping trips. However, as soon as the kid saw the bright red bike, he did the obvious thing. He jumped on it and started to ride it! We laughed, thinking it was funny, and commenting how our ugly laminate floors can't get any worse, so what was the harm?

Fast forward to this week. Our friends lend us a bike for Monkey to use. It's raining. It's pouring. It's frickin' storming out there! We are stuck home, tired, bored and nothing to do. "Mommy, can you bring our bikes in to ride?" Why not! It sounded like an awesome idea to get some energy out!

Fast forward to today. Three days of riding out bikes in the house. (Gotta say, as ugly and tacky laminate flooring is, it is one tough surface). We alternate this with playing Lego Batman on the Xbox, and making blanket forts, and valentines crafts, and all that jazz.

And then the reason for this whole post happened. The incident that made me wonder if bikes should be allowed in the house. No. Not for safety reasons. No. Not because they broke something. But because of pure imagination. Pure brotherly "love". Pure innocent childhood fears.

Monster blew up Monkeys bike bombs. Yup. He popped them. All three of them.

It sent Monkey into a screaming, crying, crocodile tear sobs of sadness. His whole world was shattered.

Needless to say it was an interesting moment of decision for me. Since I had asked Monster to stop blowing up Monkey's bombs during the commotion, he had to take a minute and go sit in his room. Then we had a talk about how we don't do things that make other people sad.

And Monkey? How did I end my big blue eyed babies saddest moment of the day? I made some new imaginary bombs for him, of course.

The Invisible Migrain

Our couch has a magic button on it.

Once pressed, the button turns the couch into a giant fire truck, complete with loud, whirring sirens that blast whenever that invisible button is pushed.

It's super. It's great. I love the imagination the boys have these days.

But...

Monster will push the button "WHEE-OOOoooOOO. WHEEeeEEE-oooOOOoo" and sound the fire truck alarm. Monkey will come next, to partake in the super, imaginary fun his brother has started. And in his excitment, he will start pushing his OWN imaginary button. "WHEE-ooOOOoo. WHEEE-OOOoooOOOooo", they will chant in unison.

And then Monster decides it is HIS imaginary fire truck and starts yelling at Monkey,

"You can't push the button, I am pushing the button!"

And Monkey yells back,

"I want to push it! It is MY button!"

Then the pushing and shoving starts, the fighting, the pulling hair, pinching and scratching and I have to ban them from the fire truck. Forever.

I thought this was bad enough. And then this morning it got worse.

We were in the sewing room, and Monster says to Monkey:

"Here is your pretend lunch! I put it in your mouth for you!"

Monkey was NOT excited about pretend lunch.

"No! I don't want pretend lunch!"

"HERE! I made you pretend LUNCH!" Monster shouted back at him.

"NO!!! I don't want pretend lunch!" Monkey replied and started to cry. "I sad 'cause I don't want pretend lunch!"

 "You have to eat it, I MADE it for YOU!" Monster replied.

And then the fighting ensued.

I think I have a pretend migrain now.

Oh. Wait. Nope.

It's real.

Lessons in Anatomy

You don't pee by yourself when you have kids. You don't do anything by yourself when you have kids. I have learned to adapt, mostly. We even have a baby gate on our bathroom doorway so I can at least have a minute without people touching me, even if I still am watched and yelled at. Recently, however, they figured out how to scale the baby gate, so even that doesn't work anymore.

Today, while I was peeing with company, Monkey, the always curious two-year-old, stuffs his head between my legs and shouts at me "Where's your peee-nis?!"

"I don't have a penis, I have a vagina. I am a girl, and girls have vaginas."

"No!" He yells back, "WHERE is your PEE-NIS??" Because, duh mommy, four fifths of our household have penises, so of course you have one too.

"Nope," I repeated, "I don't have a penis. I have a vagina. Boys have penises, girls have vaginas."

At this point I get a close up and personal inspection as he stuffs his head back in my lap.

"Oh." And then he starts to walk away, but turns back to clarify, "You have a vagina?"

"Yup, I have a vagina." I figured we had it settled and he figured it out, mommies are just different. But then he turned around again on his way out of the bathroom to inform me:

"You have a vagina. A GOLDEN vagina."

Wow.

I'm pretty special I guess.

School! Round two!

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DING! The bell has sounded, the learners are in the ring, mommy throws a fast jab to the right, delivering the reading lesson, dodge-dodge, the two boys duck out of the way, mommy gives a high-math kick, leap-jump, the boys outsmart her! Tired and out of new ideas, mommy sags over the ropes, sure she's defeated....but just when all seems lost the boys fight back! Hi-YAH, roudhouse kick from the oldest, he can now read four sight words, uppercut from the younger, he can count to ten by himself! Mommy WINS! The boys WIN! Homeschooling, round two, has succeeded!!
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Sometimes teaching kids seems like a losing battle. You preach and rant and try to cram information into their little brains in tricky ways that are disguised as "play" and it never seems to stick. "I know, mommy, I know" My soon-to-be four year old is constantly saying when I try to explain a new concept to him. But then, in the end (actually it happens a few days, or even weeks, later) they heard you, and understand, and usually repeat the information back in such a way that astounds me. Be it to them to actually be learning something and having the brain power to turn around and create new ideas with the information I've given them. Especially amazing given that my brain power theses days is nil due to lack of sleep and fuzzy new-again mommy brain.

This year we are doing a little bit more organized preschool than our random when-I-had-the-energy teaching moments I pulled out of my hat (pinterest I love you) and deployed at will last year.

Monday we do reading. Were using Bob Books and following 3 Dinosaurs printables to go along with the books. So far we've read book 2 and book 3 of set 1. We have four sight words and are working our way up to every word in the first three books so Monster can read them by himself. He can read the third book almost verbatim from memory now (mostly because we lost the second book for a few weeks...). Monkey gets a worksheet to work on and reads the books with us as well. I also have done a few writing our name projects, one with beans, one with bingo dot painters, and next week we will do another with pom pom balls.

Tuesday is music and our weekly playgroup. Tapping the corresponding letters to the keyboard and writing out a simple song was a little too advanced for us, so we usually just play "kids" music and sing and dance. :)

Wednesday is math day. Most of it has revolved around those interlocking plastic building blocks kids love (you know what I'm talking about). Today we did some measuring objects with them and guessing how many it would take and charting it all. Monster did really well with the guessing, getting most spot on to what it actually measured out to, and Monkey had fun playing with the objects we had gathered for measuring.

Thursday we do science. Most of our science projects I have gotten from pinterest or a book called Mudpies and Magnets. We have explored concepts such as friction with a ramp, sand paper, and different objects; germs with cinnamon oil, and hand washing and placing food in the fridge and on the counter to see which molds fastest; and (the boys favorite) "science experiments" with baking soda and vinegar or just colored water to dump and pour with.

Friday we have a play date with friends and when I feel up to it we do a season or holiday themed craft. We made hand print trees this month so far. 

We started school a few weeks before September mostly because we welcomed our third boy the beginning of August and since we were not leaving the house much in August, I decided to implement school to keep us busy.

Below, Monster and Monkey are meeting baby Muskrat for the first time. :)

The undies factory

"Mommy, you know that place, the fac-orie, where my underwear are made by ma-sha-sheens?"

If you don't speak toddler-going-on-four-year-old, he means the factory with machines that makes his underwear.

After a few moments of repeating that sentence in a dozen different ways and getting interrupted a few times by his little brother, his thoughts took a different direction:

"You know, the fac-orie that makes chocolate."

"What?" I say, half smiling to myself, "The factory makes chocolate underwear?"

"No!" He gasps in annoyance, geez mom, keep up! , "There are two fac-ories. The one makes my underwear, big ma-sha-sheens make them and into boxes and then out the fac-orie and they go to the sto-war, and that's where we buy them."

"Oh, what about the chocolate factory?" I ask, because we all know moms are much more interested in chocolate factories than little boys underwear factories. (or maybe that's just me...)

"They make chocolates, and sometimes brownies, and sometimes more chocolates."

"Oh, but no chocolate underwear?" Trying to tease a smile out of him, because even if your not an adult chocolate underwear should be funny.

He paused for a moment, all serious like, "No, mommy. They don't."

Well, ok then.

Catch up!

Despite my hopes of making this a monthly blog, I currently have not posted in about 6 months. Here's a little catch up to tell you what we have been doing school wise with some fun stories of the boys development over the last six months.

 

In January we celebrated Martin Luther King Day talking about love and acceptance of all peoples. We did a project with a picture of MLK a the top and cut out pictures of people of all colors from magazines to paste underneath. We also watched a few videos online about his speech and what the day in about.

 

 

For Presidents day we did a fun money matching project. We started a chore chart with Monster which he gets money for completing each week and he has been picking up the names of coins pretty quickly.

 

We also did a presidents project and made these two lovely gentlemen.

For Chinese New Year we made homemade sushi (yeah, I know, kind of the wrong country...) and noise makers out of paper plates and beans. I wrote words in English and in Chinese on the plates and we talked about different things they do to celebrate in China. 

 

We managed to do the most school activities in the last six months for St. Patrick's Day. Although I never got corned beef and sauerkraut (one of my favorites) we did make some green play dough, make four leaf clovers, and leprechauns. Thanks to Grammy who came to visit most weeks through the winter, we had a few other green themed crafts in March.

Epic example of Monkey's "stinky" face.

Clovers and glitter. A big hit with the boys, a not so big hit with my broom.

 

 Leprechaun!!

Also thanks to Grammy we had a St. Patrick's Day themed cupcake decorating kit and so we made some tasty green banana muffins that we frosted.

March also brought a few sensory projects. We talked about different senses, played eye-spy, had a taste test snack one day, made loud and soft sounds, and make a scent plate with spices.

Monster has become addicted to craft books. He pours through them four hours and begs every hour of the day to make another project. In April we made junk robots adapted from an idea of using photos of random objects to make robots. I dug through our junk drawer in the kitchen and came up with washers, screws, tin foil, rubber bands, paper clips, safety pins, and so much more for them to use to make robots. Monster's came out super awesome and Monkey's came out how his projects always do- a pile of art pieces glued to the middle of the paper. :)

In April we covered Easter with a discussion on why different religions celebrate, who the Easter Bunny is (Monster let us know he is the bunny that lays chocolate eggs and gives it to you in a basket) and we made some really pretty ribbon decorated eggs.

Unfortunely I didn't take a picture of the finished project it looks like, but here Monster is contemplating which ribbon to put on his egg next. This project was really good for Monkey, whom I placed glue on his egg and he just got to stick stuff places. We have been doing more projects where he can just stick objects in glue and it comes out looking nice. I think he feels much more inspired when his project looks like Monsters in the end.

May has snuck up on us fast! Not only are we less than three months away from meeting baby number three now, but the last six months have just flown by! We missed celebrating for May Day since we were getting over a cold; however, we are busy preparing for Monkey's upcoming birthday. He will be two this month and it totally shows. Every thing he says starts with "I want to do it!". His vocabulary has grown so much he is on par with Monster, I think. He has an amazing knowledge of how the English language works and can put completely, grammatically correct sentences together almost better than I can. :) To celebrate him we are having our family and friends together for a Rainbow Art party and to keep in coordination of our all art year of school (or at least it's come down to just art projects this year), I have rainbow themed projects for every day this week to make decorations. Today we made paper scrap rainbows and did some painting with rainbow colors.

Our paper scrap rainbows are going to look nice in the windows.

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Monster potty trained in February and his favorite place to pee is outside in our yard. It's been interesting trying to teach him where is ok and where it isn't ok to pull your pants down.

Monkey is super interested in using the potty currently as well, and in result of that we have let him run naked a lot more often to hopefully encourage potty training before the baby comes. However, it has instead resulted in him peeing in the most random places in our house, including the toaster, off the dresser in our bedroom, and in the heater vent.

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Hopefully in the months to come I find time to keep adding to the blog. Also, I hope to be better at writing down the silly stuff the do so I can share that as well. Here's hoping your spring has been as warm and fun as ours has been! :)