This was another week of just books. We had a lot going on with my parents out of town and other stuff. We read our Alphabet Path story, the Double Daisy fairy page, and about St. Dominic. She loves the Double Daisy song! We got two books about dinosaurs that she liked: D is for Dinosaurs: A Prehistoric Alphabet and Ten Terrible Dinosaurs. Then we got a lot of Tomie de Paola books (we love Tomie de Paola!!).

Angels, Angels Everywhere
Strega Nona Takes a Vacation
The Knight and the Dragon
Abuelita
Strega Nona Meets her Match

We had a special Saturday tea time with donuts from Dunkin Donuts.

The month of May will definitely be really laid back with Lucy’s surgery this Thursday and a cruise the last week of the month. In June I’ll be back on top of things I hope!

We were super busy the week of 4/19 so I scaled the Alphabet Path back accordingly. No worksheets, just a couple of favorite books and two awesome field trips!

The science theme was creeks and streams so I found one of the recommended books: Give Her the River (the others were too old for her or not at our library) . We read it once and she never asked for it again. Oh well! The children’s classics went over much better. She absolutely LOVED Corduroy and Curious George. She quoted them often! For saints/faith books we got Christopher the Holy Giant and Clown of God, both by Tomie dePaola. She preferred Clown of God. We got two books by the author of the week, Barbara Cooney. She didn’t care for Miss Rumphius but liked Chanticleer and the Fox well enough.

On Tuesday, we walked the Trolley Trail with our friend Kate and her three boys. Kate was on a mission to catch tadpoles and I thought it fit well with the creek theme so we tagged along. It was a beautiful, warm day and we had so much fun!

On Friday, we went to the mall for the highlight of the week- riding the carousel! At tea time we had cranberry orange scones from Trader Joe’s and then Lucy got to watch a Clifford video. We also colored in her Kitty Cat coloring book and did the art study for the week - a cat painting. I thought we did well this week with all the activities and appointments we had during the week, especially finding out on Wednesday she needs to get her tonsils out! Surgery is May 6th - please keep her in your prayers!

Week of 4/12/10

This week I was able to get a lot more of the books on the list - thank you Howard County Library! The science theme of B week was birds. We read about nests, owls, swallows and other bird related topics. I think the books were a little too old for her and she didn’t ask me to read them more than once (except as noted below). The books we read were:

Crinkleroot’s Guide to Knowing the Birds

Angelo

Song of the Swallows (a favorite)

Soaring with the Wind: The Bald Eagle

Owl Moon

The Bird House

Goodnight, My Duckling (another favorite)

Wild Birds

A Nest Full of Eggs

Flower fairy of the week was the Bugle Fairy. The song on the CD is very catchy - Lucy and I sing it often! I think we have bugle flowers in our backyard too! I want to do more with the flowers but I think she is still a little young to get into it. Here’s a video of her singing the Bugle song (after a bit of the XY Fairies song )

The saint of the week was Bernadette, which happens to be one of Lucy’s favorites. She had a lot of fun reading the story in the Alphabet of Saints book, coloring a picture of Mary appearing to Bernadette at Lourdes and watching “Bernadette, Princess of Lourdes” twice! She had already seen it a few times before (it is my parents’ video) and loved watching it again and talking about Bernadette’s adventures.

While Lucy wasn’t into the science books for the week, she loved all of the childrens classics recommended for the week. She loved Bear Snores On, Jesse Bear What Will You Wear? and Bedtime for Frances. We also checked out every Jan Brett book we hadn’t read yet, as she was the author of the week. Her absolute favorites were Berlioz the Bear, Fritz and the Beautiful Horses, and Daisy Comes Home.

We did some worksheets too, including bird dot-to-dots and coloring letter Bs and butterflies. Lucy is getting better at staying in the lines.  She finds dot-to-dots a bit challenging. For her picture study, she chose The Champion Single Sculls by Thomas Eakins in the Museum ABC book (each letter has 4 pictures of the same subject - B was for boat). She was a little timid at first and wanted me to draw it for her. I drew the biggest sailboat for her and then left her alone to draw without pressure. She did an awesome job of the water, sky and clouds and even added “a man wearing a hat” to her version.

Lastly, we had blueberries a lot for B week. Blueberry smoothies, blueberry french toast bake and blueberry scones for tea time on Friday! Yum!

Week of 4/5/10

I decided to dive right in and start Elizabeth Foss’ Along the Alphabet Path with Lucy. Our main tools for the Alphabet Path are the Complete Book of the Flower Fairies by Cicely Mary Barker (and accompanying CD), An Alphabet of Catholic Saints by Brenda and George Nippert and Museum ABC by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I decided to blog about our journey so I can remember what we did and improve upon it. We’re going to spend one week on each letter.

Aa

On Monday, we read the story of Mrs. Applebee in our Alphabet Path binder. Then we read the Apple Blossom Fairies’ song from Cicely Mary Barker’s book and studied the picture. We also read about St. Anne in Alphabet of Catholic Saints and read several of the books we got from the library that morning, including Angelina Ballerina and How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. We had ladybug apples and animal crackers for a snack.

Tuesday, we did some coloring on printouts. Lucy chose to color St. Anne with the Blessed Mother first. She asked me if I wanted to color it with her. The other worksheets were a connect the dots of an apple, a follow the directions apple with coloring specifications of the stem, leaf and apple and circling all the big As and little As inside the apple, and finally a template with Aa. I helped her trace the letters and told her she could color it any color she wanted. To my surprise, she took her crayon and drew the letter inside of the template! She remembered how to form the letters! Smart girl!

Wednesday we went to the Hoco library for Story Time and to get my card activated there so I could check out the Museum ABC book. That afternoon we did picture study of the Aa page. There were four paintings and I asked Lucy to look at them all and choose which one she liked the best to copy. She chose Cezanne’s Apples.

Thursday we listened to the Flower Fairies CD in the car. She loved it!

Friday we re-read the Apple Blossom Fairies song and St. Anne. She wanted me to read lots of poems from the Flower Fairy book. We also listened to the CD again in the car. She loves the song for B and almost has it memorized. We read the Art Lesson by Tomie de Paola. We also tried to make the A apple pie on Elizabeth Foss’ site using the recipe in How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. The crust was too warm when we rolled it out and tried to use the “A” cookie cutter but it still turned out delicious!

We didn’t get to all of the Allen Say books this week, but they’re not due back for another 2 weeks. I also could have done more in the faith section - we could have done Angels, other saints beginning with A, and Adam and Eve, etc. But overall, I’m very happy with how this first week went and am looking forward to Bb week next week!

So we welcomed a new member of our family on Tuesday.  Paul Robert, born at 5:15pm, weighing in at 8 lbs. 15 oz., and 22.5 inches long.

The birth went about as good as one could hope for.  Julia started feeling contractions in late morning, but they were irregularly spaced, and would stop completely at times, so we weren’t sure if she was in labor or not.  Lucy had been at Julia’s parents’ house in the morning, and we both went over at 1pm to pick her up.  She was still having irregular contracrtions, so she stayed there while I went to a doctor’s appointment at 2:30.  When I was about to leave the doctor’s office at 3:30, I got a call from Julia telling me to get back as soon as possible.

I picked her up and raced to the birth center.  It’s about a 35-minute drive, but it was late in the day, and there was some traffic - fortunately not too much.  If it had been two hours later, I doubt we would have made in under an hour.  We rolled up to the birth center at 4:15pm, and went in.  The midwives did a few observations, and in no time, Julia was feeling ready to push.  The midwife and nurse couldn’t believe it, but the baby started coming out, and in under 15 minutes, our baby was born.

They wrapped him in towels immediately, so we didn’t know for about a minute whether he was a boy or girl.  When we finally checked, it was very exciting to find out that we had a son!  Julia could barely believe it!

We decided to name him Paul Robert, and took turns holding him for a while.  We called our parents, and I cooked some dinner in the kitchen, and before long, it was time to go home.  We were able to leave at 9:15, and we got home at 10pm.  Lucy was at home waiting for us with Julia’s parents, but she had already fallen asleep.  When she woke up in the morning, she was very excited to learn that she had a little brother.  She has been such a good helper the past few days, and she is so loving towards him.

Here are a few pictures:

Minutes after being born.

Julia and Paul

Paul all wrapped up

The room where Paul was born

First car ride

Lucy giving Paul a kiss

Hanging out on the blanket

So Lucy has this puzzle that she loves to put together, and she’s gotten pretty good at it. I decided to film it tonight. It took her about six minutes, so I sped up most of the video.

Lucy loves drawing and coloring, especially on her magna-doodle, which is like an etch-a-sketch, but with a magnet pen and a few other magnet “brushes”.  She’s getting pretty good at drawing recognizable things.  Here are a few of her latest:

She went to a birthday party where Barney and Baby Bop made an appearance.  When she got home, she drew this picture of them:

A few days later, she drew a picture, and showed it to us. She said it was a drawing of “The Lion King”.

We got Lucy a Halloween costume, and she’s all ready for trick-or-treating next Friday. Should be fun!