Frogs and Art

Wednesday seems to be the day where we play catch up around here and relax a little bit.  We have no scheduled activities, no reason to rush or get ready to go anywhere, and nothing to worry about.  Today has been a great Wednesday.  Once we got everyone going this morning, we had some issues with Ruby wanting to do her work while Ford was doing his work and Ford wanting to do his work while Rachel was doing her work and so on and so on.  Amazingly, we had done all of our school work by 8:30!  I found some paper with lines for Rachel to start practicing her handwriting on since the book used new lines yesterday.  We just practiced writing her whole name on the lines that have the dash in the middle and she did very well.  She really does pay attention to details so well (honestly, way better than I do!).  Ford and I worked on his upper-case "I"s since he had trouble with that yesterday.  He did them with the magnetic pieces a few times (his favorite thing!) and then wrote them on paper several times.  He was definitely doing much better by the end.  Rachel worked on her math blocks today moving from unit blocks to the blocks that are certain numbers and colors which will help her when we get to addition.  Then, we all read some stories and looked at a lower-level non-fiction book for Rachel and talked about captions, chapter titles, and diagrams.  The book was about frogs and talked about tadpoles and she remembered that we watched a Curious George from long ago about tadpoles.  They had done so well that I promised them if they would clean up the playroom we could watch the quick tadpole episode.  It's pretty cute how George thinks he's lost the tadpoles only to find out that the things he has with legs are the tadpoles turning into frogs!  After all of that, it was snack time.  While they ate their snack, I got out all of the play-doh tools and such and we played play-doh for a good 30 minutes or so.  Ruby made shapes (including her beloved hexagon), Rachel wanted to make coil pots like Ford had done in art class, and Ford played construction with Buster the Power Crane and the brick-colored play-doh.  We are getting really good at doing Play-Doh all at the same time and everyone enjoying it.  I always know it's time to put it up, though, when Ruby starts licking it!!!  After we got all of that cleaned up, we packed up our paints and headed down to Vanessa's for some art.  We painted little rocks all different colors and line them up like a caterpillar.  It was a pretty cute idea that came from a fairy book Rachel got for Christmas.  Vanessa also showed them how to make robots out of construction paper (Ruby put wings on hers so that it was a Robot Fairy).  We inevitably got a little wild...they just love playing there so much, but spinning Hyland around in his exersaucer is not a good idea!!  After some lunch and a little more play time, we headed home, put the sheets on the beds and settled down for a nap.  I actually dozed off myself for just a little bit...amazing how in 5-10 minutes of sleep, I was already dreaming.  Seriously!  I've got to catch up on some zzzzzzzzzz's....It's been a great day and the sun is shining and it's warming up, so I'm hoping the afternoon is just as great and we can get outside and enjoy the fresh air.