Craft Night...Kinda.

A few weeks ago, one of our bloggy friends Kameron, had a Girl's Craft Night with a bunch of her friends.

Amber and I decided that was right up our alley. And since Andrew was going to a men's conference and David just happened to by working second shift, we threw a spur of the moment crafty festival together!

Amy, Kim, and Amber showed up around 5 toting all their crafty goodness and a little extra inspiration.

All the little girls were wore out so we put them all down for the night around 7 and we went to town trying to finish all our random crafts. Some of mine had been sitting in my closet since before Christmas!

The wine was a wonderful motivator, but after a couple glasses things went from bad:

(the elastic that should be in Josie's new skirt.)

To worse:

And by the time we emptied the jug, crafting was pretty much shot for the night.

By the time David and Scott showed up to drag the girls home I had stepped on Amy's frame project and broke the glass, Amber had sewn a dress with no armholes for Olivia, and we all had cried.

Amber finished off the night showing off her cheerleading skills while we all died laughing.

I may not have finished all my projects, but I had so much fun!

Our next craft night we are going to attempt felt food and I think a bottle rather then a jug will more then suffice!

The Little Payer Girl

Andrew and I are working hard to teach Josie about money and making wise choices with it.

She's been desperatly asking for an umbrella since her birthday but I wasn't willing to shell out $10 for one. Then she started to get an allowance so we told her if she wanted to, she could save up to buy one for herself. This week she finally had enough.

When we got to Target to pick it up though, she wrinkled up those sweet eyebrows and told me, "We can find it on sale."

Now that sounds like my child!

Two days later we were walking around Wilsons Warehouse and Andrew spotted child sized umbrellas for $1.99!

She is now the proud owner of a on sale umbrella.

Josie learned a great lesson about shopping around for the best price!

Then just last night she treated us all to ice cream.

Baskin Robins was having .31 Cent Scoop Night so we decided it was a perfect chance to let Josie pay for something for the family.

So before church Andrew asked if that was something she would like to do and then helped her count out $2.00 in dimes.

And boy oh boy was she excited!

We may have held up the line for a bit while she counted out 13 dimes, but it was well worth it.

She told us she is "The Little Payer Girl."

It was a great Family Date Night and an awesome memory!

Strawberry Day!

We finally made it to the strawberry farm today!

Josie has been asking everyday so when we finally pulled in she was pretty stinking excited!

Even though it was unusually windy and cold we were able to get a pretty good sized group to come with us. I love, love, love our church and this was the first chance I had to get together with some of the awesome moms that I've met there. I'm really excited to get to know them better!

After a brief tutorial on which strawberries were ripe we let the kids loose!

Just like with our blueberry picking, I'm pretty sure quite a few berries never made it to the check out counter.

The kids were all smiles!

After we were done picking we got to roam around the farm and do some exploring and even got to ride the cow train!

I had to laugh when I looked around and noticed all the little girls. For the first year of Josie's life she was the only girl in the group!

She's got pleanty of little girlfriends now!

Before we left we went to check out the rest of the farm.

We had such a great time at the farm!

Now I'm off to try to find a few recipes to use up all these yummy strawberries!

Little School - Weather!

This was supposed to be Strawberry Week around Pope Academy, but due to a wet winter the farms don't open until next week so we did a little switcheroo.

And it ended up being the perfect week to talk about weather since we started with a wet, 60 degree day and ended with a hot 80 degree one!

I also decided to give the Tray System a shot and it is totally worthy of all the hype it gets in Blogland!

I moved our Quiet Work Shelf to another cabinet and used that for our Tray Spot. It is so easy to set up. All you need is a spot to lay each activity for that day. It made it so nice to see what we were going to be doing and Josie could see how many she had completed and what she had left!

I haven't ordered our trays yet, but you really don't need them. It would be nice to keep the supplies together, but this worked just fine for us.

We did a lot of reading this week! There are a ton of weather books at the library!

Here is our Weather Chart that we filled out each morning. I found it on Homemade Preschool and if you haven't checked her out, you need to! I printed off a ton of her worksheets and Josie has loved every single one!

We did patterns with Bears. This was her first time doing this. She had a hard time with ABCABC patterns, but ABAB she rocked at!

Letter recognition with ABC Bingo.

I made these cards and had them laminated. I'm starting to figure out Josie's learning style and right now she learns super fast through games. Most of these letters we haven't gone over but she was able to recall most of the names after we played this a few times!

We got all glammed up with some necklaces that we beaded! Then we put the numbers in numerical order when we cleaned up.

To learn about wind we made kites out of paper and string. Of course it wasn't windy this day so they didn't fly very well.

I found this little experiment and it was very simple. You just fill a jar with water and cover it. Place it in the fridge for a few hours then set it on the counter. As the jar warms up water drops roll down the jar and it looks like rain.

Cutting out raindrops. She can do a straight line pretty well, but any kind of curves are really hard for her.

We made our W for our Alphabet Book.

This next activity I found at Three Little Birds and thought it looked great.

It works like a puzzle but exposes her to the sight words. It took a couple tries for her to understand what I was asking her to do.

And we wrapped up our weather talk with our Baby Doll Laundry Mat! I talked about drying clothes on the line when it's sunny out and then let her wash her little heart out!

Wow! That was a long post. We had a busy week!

Next week we are learning about berries and going on a fun field trip to the strawberry farm!

Josie is 3 (38 months)

I Spy With My Little Eye...

I'm not going to lie.

When Josie and I did our daily garden check on Tuesday and spotted a real, live sprout I squealed!

I had just told my Mom that there were some green things growing but I wasn't sure if they were weeds or my veggies.

Well I now can tell the difference!

Since then we've spotted a very twisty and cool looking green bean sprout, tiny carrot sprouts, a lonely watermelon sprout, and just last night our first summer squash poked it's head out.

It is truely exciting to see this process. If you've never planted a garden, you should! Even just a small planter garden would be inspiring to watch!

On a side note, I got a lot of comments on our grass name project. So far, no growth on that one. I'll let you know if it decides to cooperate!

Pretend Play - Laundry Mat

Josie and I spent time last week learning about different weather.

We did a lot of fun activities, but her favorite was the Doll Laundry Mat that I set up for her.

We gathered up all the doll clothes from around the house and I set her up with a bucket of soapy water, a bucket of clean water, and a string tied to the porch to line dry them on.

She had a blast!

Which reminded me that, at her age, the simpler the project the more she loves it.

I tought her how to use the clothes pins and after struggling with the first few, she got the hang of it (no pun intended!) and went to town on the rest of the clothes.

Proud of her work!

I highly recommend this easy activity!

Not only because Josie loved it, it kept her entertained for 45 minutes, or that it was great for her fine motor skills.

But because by the looks of the laundry tub, doll clothes need to be washed!