Lazy Sunday

A couple of weeks ago, Shrike and I established Sunday as Mama's Sleep-In Day, since I usually get up with Peeper and let her sleep because she has to go to work and be alert (not so much for working as for the drive home!) past midnight.

Mornings usually involve Peeper waking up and calling for me, and I take her to potty, then back to her bed, where we nurse for a while and maybe one or both of us goes back to sleep, until she's finally ready to get up for real, or it's time to get ready to go somewhere. 

This morning, a bit before eight, Peeper walked into our bedroom and said, "Mommy. Help me find my Rapunzel doll." 

What the hell? 

Off they went to play with Rapunzel, and it was probably an hour or so before she brought her back in to nurse. She went back out to play some more, and then back to nurse again around 10:30. 

At that point, Peeper and I got  up and let Shrike sleep for a while.

While I was Googling for a healthy blueberry muffin recipe, Peeper came in wearing a hat and singing Yankee Doodle. I said, "You put a feather in your hat and called it macaroni? 

"Yep, see!" 

Later, she was rat-a-tat-tatting on the "drum set" that she'd assembled in the hall. I didn't think much of it until I heard the bedroom door open, and Peeper shouted, triumphantly, "It worked! Mommy woke up!"

Oops. Sorry, honey. 

The muffins started with this AllRecipes.com recipe for oatmeal blueberry muffins, and I made a few modifications, as usual, based on some mentioned by the first commenter:

• Replaced 1 cup white flour with 1 cup whole wheat flour
• Replaced  1/3 cup white sugar with a scant 2 Tbs stevia and heaping 2 Tbs brown sugar
• Replaced 1 cup milk with 3/4 cup milk and 1/4 cup Greek yogurt
• Replaced 1/4 cup oil with 1 banana, mashed

They turned out pretty damn yummy, if I do say so myself. 

We pretty much just hung out the rest of the day, and I even took a little nap on the couch.

Peeper, of course, found plenty of ways to keep herself entertained.

This is a much more elaborate version of the drum kit that woke Mommy up.

This whole "dancing elephant" thing comes from an episode of Micky Mouse Clubhouse.

Make a video - it's fun, easy and free!
www.onetruemedia.com

Then it became a tower.

"Get out, and stay out!"

She thought this was the funniest thing ever.

It was Peeper's idea to build Lego stairs, but Shrike helped with the actual construction (they kept falling apart and really frustrating Peeper) and I'm not sure whose idea it was to install them in the castle.

And one more concert before bed. Xylophone, this time.

She was saying, "Do you want to hear some notes? Okay!" so I asked, "Who are you talking to?"

I figured it would be Baby Bear or Mickey Mouse or Rapunzel, or one of the many characters that she interacts with on a regular basis, but she just said, "Myself!"

Oh, okay then. Sorry to interrupt.

Tot School: Birds

~ Peeper is 43.5 months old ~

A Note To My Regular Readers: I may be repeating some photos or stories that I've already published, but I want to put all our learning activities in the one post that's part of the Tot School link-up.

Tot Schoolers: Welcome! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to stay for a while, and have a look around. I'll give you a fair warning that much of my blog is PG-13, but my Tot School link-up posts will always be G-Rated.

---

Our third unit study was about birds. I guess we've been a bit distracted (or tired, or lazy) lately, because we didn't put as much time into this one as we have the past couple. We did do several quicky activities, and most of the printed activities in her notebook, but we didn't read very many of the books, and there were several days that we didn't touch it at all.

Here are the books that I checked out. Those marked with an asterisk are the ones that we actually read:

• *Seven Hungry Babies by Candace Fleming
• *It's a Hummingbird's Life by Irene Kelly
• *Birds by Kevin Henkes
• BABY OWL by Aubrey Lang
• Bateman's Backyard Birds by Robert Bateman
• Soaring with the Wind: The Bald Eagle by Gail Gibbons
• Hatch! by Roxie Munro

As with the first two units, I put together a "Bird Notebook" containing a variety of printed activities.

I had several cards and pages of photos of different kids of birds, but Peeper wasn't especially into that. However, when I showed her the kookaburra, and started singing the song, she immediately began to act it out.

This is what she does. As soon as she hears a new song, reads a new story or learns a new fact, she acts it out. It's really kind of amazing to watch.

I didn't get any photos of her working on the materials in the book, but we started by coloring a robin, and then identifying the various parts of a bird. That page had several drawings with different parts highlighted in red. Right off the bat, she was able to identify all but two: the nostrils and the remiges.

"What are remiges?" you ask? So did I!

So, I whipped out my phone and googled it and Peeper and I both learned that a long wing feather is called a remex and the plural of that word is remiges. (Rim-uh-zhees)

I also used several pages from Homeschool Creation's Bird Printables, including worksheets on Patterning (which she still totally does not get), More Less or Equal which she actually did pretty well with, when I helped her to count the objects in each set, Follow the Directions and Find the Right Picture ("circle the bird that is next to the tree"), which we did without writing - again, one of her toys "helped" by "showing" me the answer, and Say and Clap, which is about identifying syllables by clapping as you say each one.

She totally rocked the Say and Clap. I only had to do a few examples, and she had it. She can pretty solidly "clap out" one, two and three syllable words, and can sometimes do four, but it starts to falling apart at that point.

I also had some materials in her notebooks from Homeschool Creations Bird Preschool Pack, including Beginning Letters, How Many Leaves, and Rhyming Words, but I don't think we ever got to any of those.

Our first project was to make a toilet paper roll robin, using a printable from DLTK's Growing Together. It turns out they also have a hummingbird printable. I should have done that one, too.

We refilled our bird feeder.

And made another one, out of a milk jug. Obviously, I did most of the work, but Peeper helped to decorate it.

Can I blame the misspelling of "Bon Appetit" on Peeper?

Later, we read about hummingbirds and filled up our feeder. This is the only photo I got. Thrilling, huh?

We haven't seen anybody but ants at the hummingbird feeder yet, but I know I've seen a few in past years, eating from the hibiscus (which won't bloom for a few weeks), so I've got high hopes that if we can keep the feeder clean and filled, we'll get some eventually.

I was planning to make a peanut butter and birdseed feeder, but hadn't gotten around to it, when we went to the farmer's market last week and guess what the kid's craft was? Hooray!

This guy was very interested in the regular feeder. I'm guessing that he's an adolescent cardinal, just starting to turn red. Does anyone know?

Peeper was playing with a chip clip one day, and was very proud about getting it clipped onto a piece of paper, so I gave her a couple of clothes pins to play with, and she was able to repeat that trick using them.

My plan was for her to use the clothes pin in the role of a bird's beak, to pick up "worms," "bugs," and "berries" and feed them to her baby bird.

She was struggling with the clothespin, though, and decided that she wanted me to do the actual picking up of the "bird food." So much for that fine motor strengthening exercise.

Here are the worms, bugs and berries . . .

. . . and here's the baby bird.

He's of a rare species that eats through the top of its head.

He ate lots and lots of berries . . .

. . . and then he pooped them all out!

Mama Bear wanted some berry porridge, too.

Some of our non-bird-related activities included:

"Reading" these flashcards with Mommy

Strawberry picking

Children's museum

Experiments in fluid dynamics

Sorting bears (I walked in the room to find her doing this.)

Picking blueberries and cherries

This is a fruit from an iris flower. We saw it by the mailbox and decided to check it out.

How's our sunflower house doing? I need to get out there and take a current photo, but these are from just a few days after we planted it.

What's up with the bean seeds?

The one in the jar got a lot bigger than that, but I didn't get any more photos before it shriveled up and died. It was definitely the best grower of the bunch, though. Peeper's hypothesis was right.

Next on our agenda: Bugs!