Bread Painting

What do you do with a 3 year old and a 1 year old on a cold, rainy day and you have no car? Bread painting, of course. I stumbled across this idea (I can't remember where) and thought it was the cutest idea. We mixed milk and food coloring together, got ourselves some bread and paintbrushes, and went to town. Summer was only interested for about 2 minutes before she decided to just eat her bread, but Logan lasted a lot longer. But as long as Summer has food in her little hands she's happy so this was a resounding success in the Newell household. After the bread was all beautified we popped it in the toaster and had a nice afternoon snack.

Milk Jug Ghosts

Just a little warning: there is a slight chance that the Halloween theme will be dominating this blog for the next week. We've been very busy with all things spooky lately.

I'm sure many of you have seen this idea floating around out there, I will not claim that I came up with it. However, I will claim my own way of doing it and the month of preparing in order to save up enough milk cartons.

  This was a cute little craft that was quick, inexpensive, and something you're toddler will probably take a lot of pride in. I know Logan did. Tonight I found him outside turning on the lights for the ghosts. It was pretty simple. I let Logan draw faces on them, then I went over them with a permanent marker to clean it up. I then cut holes out of the bottom of the jugs. Once that was done I took them outside, placed them where I wanted them, and strung a string of icicle lights out in front of them. I stuffed a few strands of "icicles" into every ghost, buried the line, and voila! These little cuties:

They really turned out cute. Brian expressed his surprise on the outcome. He was a little dubious when I told him my plan. They look even cuter at night time all lit up, but my night picture skills are non-existent. So you'll just have to go make some and see for yourselves!

Toddler Summer School

During the school year I do a preschool co-op with some of the mom's in my church. For some reason preschool is really expensive here in Houston. Since Brian is in medical school and we have no income I could qualify for a pre-K program the year before Kindergarten but it's 5 days a week all day and I'm just not sure I'll be ready to let go of my little boy for that long. So preschool co-op it is. And it is actually really great. There are 5 of us in it so I only have to teach every 5 weeks. We do it twice a week for a couple hours and having those few hours toddler free is really good for my sanity!

Giving me his cheesiest smile.

We've been having a lot of fun so far this summer but I'm starting to miss the structure of preschool. So I thought I would try and have a little more structure with just the two of us a couple times a week. I thought I would focus on things that are interesting to him, rather then letters or numbers or preschool type things. This week we did firefighters. I borrowed some books from the library and we learnt a little about fire safety as well. It turned out to be really good so I thought I'd share with you all what we did this week.

I tried to incorporate a lot of different activities in my plan. Logan loves reading and singing but has a very short attention span for crafting. I really want to help him develop his fine motor skills. The hose activity on the fire truck is a really great one to help work on those skills.

"No Dragons for Tea" was a really great book and I strongly recommend it even if you don't want to do anything else I have. It is interesting for a boy or a girl, and teaches the kids about fire safety with a fun little rhyming story. At the back of the book it also has a short fire safety rhyme and questions/topics to go over with your child about fire safety. Some of the topics were a little over Logan's head but would be great for an older child.

Next week our theme is dinosaurs. Logan is really in to anything that roars; I'm looking forward to our time together this week.