Our First Week Back

Quick, while the kids are napping type something up on the blog! Haha! I feel like this is how most of life goes. Uh, oh, Baby Monkey is up already!!! Whew, ok, back to blogging.

Our first week back wasn't too bad. We didn't accomplish all that much school wise and Big Monkey really wasn't interested in doing much, but we tried. Slow baby steps right? Maybe next week will be more fun.

We're catching up from where we left off before the holidays rather than moving on. So we did C is for caterpillar this week, although there was not much caterpillar stuff going on. We also did the birthday themed worksheets that we were supposed to do before Baby Monkeys birthday in December. Haha!

Some highlights: we started out with some painting per Big Monkey's request. He wanted to use the new Melissa and Doug paint brushes that he got from Santa. These are great. We also used some our of foam painting shapes. He had a good time paint the "ocean" and fish to go in his ocean. Very creative.

Baby Monkey was enjoying being a monkey this week. Man is this little dude really a monkey. He wears me out! He literally climbs anything and everything that looks like he might be able to climb.

I let both boys play with the Christmas themed sensory bin since I set it up before Christmas and never actually took it out for them to play with. Oops. Big Monkey stuffed all the little gumbie reindeer into the little stockings and gave them to Baby Monkey as "presents." It was cute.

 

We did pre-writing skills worksheets with the Crayola dry erase center while we waiting for the Stanley Steemer guys to finish cleaning and sealing our upholstery this week. Took forever to dry, but it is so nice to have a fresh clean couch and recliners! 

Big Monkey got a kick out of caterpillar graphing this week. We counted how many caterpillars were on each page and then colored in that number of boxes underneath. For the most part he did this on his own. A few times he colored in a few too many boxes, but mostly did great. 

He was not a fan of letter matching this week. We tried to match up uppercase letters to lowercase letters, but he said he didn't want too. I think there were just too many letters on the table. Next time I think I will try starting with A-D and then moving on to E-H, etc... 

He spent a big amount of time coloring this week too. Not nearly as much time coloring as some kids like to do, but hey, a few weeks ago he wouldn't color for more than 2 minutes. I think coloring lasted about 20 minutes this week. Then he dumped all the crayons and I had him pick them up (since he was throwing them on the floor) and that took an additional 20 minutes. Sigh, I remember the days before Baby Monkey was born when Big Monkey used to love to color for hours in coloring books.

The last and also not favored activity was matching letters to the word caterpillar. Again, he was not interested, but I think he was tired. We are going through another phase where it take Big Monkey a long time to fall asleep at night and then he wakes up several times during the night and gets up early. Makes for a tired Big Monkey (and cranky) during the day. We go in and out of these phases as neither of the boys are very good sleepers. Needless to say, both of them are getting some sleep and routine adjustments! I'm brushing up on my "gentle sleep training" methods (I am not a fan of CIO unless it is a last resort - we have done it, but I am not a fan. No judgement here though if you are) and trying to help the boys sleep better. 

Not sure what next week brings yet as I haven't looked at my curriculum! Guess I need to pull it out since tomorrow is Sunday. Oh, we got a new printer though, so away with the black and white boring sheets and bring on the color again!

Oh, and of course we spent a lot of time this week reading, but that is normal for us anyway!

New year, new resolutions, new motivation... Maybe

I've never been one to make new year's resolutions. I believe that if you want to make a change or do something different, then just do it. You don't need to wait for January 1st. This year though, January 1st just happened to fall right around the time that I decided I needed (or wanted) to make some major changes. Ok, not major, but some changes.

We missed the New Years start point though because we were fighting some sickies in the monkey cave, but we are all recovered this week and started fresh yesterday. So what's going to be different? Our schedule and goals I suppose.

This year I'm going to spend some time focusing on myself as well as my kids. I've been just "mommy" for three years now. We made a big decision this past week that we are done having kids. Baby Monkey will be our last. So Mama Monkey wants to work on my health, my relationship with my husband, my faith, and just getting back into the things we enjoy but couldn't do because we had a baby (or two). This means schedule changes to fit everything in. I've registered for a half marathon in October and hope to do a 10 mile in April. So I need to run and train several days a week. It's hard to fit in preschool, training (especially as my milage goes up) and play all in the same day. So we will be doing school 2 days a week most weeks. We will spend the other days of the week training, playing, getting outside time, and other day to day activities (laundry and grocery shopping have to be done at some point! The Monkey family needs clean underpants.).

This summer Big Monkey will start a reading program with me if he seems to be ready. Right now he doesn't have the attention span or motivation. We are also lacking a few pre-reading skills that we will work on this spring. If he's not ready by summer, then we will wait until fall or possibly until his fourth birthday next winter.

After this spring, we will have 2 more "preschool years" before Big Monkey starts kindergarden (possibly at the local public school). So this fall we will start a more challenging preschool curriculum and the year after that we will do a pre-k program. Which I have not decided yet.

We got lots of great educational toys for Christmas, so we will have plenty to do between now and summer. Most importantly, I want the boys to experience some fun stuff and enjoy their time with Mama Monkey while they learn important readiness skills.

Oh and over the break we got a caterpillar kid from Insect Lore. It was neat! We got 5 caterpillars and watched them grow into huge fat caterpillars. Then they went into "cocoons" and later "hatched" into gorgeous painted lady butterflies. Here are some highlight photos.

A week or so after they arrived:

 Another week later. Getting bigger.

 Cocoons! There was one more on the floor. He survived despite falling.

 Our first butterfly! We never saw one emerge. I looked in on this guy before breakfast and there was no butterfly. By the time we finished eating breakfast, we had a butterfly!

 We now have 4 of these. If it was warmer outside, we could release them. Instead we are feeding our little butterflies and keeping them for their full life cycle. I have no idea how long that will be nor do I know what I will tell Big Monkey about the butterflies once their life cycle is over. I'm taking it all one day at a time.