18 Months Old!

Yesterday, my little love turned 18 months old. It's funny because it doesn't seem like long at all but at the same time the whole NICU ordeal seemed like ages ago. He has changed so much. He can run, jump, throw a ball and, depending on the ball, he can catch one, too. He is saying so many words. Two of his new favorites are bug and WOW. Here they are digging for worms and bugs. I heard a lot of "bug and wows."

I really love the way he says wow. It's so cute. He has become fiercely independent. So much so that he would not hold my hand in the parking lot today and I had to pick him up and carry him instead. He loves to do art. He can color, paint,  and use a glue stick. His two favorite toys are balls and cars. He loves to read. Every night I read him books and every night he says, "more, more," when it is time to be done.

He and ollie are becoming such great friends and they love to play together. They run around the house yelling and laughing.

I took some pictures of him. I tried to get some in a diaper and some with clothes but once I got his clothes on him, he would not cooperate. Imagine that.

Can't get enough of DINOSAURS~

Ollie is completely infatuated with dinosaurs. I have been searching and thinking and scraping together dinosaur activities for my little guy. What do you teach a kid who knows everything about dinosaurs? Well luckily I found a few things and I found that you don''t have to teach about dinosaurs to use dinosaurs to learn.

So, we worked on sorting. I gave ollie several dinosaurs and asked him to sort them however he wanted. He sorted by color, species, and what they ate (carnivore, herbivore). He then organized them by size.

After seeing this on Play at Home Mom, I had to put it together for ollie. I put together a sensory activity for him. The bottom of the cake pan is covered in cloud dough. I put a dinosaur in each of the three eggs, added some foliage and a mama dinosaur. He was so excited when he saw it and loved every minute.

Lately Ollie has been asking for a spinosaurus. I hear it all the time. Well, he finally got one. We cut up an empty box of cheese crackers and a paper plate. Ollie glued it together but refused to paint it because it was colorful. He was referring to the box. haha. Anyway, I don't know why I don't make cardboard dinosaurs more often. He ran off to play with it and played independently for quite a while.

Parasaurolophus. That is what our mask is. This was fun to make but I think it was a bit big and awkward. He wore it for about twenty seconds. This activity and the one before came from a couple books I got from the library-  Activities for kids learning about dinosaurs & Crafts for kids who are crazy about dinosaurs.

We also did a little dino printing. I got out the paints and some dinosaurs and let the boys go to town. Ollie used them to stamp on the paper a bit but he also painted the dinosaurs themselves. After he was done, he decided the dinosaurs needed a bath and the boys and dinosaurs hopped in the tub to get cleaned up. 

Being a stay at home mom is such a wonderful blessing. I love being able to take the time to 

do activities with my kids. I was talking to a woman at the mall playland today who commented on how she wished she had more time to play with her kids (she is a working mom). It was just another reminder of how lucky I am!

Bapa comes for a visit

Last weekend, my dad came for a visit. It was so wonderful. The boys haven't seen my parents since Christmas. Bapa drove down on Friday. We had a couple very special activities planned. Both Ollie and my dad love all things prehistoric, especially dinosaurs. Bapa came to take him to an Imax movie called "Sea Rex." Lucky for us, this same weekend, an ice age exhibit opened at the zoo.

My dad arrived Friday late morning. We immediately set off for the Science Center. We checked out the exhibits and had a little lunch while we waited for the movie to start. Bapa and Ollie went to "Sea Rex" while Dawson and I went to the Small Wonders exhibit to play. Dawson had a great time. He especially loves the bubbles and the "imprint wall." We played and played. Apparently, Ollie enjoyed the movie so much that he sat through all of the credits until the screen went completely blank at which point my dad finally got up and Ollie decided he should too.

We then headed home so Dawson could nap. While he did that, Bapa and Ollie headed to the park. It was nice to have a little quiet time while they went to play. Later that evening we headed out again to another park. I was so thankful for such nice weather and time to play outside.

Saturday, we got up and got going early so that we could see the new Ice Age exhibit. Ollie was thrilled. Dawson was scared. My dad commented on how they weren't to scale. Lol. The zoo was really busy so we didn't stay too long. We checked out some of the other animals and hit the road home so we could have lunch and send Bapa on his way.

It really was a great weekend and very special for my little guys.

Dinosaurs!

We just started (a few weeks ago) a unit on dinosaurs. It is a hard one because he already knows so much that it is really hard to know what to do. We started with dinosaurs at preschool co-op. We did some fun stuff, but I, of course, did not take pictures. For one of the activities, I used tape to create a dinosaur sized foot print on the floor. When ollie got up, he thought that was really neat. We measured how many of our feet fit in one and even how many kids!

We followed up the dino print activity by doing another with dinosaur feet. I made 10 dinosaur feet (smaller ones) and set them on the floor. At first, ollie had fun jumping, skipping and running to each. Then, we played a little game. I used the footprints to lead to a dinosaur I had hidden. Ollie loved following them and really enjoyed this game. He even hid it for me a couple times.

We are still working on our fine motor skills. One activity that never gets old is drawing in flour. I filled a cookie sheet with flour. I had ollie practice writing Ds with his finger. I then gave him his dinosaurs to play with in the flour. He had so much fun. He made prints and buried them. We soon adding other spices and he made trees and scenes.

For another activity, I wrote dinosaur on a strip of construction paper. I was surprised that when I showed it to Ollie he knew what it said. He has told pointed to books and said that before but there was always pictures to give a hint. He just knows the word! I handed him the letters to the same word and had him place them over the letters. I did this first with capital letters and then with lowercase. He did a great job.

Ollie's favorite activity was making his own dinosaur egg.I blew up a balloon and we put a baby Brachiosaurus inside. He then did his own paper mache and covered it. When it dried, he got out his hammer and chisel from his dinosaur exhibition game and cracked it open to find the baby. So exciting for a little dino lover!

 Finally, we learned about measurement. I gave ollie a ruler and had him pick 4 dinosaurs to measure. We measured their height and length and wrote them down.

Fun Stuff

We just kind of go with it most days. I've decided that I am not all that hyped up on specifically what he is learning as long as he is learning and enjoying it. Right now,we are still talking water. Some related to oceans and some not. One day he announced he would like to learn more about sharks. So, we first drew and labelled a shark and it's parts. We talked about how a shark is made of cartilage which he has since asked about other animals and if they also are made of cartilage. After we created it, I cut it into a puzzle and let him reassemble it. Fun times!

The other very ocean specific activity dealt with coral reefs. We read a couple books, youtubed it and then ollie created his own picture using his dotters, a couple pom poms and some glitter. After he made his masterpiece, I had him tell me a bit about it (a coral reef). Some of his description included colorful and lots of fish. Smart boy!

As you know, in an earlier post I mentioned that we had started talking about density. The next two experiments dealt with density. Both boys participated and loved it! For the first activity, I filled a vase with water. Then I had ollie pour some oil in it. We first watched how the oil all settled to the top. Then, Ollie & Dawson got to add food coloring. The food coloring, being more dense than the oil sunk down below the oil and then burst into the water creating a really cool effect. This activity came from a blog called, "Play Create Explore." Really cool site. Lots of great stuff!

Our final activity, had three components. First of all, my boys love using straws to blow bubbles so I thought "why not?"And secondly, they loved pouring things together. This activity was awesome. I took a few household liquids and put them into separate glasses. I used edible stuff because I don't want them to drink something or get something dangerous in their eyes. I used oil, water with food coloring, corn syrup and pancake syrup. For the first part of the activity, the boys tried to blow bubbles into each liquid. Some were near impossible to blow bubbles in. Then we poured them all together and watched where each settled. Ollie quickly discovered that the more dense a liquid, the harder it was to blow bubbles! Yay for hands-on learning. The pour the liquids together I took from an activity I did in a college elementary ed class. The straws was just me using my brain! After we finished, ollie and I created a "chart" with the liquids labels and colored to match.

                                           

                                            

Announcement!

So this little guy, 

and this littler guy want to tell you a secret!

They are both going to be big brothers!

Baby Gray #3 is coming September 4, 2012 and we are so excited! The Lord has blessed us immensely.

Just a few more Ocean activities

There really are a bunch of things you can learn about with oceans. So this week we did a few more activities. Ollie is enjoying it but he told me that he really wants to do dinosaurs so maybe we will move on to prehistoric marine animals. They are pretty cool.

We started with an activity in density. I took this activity from my Kitchen Table Play and Learn book. I took a bowl of water and placed a piece of carrot in it. I told ollie that we were going to add salt to the water. I asked him to make a hypothesis of what would happen. I can't remember exactly what he said but be assured it was something wacky. As we added salt to the water, the carrot began to rise and float. We talked about how the salt made the water more dense and so the carrot could float. I asked him if he thought it would be easier or harder to float in the ocean than freshwater. He of course said easier. Such a smarty!

We did a matching activity. I placed some sea animals in front of Ollie. The ones he knew he matched word to by looking at the first letter and listening to the sound as I repeated. I then taught him the sea creatures he didn't know. The second time I held them up and told him what they said and he matched them. We always end up youtubing something that he wants to know more about! He also wanted to see what would happen if he added pepper. So we tried it. It looked so disgusting!


Finally, we did a writing activity. I wrote the words Ocean and Ollie on a paper and had him trace them with a highlighter. He generally doesn't like handwriting but he liked using a highlighter. He wrote his name by himself for the first time this week! So exciting.


 That's all I have for this week. We had preschool on Wednesday and learned about sound. We may need to check out some science experiments about sound in water this week!

We had beautiful weather this week. Here a a couple of pictures of my sweeties!