Artistic round-up in photos

Making tortillas. Cooking is art!

Painting

Body as canvas

Creating ocean scene before beach trip. That's real sand, baby!

Adding fish and shell stickers

Playing dress up

Creating ocean in a bottle to take on beach trip

Open-ended art activity: I put out paint, glue, paper, scraps of paper and felt, cotton balls, q-tips, etc for him to use as he pleased.

 

 

...Ultimately, he didn't do that much with it. :(  I think it was too "messy" for him. We'll try again another time!

New art table arrangement, with materials out on table instead of in cabinet. He went straight for it as soon as he woke up from his nap. Amazing how just changing up the location/presentation of something will get him interested.

Very intent.

That's it for now! Sensory play round-up coming up soon! See how cheaty these posts are? I get to share a bunch of things that we've been doing without actually writing about them that much! Ha!

Abraham and the Three Bears

Another literature connection we did last week (omg, can you tell I'm an English teacher? awkward!) was to create scenes from the story of "Abraham and the Three Bears" that I have told this kiddo for almost a year now. Still a favorite, but now he likes to help tell the story and decide what toys Abraham and Baby Bear play with at the end.

I got this idea because we have a normal sized rocking chair and also a kid-sized. So we just needed one more to make three! I made a small one out of cardboard. It was...how shall we say...not very sturdy. For some reason I was expecting it to be very easy to make and expecting it to hold up well. Neither of those were true. It broke as soon as Abraham sat on it. (But I suppose, since Abraham breaks it in the story, I could say that was intentional...)

Baby Bear's little rocking chair

Big hard chair, medium soft chair, little chair

Three bowls of porridge

Abraham tasting the porridge

Abraham trying out the three beds

The Bear Family

Abraham hugging the bears

They all lived happily ever after...

He really got excited about acting out the whole story. If I can find a sturdier small rocking chair, I'd like to try this again, and maybe make it a semi-permanent installation that he can play with on his own. The main problem was the scale of everything, because in the story, of course, Abraham is supposed to be the same size as Baby Bear. But this didn't really work out in reality. But I don't think he minded!

In the kitchen

For some reason lately cooking dinner has been annoying. I'm sick of everything that I know how to make, Anderson has made his two dishes, and I don't want to look up recipes. Too much work, too much time. Also, we're trying to eat healthier, cutting out as much processed food as we can. Sooo...we subscribed to The Fresh 20! Basically, this is a meal planning website. For $5 a month, you get 5 recipes a week (classic, vegetarian, or gluten-free), plus a shopping list for each week. The cool thing is that each week's worth of recipes uses only 20 fresh, whole-food ingredients, and then some pantry staples (rice, pasta, etc). So the meals will be really healthy! It's a little intimidating, though, because several of the recipes use ingredients that I rarely or never cook with, like fava beans, eggplant, kale, portabello mushrooms, jicama. Maybe that's not so weird to some of you. I've eaten these things, but they're just not usually on the rotation of things I prepare. I was tempted to pick and choose which recipes I wanted to try, but decided that that would defeat part of the purpose of the subscription in the first place. So I'm going for it, even if it's weird. (We went with the vegetarian meal plan, btw. Cheaper and healthier, and more normal for us, since we cook meat at home less than once a week.)

Yesterday, Day 1, the meal was portabello melts, kale chips, and cantalope. The portabello melts were awesome! Portabellos, avocado, cheese, tomato, onions, on a toasted sandwich. Definitely will make this again. Very simple and good, yet not something I probably would have tried without a recipe. I didn't make the kale chips, though, because we've had them before and didn't really like them. I made edamame instead, for an easy baby-pleaser.

Anyway, point is, if anyone is in a meal rut or looking to eat healthier, I would recommend the Fresh 20! Well, for Day 1, anyway. We'll see how it goes from here! Next meal is Southern Squash Casserole, Tomato Salad, and Fresh Blueberries.

Artistic endeavors

I've been meaning for months to post about some of the fun art and activities we do: finger painting, painting with brushes, making prints, coloring and stickers, sensory trays, felt boards, puppet shows, etc. Here's one we did today - a great literature connection!

One of Abraham's favorite books (and mine, I will admit) is Little Pea. I bought this book for him before he was born. Basically, it's about a pea who hates candy, but has to eat it every night before he can have his dessert...which is spinach! Very cute, and the illustrations are great. So we have read this book a lot and all have it memorized at this point. I wanted to do something to go beyond the story*, so I thought of creating a felt storyboard. Abraham has an ocean felt board I created that he really likes, so I figured this would go over well too. Here is how it turned out:

Litte Pea felt storyboard

This was so easy and cheap to make. Felt pieces are 29 cents at Michaels, and most of this came from pieces I had already bought. Then I just free-handed the drawings based on the book. I'm sure these would be a little better if I were a better artist, but hey, they work for us! You can see the Pea family (Little Pea actually has a sad/angry face on the back for when he has to eat his candy), all the different types of candy, the bowl of spinach, the spoon that Papa Pea uses to fling Little Pea high in the air, and the hill that Little Pea likes to roll down. Abraham really liked watching me actually make all the pieces. He got so excited when each piece was done. I let him color his own piece of candy too, which you can see up there. Then we sat down and I told him the story from memory, adding and moving pieces on the board as needed. Big hit! Now we'll see if he plays with this on his own and tells the story himself.

*Besides, ahem, using the example of Little Pea to get Abe to eat things he is not fond of...and peaking his interest in spinach.

Things to remember

Abraham was pretending to be sad, as he does sometimes (weirdo), and then he said....that candy would make him happy. HA. Hahaha. Nice try, buddy! Luckily, the novelty of eating pretend candy was enough to do the trick.

We are mostly/practically/almost weaned over here. Whew/Hoorah!/Sadface all at the same time. But the point is, he wrote a song yesterday about nursing. As he played the drum, these are the lyrics he sang: "Breast, nurse, Abraham nurse breast, I do, yes." Ahahaha. It cracks me up every time I think about it. And, even though he can pronounce "Abraham" very clearly now, he still often refers to himself with an earlier pronunciation, as he did in this song: Abadaboo!

Another cute thing: he is getting the hang of apologies. If he hurts me, he will often say "sorry." But he also says sorry if he gets hurt. Say I bump him accidentally. He says, "Sorry." Or if he bumps his head on the table or trips on something, he'll say sorry.

Speaking of social graces, he also says please quite regularly and unprompted. And I think he is fast learning that it totally melts my heart and that he will get his way. I need to video this. He'll be yelling, "Pretzel! Pretzel! Pretzel!" and then all of a sudden his voice gets soft and sing-songy and he says "Please pretzel." Okay, it's really more like "peas petzu" but you get the idea.

email from my husband that made me laugh for a long time:

i went to the goodwill outlet store and it was traumatic because it was just crazy looking people frantically digging through large bins of unsorted crap.  like monkeys looking for fruit hidden under straw or i dunno chewbacca digging for robot parts.

Themes of importance

So, since I changed the name of my blog, this might have messed up the (few) people who were following me. Not sure? Anyway, I changed it on FB, so it should be importing properly now. And then all you people should follow me, rather than just reading it in your newsfeed. Why? So I can become rich, obviously.

I wanted to find a video of Ryan Adams singing "Tennessee Sucks (in the summer)" to post here, but apparently it's not a popular enough song. But c'mon, my Tennessean peeps, do you feel me on this one? I hate when it's too hot to be outside.

Also, I'm so mad at my yard. It's full of chiggers. I have - not even joking - over 20 bites all over me at this point. We tried an all-natural repellent in the yard, but I guess it didn't work. Need to do some more research, because I hate that I'd have to put poison in my yard in order to be able to be outside without getting bitten. Any suggestions?

I've got a hankering for writing again now thanks in part to Ashley's post about how hard it is. But I have a sort-of idea for some poetry inspiration, so maybe I'll work on that, and post something here if it turns out decent. You know, in all of my spare time. Gugugugoo!

Meanwhile, here's the last good one I wrote, and the last bad one. I'll let you decide which is which. No titles.

Sept. 21

At the door, a man stood.

Backwards twisting words of his.

Dark hole of a mouth shaping forms.

Rolling, foggy sounds escaping.

Covered by my hands, my ears.

Muffled.

On the table, fists pounded

            firecrackers

into the night spewing.

Colors, shapes, and blocks.

Verbally sentences diagrammed.

Trees of sentences.

Prepositions of.

Quickly adverbs.

            Dark, beautiful adjectives

through my fingers squeezing

            my ears into.

Nov. 30

And I hear the “ding” that is you

playing Mario

while I lie in bed under a pillow

and I get mad

and I want to crush all your Oreos.