September 8, 2014

Two things: I canNOT believe that it was already two years ago that I was only a few days away from having Luke.  It was the bloomin' hottest summer ever-ever-ever.  I was dilated to 4cm and 60% effaced for weeks, getting up each morning at 6am to go for a rather uncomfortable 2-mile walk to try to hasten that process even more.  The night before I delivered I said to Matt, "I think this boy is going to be our mighty warrior."

Boy, was that ever true! ;)  A cute one, too.

                               

Second thing: parenting a nearly four-year-old is no joke.  Seriously the most awesomely humbling experience ever. There was nothing even remotely terrible about the two's.  We were warned that the three's were actually the one to watch out for...and now that we are approaching four the truth about that age is coming out too: parts of it ain't pretty.  A resounding AMEN from the Gouveia's here.  Wow. I won't get into any details because it's just too exhausting to even begin describing it...but....just...wow.

He does still have his sweet moments, though. :)  Enjoying watermelon from our garden.  I took him to the front porch and showed him how to shoot-spit out the seeds.  Last week while I was at work Matt texts me, Found Levi spitting watermelon seeds on the floor.  He said Mama said it's fun to spit out the seeds.  My reply: OUTSIDE. I MEANT OUTSIDE. Lesson?  Always be very specific.

                                   

Anyway.  So.  Labor Day weekend we went to our friends' house for a cookout and it was (as always) a bloomin' riot.  As things were winding down Krista says, "I feel like piling into our cars and going out for ice cream."  Of course, practical clock-watching me says, "Enhhh...I gotta get these boys home and in bed."  Krista: "NO!  In the motorhome!!  Let's all pile in the motorhome and go out for ice cream!  It'll be like a party bus!  Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleeeeeaaaaaase?"

Well, why not.  Levi thought it was the coolest thing ever.  So did we.

                                   

As an early birthday gift, Matt took Levi to Menard's and bought him a stack of wood scraps and a few other odds and ends.  Luke and I cleaned up the (janky, dirty, slightly unusable) area behind our garage while they were at the store, and arranged the hand-me-down playhouse on a spread-out pile of sand to create Levi's own construction zone.  Holy moly - best present ever.  Every boy who comes over to play disappears back there.  We have since added a couple of small step ladders and my garden stakes and trellises that I'm done using for the season.  Levi formed "Jason & Jason Construction Company" - insisting that I call him and Luke BOTH Jason (???).  The Jasons take their work VERY seriously.

                                  

Yes, those are garden trellises they are using as ladders.  Risk Management put the kabash on that one.  (He doubles as Infection Control too.) LOLOLOLOL  It's a good thing.

                                 

School stuff. Levi starts one day a week of threeschool on Friday.  His teacher is a wonderful young lady who just graduated from college last year, so she has lots of (definitely needed) energy.  He is VERY excited to go to school!!  I can't believe that this little baby that was JUST placed on my chest after hours of labor is actually going to school.

Meanwhile, we are plugging away as much as we can at home.  So far, pretty good.  We have our little routine and it's working pretty well. As long as the weather is nice our routine is going to be very loose. There will be plenty of time for crafty projects and more focused activities when the snow is flying!

One thing that thrills my socks off is this amazing thing that I ordered.  I had read about it on my favorite homeschooling blog several months (maybe a year?) ago.  I tucked the thought in the back of my head and have been rolling over and over it for that amount of time....read every review (literally from around the world), calculated the cost vs. what I currently spend on learning toys and manipulatives each year...talked it over a few times with Matt...and then we bought it.  It's called a Spielgaben set and is basically a learning system of open-ended toys geared to ages 3-12.  I really can't do justice to describing it but it's beautiful in every sense of the word.  It's all about play-based learning, exploration, developing fine motor skills, and play that encourages math skills and logic.  It also comes with hundreds of pages of learning resources, lesson plans, and inspiration cards (for building things).  You could seriously build an entire curriculum on it.   Yes, it was expensive and we had to weigh the cost carefully, but when I considered the fact that I spend at least $50-100 each year on learning toys specifically for homeschooling, if even one boy uses it for just a few years, it'll pay for itself...but it really will probably get used for several years, up through junior high. If both boys use it, even better.  So, we sprang for it.

Levi is NOT one for a lot of open-ended play, oddly. He loves projects and activities with a purpose and a definite goal - like puzzles.  He is all about gross motor movement (like every other boy) and is huge on language skills and development...but not so much fine motor. So I knew that a set like this would challenge him, only mildly interest him in some ways, and then eventually it will be a huge success for him once he keeps gravitating to it.

I'm mixing it up right now as I pick through the educational resources the set came with...mostly I set parts of the set out for the boys to explore and play with freely, which they have really enjoyed doing. I put some out with play dough the other day.  Levi made a sea urchin and a little underwater scene.

                             

                             

I put contact paper on the windows and let the boys stick shapes to it and make their own pictures.  Luke just randomly stuck shapes on, of course, and Levi built a stick person (I just taught him how to do stick people using a fun method suggested by Handwriting Without Tears) and wanted me to build a boat.

Levi's

                              

Lukie's

                             

Here's the first "man" Levi made.  There's a song on our Handwriting Without Tears CD that describes how to draw a person, so modeled it for Levi, and then he built "Mat Man" himself.  I left the pieces out and he kept going back to practice, it was kind of cool.  The next day he drew his first 'person,' which is huge because all he does otherwise is scribble, LOL.

The Spielgaben comes with some pretty cool worksheets and simple activities, so I've been experimenting with them to see what grabs Levi's interest.  So far he's been more take it or leave it as far as engaging with me in playing, but since we've gotten the set it's what he primarily wants to play with. I have to keep a close eye on them playing with it because there are some very small pieces, and Luke does put a lot of things in his mouth still.  So I store it away and pull out little bits at a time for them to fiddle with. 

After Luke went down for his nap today, I was all set to sit down with Levi to read...and he asked if we could play with the toys that I had set out in the morning.  Well, by all means. So we sat down and started fiddling around with the pieces. He pressed some small wooden disks into larger wooden circles and said he was putting money in envelopes to take to the post office.  So we built a post office together and people to work at the post office, and played with that for a while - pretending to send "money" in the mail, counting it all out together, etc.  This is exactly what I had in mind when I bought this set: engaging with each other in creative play, building things, reinforcing concepts, and keeping it fun.

Then he wanted to pull out his tractor and play on the floor.  I thought he was done playing with the set, but he started loading blocks into the trailer, dumping them on the wooden board, and counting them all out (his counting is great sometimes, rough most of the time)

He  brought over a large pile, and got overwhelmed by counting it all...so the next "load" he made much smaller, and he even said he made it smaller so he could count it better (he counts decently up to 12, then gets jumbled up between 13 and 15).  Then he loaded up a huge amount of tiny little matchstick-sized pieces.  I used the larger circles to show him how he could take a large number of items and divide them into smaller groups that would make it easier to count. He caught onto that right away and placed small piles of sticks into each circle so that I could count them all.

We played for about 45 minutes together until it was well past nap time and I put the brakes on it.  I was thrilled because he got practice with fine motor activity, counting, sorting, and probably a few other things that have lofty educational terms that I don't know.  And it was all while playing.  So fun.

Between our Sonlight curriculum and using the Spielgaben and getting more familiar with all that we can do with it, and doing some of the fun Handwriting Without Tears activities, I think it'll be a fun year of 'homeschooling.'  Most days are loose and easygoing, and I write down all the things we do (planned or otherwise) at the end of the day in my school planner so I can see that little things ARE being absorbed along the way.  :)