Quality Time
After the mostly wonderful craziness of last week, I tried to keep to the "normal" routine as much as possible with lots of family quality time thrown in. Daddy deployed this weekend, so we tried to get in as much time with him as we could. Their Daddy date this week involved watching him mow the lawn, which for a trio of preschoolers is actually a fascinating activity. Daddy even made sure to get in lots of rough housing time with his girls. They are going to miss evenings spent like this!

Thanks to our wonderful neighbors even I got a date night with Daddy this week! The entourage was thrilled to spend an evening hanging out with LA--eating alphabet soup for dinner and playing princesses.

Project
The entourage was incredibly excited about the project this week. I threw into a shoebox the following items: a few sticker sheets, a collection of cut outs from magazines, a couple of glue sticks, two pairs of scissors, a handful of crayons, and a few pieces of construction paper. I gathered the entourage around their table in the study, opened the box, and told them to have at it. They were far more proud of their finished products than they have been of any formal craft project I've led them through. Of course, the "finished" products were cut into slivers before I could take pictures of them, but they had the best time letting their creative juices flow. We will definitely be repeating this with a variety of things in the box!

Trucks
Monkey in particular spent a lot of time with the toy trucks this week: parking them in various locations, creating different arrangments and patterns, vrooming them from one place to another, and occassionally lining them up and naming them.

Toddlerese
I've officially lost track of how many words exactly Goose says now. She's constantly popping out new words, and life is slowly getting easier now that she can communicate a little more effectively. Her most frequently used phrase: "I want . . . " This usually ends in a request for food (and yet the doctor thinks she isn't gaining enough weight. I don't get it.)

Little Techies
In addition to all the new words, Goose has discovered that there are several apps on her big sisters' iPods that she can play with (her current favorite is a shapes game, but she really enjoys the coi pond too). Monkey and Bug continue to play games are Starfall, and I recently showed them the Paint program on the old laptop. I had to laugh the other day when I looked around the study to see Monkey playing a JumpStart program on the desktop, Bug painting a picture on the laptop, Goose playing with the fish on an iPod, while I worked on the netbook.

Library Day
We were back to our usual library day today. The big girls claimed a table in the kids section and spent most of the time picking books off the shelf and quietly "reading" them. Goose didn't play with the puzzles at all this time--she too was busy pulling books off the shelf, but she did a lot less quietly reading than her sisters. We're trying to teach Goose that books are taken off one at a time and looked at, not dumped off the shelf by the armload. It's going to take a while. (It probably makes it harder that I have no problem with her doing the same thing at home. Only at home once she's emptied the shelf she plops herself down in the middle of them and spends a long time flipping through them.) Anyway, we came home with the following books this week:
I Love My New Toy! (An elephant and piggie book; this series is one of our favorites)
Horton Hears a Who
Where the Wild Things Are
Five Little Chicks
The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything
Good Night, Engines! / Wake up, Engines!
The Very Grouchy Ladybug