Advent Comes Early
I've always been firm about the household Christmas season beginning with the first Sunday in Advent: we break out the Christmas music after church and put all the decorations up in one afternoon. This year, however, I broke down and decided it was worth it to pull out a few things early, so the entourage has a better understanding of what Christmas really is. We can't go anywhere without seeing signs of commercial Christmas with its focus on Santa, presents, and desserts. Santa seemed particularly confusing, and Bug wanted reassurances that he was "just in stories, right?" We also marveled that the couple of Christmas books they found at the library last week completely failed to mention Jesus (who has a party and forgets about the birthday boy, right?!) So this week we dug into our storage boxes and pulled out our Christmas books (a handful of nativity books and a St. Nicholas storybook), a Veggie Tales nativity set, and our iTunes Christmas library. We also visited the local Christian bookstore to purchase a kid's Advent study that we're all very excited about. The holiday season is a little more balanced now.

Project
Inspired by all the Christmas preparations, Bug decided she wanted to do a Christmas project and flipped through our craft books until she found the inspiration for these wreaths.

Playground
It's been awhile since the entourage got to play at our favorite playground, so one morning this week we got out the door early enough to fit in some playground time after running a few errands.

Hooray for fall leaves!
(They've been disappointed that our little maple sapling didn't produce enough leaves to play in,
so they were thrilled with all the leaves falling at the park!)

Haircut!
Goose finally had enough hair to warrant a first haircut! Sadly, I failed to take any photos of the actual event, but she was a very brave girl! She was obviously nervous about it, but she didn't actually cry until they broke out the hair dryer.

Reading
Reading lessons continue, but it was definitely a week of "slow and steady wins the race"! Monkey is slowly improving her sounding out and rhyming skills, and I let her add a new sound before the curriculum introduced it. Bug added two new sounds this week (d, i) and is sounding out three and four letter words all by herself. She's even dealing with the concept of silent letters (the English language is so confusing!). Both girls had some tough lessons to get through this week, so we reviewed a couple several times before moving on. Bug has also been actively memorizing more picture books and reading them to her sisters after bedtime.

Games
Monkey and Bug watched me assembling a deck of Magic cards and suddenly remembered that they hadn't played in a while, which means of course that this week involved a lot of Magic games. Bug even developed a more sophisticated strategy. She realized that it's really fun to have a long line of winning cards and that she can increase her odds of having that if she plays her highest card, so every round now involves Bug eyeballing her hand and picking out the biggest one, then adding up the numbers and comparing it to the cards Monkey and I have thrown down. Monkey, like me, doesn't care much about whether or not she's winning or losing. We have fun admiring the artwork on the cards and talking about what all the creatures are supposed to be. Both girls are improving their math skills, of course. There are even some low number cards that they've realized they don't even need counters to add up.

We also played several rounds of a Peter Rabbit board game. At the moment we play this by taking turns rolling the dice and seeing who can get to the bunny supper at the end first (math skills: recognizing numbers, counting, one-to-one ratio). Important lessons in playing by the rules and good sportsmanship were also learned. Just a note: anyone who's argued against an original sin nature has obviously never witnessed a preschooler who's just grasped the concept of winning attempt to cheat at a simple board game!

While those are the only two games we've really played this week, all three girls pulled out lots of others to play with: building and making patterns with UnoStacko blocks, sorting and mimicking the motions on a set of Eric Carle animal cards, fishing with a magnetic pole and fish, identifying the objects on Memory game cards, and lining up and identifying the letters on Scrabble tiles. So much fun!

Germs
All three girls got nasty colds this week, and poor Monkey even spiked a fever for 24 hours. The health and science lessons learned here were, of course, all about germs, how they spread, what we can do to keep that from happening, and what we can do to help our bodies get better and keep from getting sick in the first place. As a result we missed several of our usual activities (library storytime, church night supper, the homeschool playgroup, and a visit to the Y).  For some of those days, the girls only had colds, but declared that they just weren't up for playing with friends. They definitely validated the declaration by spending a large part of the time lounging around the living room, listening to lullaby music, and looking at books. We also watched some extra TV: at Monkey's request we saw the VeggieTales The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything and more 1940s episodes of Superman (also a particular favorite of Goose).

Monkey was feeling yucky, but Bug and Goose asked me to pull out the camera, so they could "cheese"!