Stay-at-home Days
After all the excitement of Christmas and traveling to see family, the entourage and I enjoyed several stay-at-home days this week. They had plenty of time to play with their new toys and settle back into the familiar routine. The additional Playmobils, fairies, and family dolls were quickly incorporated into the usual pretend play. We read lots of the new books and even managed to find shelf space for all of them!

Hard at work painting dinosaurs

Maybe the biggest sign that they just needed stay-at-home days was the brevity of this weeks library day. We were in and out in less than 30 minutes! They didn't even want to stick around and read books. They quickly located a favorite airplane book (Airshow about a girl their age who attends an airshow with her family; it features labeled drawings of lots of airplanes including a number of military ones that are always favorites) and a copy of The 20th Century Children's Book Treasury, which they picked because they remember reading from it at Grandma's house.

They're Getting So BIG!
All the girls hit big milestones this week. Goose is now in a toddler bed instead of a crib. They are all very excited about this development, and Goose has handled the new freedom superbly. In fact, she wanders out from naptime or nighttime with less frequency than one of her older sisters! This is one of those cases where I think it's been really helpful to have them all in the same room, and she can just follow her big sisters lead (or get dragged back to the bedroom by them, which I'm pretty sure has happened on at least one occasion). A couple of days after Goose's big switch, Monkey and Bug switched from 5-point car seats to "big kid" booster seats. The only catch is that while they can't buckle themselves in anymore (we're working on it), they can unbuckle themselves. Fortunately, that hasn't happened while we've been on the road yet, and we had a long and serious preventative discussion about it (with the threat of putting them back in car seats if it becomes a problem). So far, so good, and they are loving the additional freedom to wiggle!

Reading
We started daily reading lessons back up with much success! Monkey and Bug jumped right in with enthusiasm. Bug read several more sentences this week and added a new sound (c as in cat).
Monkey read her first complete sentence this week, and she also added a letter sound to her repertoire (i as in sit). Bug also wrote another email to Daddy and spent a fair amount of time on the desktop computer just typing away at a string of seemingly random letters in Word.

Fractions
Bug was rummaging through the game cabinet this week and came across the set of fraction bars we bought a while back. I agreed to open up the rest of them (only 1 through 1/4s were loose) and explained how they worked. She very quickly understood that the number on the bottom of the fraction means it takes that many parts to make up a whole bar. I also showed her that you can play around with them and use different fraction pieces to make a whole (so, 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4 still makes 1). I walked away and she spent another 5 or 10 minutes arranging them on her own.

Calendar
I decided we needed to start intentionally working on the concept of time--not telling time on clocks but the concepts of days, weeks, months, and years. To this end we bought a calendar for the entourage that has a new coloring page every month. We sat down one day this week and compared my calendar to theirs, talked about all the months that make up a year, what month we're in now, how each day has a number, what today was (and crossed off the couple of days in January we'd already passed), and what the names of days of the week were. This last item was followed by countless renditions of the days of the week song (to the tune of "The Adams Family"). My plan is to mark important days in each month as we enter it, and to keep up the habit of crossing off days and noting which day of the week it is.

Christmas Money!
Perhaps the highlight of the week was taking the entourage to our new favorite toy store (small, local place that stocks all--and only--my favorite brands). We discussed their budget and that they may see things they wanted that they didn't have enough to buy. They listened patiently, and it must have sunk in because they didn't have any problem accepting that several items were out of their price range. We spent a long time browsing the store and playing with the various items out on display before they made any decisions. First, they decided to split the cost of two things to share: a set of three bathtub boats and a big box of Marbleworks. With the money they had left they bought a couple of wind up toys (the obsession with automatons continues!) and several plastic figures from a bin they've admired for a long time. Goose was particularly excited about her purchase from the figure bin--a shimmery, purple, five-headed dragon, whose first act in pretend play was to attempt to eat the fairy figures her sisters bought. Don't you just love little sisters?