Holy Week
We kicked off Holy Week by making sugar cookies in spring-themed shapes at the girls request (we made Christmas cookies after all. Why not Easter cookies!) I switched our daily Bible readings to the Holy Week stories starting on Palm Sunday. They were so excited about waving palm branches! Bug decided to wear a special dress for the occasion--her Christmas dress, red velveteen and white faux fur and all!

The next "big events" for the girls were on Friday: I decided to start a tradition of having fresh cut flowers for Easter decorations, and I let the girls pick them out from the grocery store. Monkey chose pink roses, Bug picked purple irises, and Goose went with orange tulips. When we got home we searched the house for vases, and the girls helped me pick appropriate ones.

That afternoon we dyed Easter eggs. The girls colored them with crayons first (they only dropped two!), then I made six different colors of dye to drop them in. I had to do quite a bit of convincing to get the girls to leave them in for any length of time. (We're working on the whole concept of patience. Cue Bug wailing: "But, Mommy, I don't have any patience!").

(Monkey dyed eggs too. She has a habit of stepping out of photos though.)

Most of our Easter celebrating took place on Saturday with two parties! The first was an event at church that involved several tables of craft projects, snacks, a retelling of the Easter story, an egg hunt, and a couple of bouncy houses. Let me just say that our children's minister is awesome. She had them hunting for empty Easter eggs, but she explained beforehand that the empty eggs stood for the empty tomb the disciples found and that at the end the kids could trade them in for a treat bag to celebrate Christ's resurrection. Besides the sheer fun of finding (Monkey and Bug compared it to a hidden pictures puzzle "only in real life!"), the kids were motivated to find several metallic eggs or to collect the most eggs, both of which would earn them an extra prize. (The obvious upsides for the grown ups: the parents didn't have to deal with dozens of plastic eggs to take home, and our minister could reuse the eggs next year.) We went straight from church to our second party: a neighborhood potluck that was actually taking place in our front yard (hosted by our next door neighbors with my permission). We all enjoyed lots of tasty food, and Bug and Goose had a blast in our neighbors bouncy house. Monkey decided she'd been social enough for the day, and retreated into the house to get some alone time with a brief appearance to acquire food. (Let me just say I'm very thankful for a self-aware preschooler who can declare that she needs alone time instead of having a meltdown.)

I had three happy girls Easter morning when they woke up to chocolate bunnies and hot cross buns for breakfast! I decided to make it a relative stress-free Sunday morning, and we got to church too late for Sunday school, but early enough for the service that we got to watch the guest musicians warming up. They were particularly impressed with the tuba: "It's HUGE!" They left halfway through for children's church as usual, but I rushed to get them back at the end so we could process out to the lawn with flowers to place in the cross.

Bug and Goose were thrilled to have a pic taken in their beautiful dresses.
Monkey exited the frame, and I had to catch a candid later. 

Nana's Here!
Nana came to visit this week! We did some shopping for spring clothes, which the girls were very excited about. They even tried to help me find a new dress for Easter; I came away with a new blouse and some strappy shoes at least (Bug in particular was concerned that I should have a pretty dress too). They got to play on the play space at the mall and at Chick-fil-a--always popular activities. They also got some time with just Nana to play, read books, and watch a movie, while I got to leave the house solo to do things like go for a run, browse the library, and take myself out for dinner and a movie.

cheesing for Nana

Library Day
This week's storytime was pirates and princesses, and all the kids were invited to dress up. Bug and Goose donned crowns, but Monkey grabbed a hook and a bandana. (I think I had the only female pirate in the crowd.) We had a guest librarian from the "big library" who dressed up as Fancy Nancy to read a few books about pirates and princesses. They had several craft station set up, and my girls made pirate hats and fancy wands.

Bug took this photo of Goose modelling a pirate hat Bug made.

Their book selection this week certainly followed a fantasy theme! We came home with:
The Sleeping Beauty
Not All Princesses Wear Pink!
Puff the Magic Dragon
Child of Faerie
Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy
Hey, Mama Goose! (they've checked this one out multiple times--it's a cute book about fairy tale characters going house hunting.)
Strega Nona's Magic Lessons
Jump Up!

Movies
Since ceasing our morning TV time, we've stopped watched typical preschool cartoons, but we haven't stopped watching everything. Over the past few weeks, we've watched Linnea in Monet's Garden (lovely little movie about a girl and her elderly neighbor who visit Paris to see Monet's paintings, house, and garden; it cuts between animations of the characters and real footage of paintings, photos of Monet himself and his house and garden, which are currently a museum. The girls were excited to recognize paintings from our prints and from their Monet picture book.) and The Red Balloon (classic French film from the 50s; the drama crossed barriers of language, culture, and time; they loved it.) They also watched The Land Before Time with Nana (what preschooler doesn't love baby dinosaurs, right?) and rewatched one of their favorites, The Lion King, when Miss J came over to watch them for a couple of hours. Apparently she was treated to play-by-play commentary throughout the showing.

Reading & Math
We took a break from the usual lessons with Nana here, but we picked it up again at the end of the week. Monkey and Bug each learned a new letter sound (a as in ape for Monkey, and v for Bug). Goose insisted on doing a few of her own reading lessons this week too. For her of course we just review letter sounds. She has the first several sounds from the book: m, a, s, and e.

Math was similar: review and confidence building. Mostly we worked on counting--also skip counting for Bug, who wants to learn how to count "the fast way." During one of these lessons Monkey opted to just listen in while quietly working on her own spatial reasoning skills with a set of magnets--building different forms, laying them out to make shapes on the floor, lining them up in rows of equal length and rearranging them, etc. Once again Goose insisted on her own formal lesson. I used the abacus with her to practice identifying colors and counting to 10.

History
We only did one history project this week. I printed up 8 or 10 samples of ancient Roman mosaics, which we admired then talked about how they were made. The next obvious step: We made our own! Of course, ours were just construction paper.