Library Day
This week's storytime theme was cars, trucks, and trains. As usual the girls loved the stories and begged out of participating in most of the get-your-wiggles-out activities--except for when the whole group became one long train and placed a fun stop-and-go game around the storytime room. I also made friends with a couple of other milspouses. Hopefully, we can herd the kids into being friends too! We came home with these books:
The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs
Mouse's First Fall
Chicky Chicky Chook Chook
Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse
Tell Me My Story, Mommy
Hurry up and Slow Down!
Will's Mammoth
The Caterpillow Fight
Good Thing You're Not an Octopus!

Epic Adventures!
Daddy and I watched the movie Epic this weekend, and decided it was must-see viewing for the girls. They LOVED it! (In fact, I've been informed that we need own it, so they can watch it again.) Bug has even figured out that she gets better answers if she saves her "why" questions for after the movie instead of peppering me with them while we watch. The real sign that this story captured their imaginations was the next day when Monkey triumphantly popped into the kitchen with an action figure in hand: "Look, Mommy! Green Lantern looks like a Leaf Man!" He and the girls' fairy dolls, who look a lot like the flower people in the movie, had lots of adventures. At the end of movie I caught the small print noting that the movie was inspired by a picture book by William Joyce. The girls and I were very excited to find it on our library's shelves! It bears very little resemblance to the movie, but it does have Leaf Men and it's a really lovely little book that I suspect I'll be reading frequently until we have to return it.

Playground
We made it to the playground several times this week, and we finally figured out the best time to go. The elementary school bus stop drops kids off right next to the playground, and we discovered a small contingent of neighborhood stay-at-home moms who hang out for a while before heading home. There are a couple of other kindergartners in the bunch. My girls didn't play with them much yet, but at least they saw me making friends with the other moms--that's usually the first step toward making real friends for them.

Being Touristy
This Saturday we decided to visit one of the must-sees in our area, and headed for the wharf. It was a bit wet and blustery, but we had a great time anyway! Between walking along the wharf and shoreline, we spotted otters, sea lions, harbor seals, and several kinds of birds, which we were able to identify using the local wildlife guide I got today. We also stopped to watch salt water taffy being made at the candy store and decided we needed to buy a bag to take home with us after a tasty seafood dinner overlooking the marina. Dinner entertainment included watching a very playful otter and several sea gulls as well as looking up squid on my phone, so the girls would know what animal they were eating.


The girls were very excited about finding this platform full of sea lions! They were particularly amused
by the one sleepingup on the rail (seriously, I would have loved to see how he got up there!).

Daddy explained a little about how sailboats work.

Three Rs
We're all plugging away at the same goals and making good progress:

Monkey finished Hop on Pop, and decided that her reading lessons would be most productive if we went back and forth between her textbook and a real book. Since I was planning to talk her into that plan anyway, I was thrilled to jump on her idea, and she finished out the week reading pages from the text book with slightly more challenging vocabulary, but lots of phonics clues. She also took some initiative with her math lessons. We focused on numbers 9, 11, and 12 this week, then took one day to review and drill these first dozen numbers (Thursdays are super-busy, so I decided to lower my stress level and not even try to do formal lessons that day.) After doing 9 on Monday, she asked if we could "do that number that looks like two 1s next?" because she assured me she knew the number ten, but had trouble remembering eleven. For writing, in addition to some copy work, Monkey really practiced writing her name. The poor kid has kind of a long one, and she really wants to be able to write it all out instead of using her nickname on things like worksheets at church.

Goose learned the letter C this week. She's also taken to pulling letter magnets at random off the fridge and asking me what they are, so I'm hoping more letters are going to just sink in. On Friday while her sisters were copying nursery rhymes (their choice), Goose took one of the nursery rhyme copy pages, and I had her circle the letters we've done in lessons so far (A, B, and C). She continues to be really into math worksheets, and usually does 2 or 3 per day (at which point we've run out of time, but not necessarily her interest). One of the things slowing her down is that she doesn't have the pencil control yet to actually write the numbers herself. I found several worksheets that help her work on that though, by having her trace lines connecting baby animals to mommies, etc.

Bug is still reading the Little Bear book (it's a collection of four stories), but we cut short some of her reading lessons because the poor girl was just coughing so much (fortunately, by the end of the week she was sounding much better). For math, she worked in her addition book, where she can solve most of the problems without using a number line or manipulatives, and practiced using manipulatives to illustrate multiplication problems (she's working with problems from the 2s, 3s, and 4s times tables).

Everybody loves marshmallow math! I gave each girl a bowlful of mini
marshmallows and a small stack of flashcards with instructions to illustrate
the concept on the card with marshmallows (1-5 for Goose, 6-12 for Monkey,
and an assortment of multiplication problems for Bug).