She’s 3!

Happy birthday Amelia, we love you!

Yesterday we had a little family celebration with grandparents and great-grandparents. We had pizza, cake, and ice cream. Since she is the only grandchild on both sides she was spoiled rotten. Including a 1/16 size violin from Grandma Jo. As tiny as it looks, it’s still a bit large for her, but hopefully she’ll grow into it fast. I don’t think she’ll be using the fingerboard for the first 6 months anyway, her left hand will just rest on the body of the violin until she does. I played violin for many years as a child/teenager and was fairly decent, so I think I can get her at least through beginning violin. She’s super excited, but we’ll be taking it slow. Right now just holding the violin is the lesson – we’ll try a couple of times a day and then I just let her pluck the strings on the floor all she wants. She also thinks applying rosin to the bow is super fun.

Today we got together with 3 of Amelia’s little friends at a local indoor play gym that Amelia loves, Run Plus Fun. I think all of the kids had fun, and afterwards we ate some delicious cupcakes made by my friend H. The big highlight for Amelia and me was conquering the big slides at Run Plus Fun. Amelia developed a slide-phobia at around 17 months when she took a little tumble down a slide. For over a year she wouldn’t go down any slide, no matter how small. In the last 6 months or so she’s been conquering slides one at a time. Today she finally worked up the courage to go down the big, fast slides at Run Plus Fun and she was so proud of herself. H captured a little video for me. I somehow left my camera at home.

After the play gym, Billy and I took Amelia to her very first ever movie in a movie theater – Chimpanzee. She’s only watched 3 movies even on DVD, so movies are a bit of a special for her. It was kind of a last minute decision after watching Jane Goodall on The Daily Show.  Billy and I did not like the movie. The footage was great, the narration was horrible. Still, I don’t regret taking Amelia because it was a fairly good choice for Amelia’s first foray into the movie theater. She understood most of the movie with some whispering from mom and dad and the movie had a bit of happiness and sadness and some scary bits. Best of all, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of characters to be heavily marketed by Disney every time a kid tuns their head. Her behavior was great and she was very respectful of the other movie goers.

Then we spent the better part of an hour playing with a water squirter (gift from Grandma) and a bucket in the backyard. She had a blast.

Then she played with her new monster feet. I highly recommend this toy. I almost didn’t get it because I thought Amelia would not be ready. But she saw a group of 5 year olds playing with it at the park and really wanted to try them out. I took a great video of this and it somehow got deleted. Very mad at myself. I’ll have to make another one and post it soon. But here’s a picture. She can actually do this all by herself! I am quite amazed.

Then it was time for bed. This night is a bit bittersweet for me because this is the last night that Amelia had “Mommy milk.” I expected this to be a sort of sad and sweet occasion where I’d look down lovingly at her while she fell asleep. Ha! She was still all wound up from birthday excitement and was totally goofy and giggling and squirming. It lasted all of 1 minute and that was the end. And I was annoyed with her behavior. Oh well. I’ve been nursing her only at bedtime for the last 6 months. During that time, we’ve been talking almost nightly that when she turned three, there will be no more milk. I was just ready to be done. I think Amelia would have liked to continue a little longer, but she’s ok with being done. We decided together to do her song jar for 10 minutes each night instead of nursing. We’ll see for sure tomorrow night.

Simple sewing for toddlers

This turned out to be very successful! I found the idea here and pretty much followed her directions – I even had a bag of Trader Joe’s sweet potatoes on hand.

Amelia was disappointed that I didn’t have blue thread (the horror!), but otherwise really enjoyed herself exclaiming several times “this is fun!” I couldn’t get her to reach underneath the frame and pull the needle up, she preferred to keep flipping the frame over and push the needle down (hence the blurry photo).

My sewing ability is strictly limited to sewing on buttons. Maybe if I start with projects like this and progress with Amelia I can get somewhere. Maybe.

Yarn Block Prints

I ran across this post awhile back and the author made yarn block prints sound very simple and fun. The first time we tried this, Amelia insisted upon using blue chunky yarn which didn’t work very well. We tried again a few weeks later, this time I insisted on using thinner string-like yarn and the results were much better.

First we wrapped our lengths of yarn around the block and secured with tape. I thought I’d do this step for Amelia, but she did pretty well on her own. I set out a yogurt-lid of paint for each of us and we began to experiment with making prints.

Amelia enjoyed this and was engaged for about 15 minutes and then was done.

My results don’t look nearly as professional as the post I linked to (please, check it out!), but I think with practice I can do something similar easily enough. This time, I was just trying to experiment in the short time I had before Amelia was finished. Next time I’ll wrap the blocks a bit more heavily and definitely slow down to take more time placing each print.

All-in-all I think this was a fun project that adults and young kids can do happily side-by-side. I think we’ll do it again when Amelia is a bit older with the math twist seen here.

Touch a Truck 2012

Touch a Truck is a neat annual event we have here in Las Vegas. This was our second time going (last year we had to miss because of Nana’s memorial). Local vehicles of all types come for the kids to touch,  climb around in, sit in the driver seat, and honk the horn. Everything from tow trucks, to fire trucks, to semi trucks, to garbage trucks, to news vans, to DUI enforcement vans (yes, I’m serious!) are represented. This year, even Robosaurus made an appearance. Amelia talked about him (or her?) for days. The profits all go to a great local non-profit, Family to Family Connection, which I personally utilized several times when Amelia was an infant.

Just a couple of pictures from Amelia’s favorite attraction, the NAFB Fire Department Mobile Decontamination Unit. They had all the showers going, a little stream of water to wade through, and scrub brushes for the kids to play with (it didn’t hurt that they were blue).  She played here for around 30 minutes and only left because we made her move on.

Painting (or drawing) on…

Another catch-all post for projects that we’ve done that I’ll never get around to writing posts about.

Grandma’s toenails

Sandpaper

Mirror with dry erase markers

Black paper with chalk (tip: hairspray sets finished chalk drawings)

Painting with…

This is a bit of a catch-all post for some painting projects that I’m not inclined to write a whole post about – but they were all great fun!

A feather

Toy vehicles (read this post about why you should do the same “old” activities with preschoolers).

Feathery Cassia leaves

A Balloon

Snapping rubber bands (really messy, but really fun). Amelia liked that this painting project made music!

Sick

Amelia’s been sick for the last 2.5 days – sicker than she’s ever been in her life in that this is the first time she’s ever vomited and the first time an illness has ever slowed her down enough so that she spent practically the entire day yesterday asleep on the couch.

She also hasn’t been eating, but I think she’s on the mend because she woke up earlier than usual this morning absolutely ravenous. I quickly put a bowl of cereal in front of her which she promptly scarfed down while I checked the morning e-mail. I turned around and had to post this:

I guess she’s still pretty tired. I can’t remember a time she’s ever just fallen asleep like this.

As a side note, I also had this with vomiting and no appetite for 1.5 days, but am better now. Of course Billy got sick last night and is staying home from work today.

Baking Soda and Vinegar Exploration Part 1

In this post, I mentioned (ok, it was more like a rant) that I don’t like baking soda volcanoes passed off as science experiments, because they aren’t. I do think, however, that baking soda and vinegar are wonderful ingredients for real preschool science. They are cheap, safe, clean, and offer a wealth of opportunities for hypothesizing and experimentation. It’s important for me to keep in mind that even though baking soda and vinegar chemistry is “been there, done that” to adults, it’s brand new and fascinating to little kids. Amelia loved all of these projects and kept saying things like “this is so amazing!” and “I love this!” and “wow, this is fun!”

(Originally I was going to do all these projects as one post, but it got too wordy, so I’ll break it down into parts).

First I set up a bunch of plastic spoons with baking soda and a drop of liquid water color on them.*** (as seen here and here)

Two of each color - one to stir into water and the other into vinegar. Forgot to take a picture after the baking soda was added, but I just put it right over the coloring.

Then I gave Amelia a cup of water and a cup of vinegar to stir the spoons into. First she had to sniff each cup and determine which was vinegar and which was water. Then she made a prediction about what would happen with each cup. This seems easy to an older child or adult, but it took Amelia 5 or 6 tries to understand what was happening, and then to learn that she could accurately predict the result.

You can see how completely enthralled she was with this by the expression on her face. She was totally delighted with each and every cup.

After she got the hang of sniffing the water and vinegar and making a correct prediction about which would bubble, I started randomly putting a cup of “unknown” liquid in front of her, not allowing her to sniff. She dumped in the baking soda and then had to think about whether the liquid was water or vinegar.

***Putting coloring on the spoons was a mistake, even though both blogs I linked to added it. Why? Because Amelia was distracted by the color. When I ask her “what happens when you stir baking soda into water?” she says “it turns blue!” (completely ignoring all the other colors we used, of course). I should have isolated the baking soda by itself before adding the color variable. After she learned what happens without the color, then we could have added the extra fun of color.

Water Colors + Salt = Really Neat!

So this started out as a batik on paper project, as seen here. But our glue lines were very thin, and I don’t really like the results- you can hardly see the designs we made with the glue. Will try again soon with thicker lines.

However, this project ended up really neat and this was one of those times Amelia just kept saying over and over again “I really love this!” After we painted with watercolors over the glue, we sprinkled salt onto the wet paint, and this was really fun. Amelia enjoyed dumping large quantities of salt onto her project while I used it a bit more sparingly. The neat part about this is the salt chases the watercolor away a bit so you end up with this dappled-looking design.

Before the salt was added.

My project.

Tissue paper window collage

Inside view in the afternoon.

This was a really fun project that Amelia and I worked on together over a couple of days. The wonderful idea came from here, and it would be really fun to do this again with a group of little kids like on that blog.

I went ahead and threw the recommended glue pens into my most recent Discount School Supply order just for this project – they were cheap, worked fabulously, and minimized any mess. This is really impossible to mess up. The only direction I had to give to Amelia was to use less glue and to only cover a small area of glass with glue at a time. Once she got it though, there was no stopping her! She was even able to work on this independently. My job was to fill in the gaps and work on the edges.

After the first couple of days, Amelia did get a bit tired of this proclaiming “this is hard work.” I’m proud of her for how long she did stick with it. So I did a bit by myself for a day.

She became interested again for the last bit and helped me finish up. I think she probably did about 40% of the whole project which is a lot. It was hard work!

Amelia is a very cautious kid by nature, and of course she was very carefully supervised when she was on this contraption!

I have no clue how long this will last, but I adore the way it looks and am tempted to do some other windows in the house. There is so much kids’ art for windows out there though (we’ve already done this) that I’ll save other windows for future projects.

Outside view at night.