Spooky Pancakes

Mommy and Auntie Lu took us to IHOP this morning for FREE kid's spooky pancakes. They brought out the pancake with whipped cream and a strawberry on it and some little fixins for us to decorate. It was awesome. HOWEVER obviously it was too much shenanigans on a simple pancake, and I ended up eating most of Mommy's french toast instead. :)
Emma Grace inhaled her's however. She can be quite the tank when she wants.

After we were done, Aly and I made out... it was fancy.

LOOK AT THE MUSH THAT IS THIS CHILD! Jameson... my Mommy wants to gobble you up... I'd like you to quit looking so cute please because for real... I'm currently in no mood for a little brother. ;)

What's Emma Grace been up to?

Rachel here. Emma Grace is all over the place. I put tasks on her shelves only to have her throw them on the floor, and then she meanders around the house to get into shenanigans... or she does the things on Reese's shelves... and by does the things on Reese's shelves, I mean she throws those things on the floor as well. :)

Next week I'm going to put the crayon tin on her shelf, and she'll ignore it. Last week, she poured every single one on the floor... repeatedly. She managed to put a handful of them back in the can, but as soon as I put the can back under the easel, she would pour them back onto the floor. She's such a charmer that one.
She does the same thing with Reese's Little Miss Sunshine band aid tin.

This is a hammering toy, but Em just likes to put the pieces in the holes.

Our generic Melissa & Doug magnetic bug puzzle. It was on sale at Michael's for $2. Reese loves them, and Emma definitely gets a kick out of anything Reese does.

The girls both love the pea pod seesaw at the library, and when I saw this brand new IKEA model at the consignment sale for $4 I knew I had to have it.

EG can get the animals to the correct spots on her puzzle, but she definitely can't quite get them in the holes yet.

Emma Grace is big into wearing things around her neck. She's always digging in the dress up drawer to accessorize.

If she doesn't find what she wants... she wears her sister's underpants... seriously. (And yes, those are Christmas pajamas... I'm getting my money's worth this go 'round.)

This week I introduced the color orange to go with all of our Halloween shenanigans. You can really tell she's learning a lot... taking it all in. ;)

Halloween "rattles."

Emma Grace loves to play with her basket of gourds. She tends to lick them and pretend they are ice cream cones. She'll lick it and then say "Mmmm... nunny!"

I can't tell you how many jam sessions/dance parties we had this week.

The girls play with play doh every. single. day. without. failure.

Each of the three pumpkin baskets had Fall/Halloween trinkets in them. One had bouncy eyeballs, one had silk Fall leaves, and the last had glow in the dark spiders.

Em's new favorite thing is sitting on the potty, which is more than I can say Reese would do FOR THE LONGEST TIME. I sat her on it the other day just to see what she would do. Now she wants to be on it all the time. She'll come up to me, touch her diaper, and say "potty." I strip her down, and then she just pops a squat and relaxes. She brushes her teeth, reads, you name it... except for actually using it. :) It's REALLY REALLY cute.

Emma Grace loves to pull Reese's tasks off of her shelf and attempt to do them herself. She mocks us all big time, but never gets it quite right. ;)

Painting with REAL paint... washable of course.

All hail Crayola and their Color Wonder products!

She REALLY dug dumping the spiders out of the jar and then putting them back in. :)

I have a few more activities that Reese did last Friday to post, but we have a busy weekend of marathon trick or treating, AND Bryan and I have promised one another to have a computer free weekend. That means after nap time tomorrow I leave the world of cyber until Sunday evening. So until then... HAPPY HAUNTING!

Reese Wed/Thurs

Rachel here. /S/... sprinkles and spiders. I can not even tell you how long Reese played with the sprinkles. She played with the sprinkles so much, that she did maybe one other activity from her shelf the rest of the day. :)
She marble painted a spiderweb which she later added spider stickers to.

Uppercase/lowercase letter match. (2 Teaching Mommies)

Frozen /s/trawberry and banana /s/mootie popsicles. :)

Emma Grace had a bit of a learning curve to overcome. :)

Eyeball bouncy ball transfer. Please excuse the color combination... there were no other containers clean. Argh.

Spiderweb watercolor/crayon resist painting. This was turning out to be so cute until Reese asked to use the smaller paint brush. :(

Big vs. Little eyeball sort. Each bowl was labeled with a /b/ for big and an /l/ for little.

/S/unscreen and /s/unglasses patterns. (Preschool Palace)

Color sorting with purple, green, and orange spider rings.

And finally... finger print spider family a la Reese, Emma Grace, and myself. :)

Reese... Mon/Tues

Rachel here. We started this week with the /p/ sound. I took the next set of letters (yellow group) and chose /p/ and /s/ because I knew I would be able to incorporate Halloween themes in with those two sounds.

Reese working on her /p/ lesson. She's decorating her /p/ with pennies.
I gave her red and yellow food coloring and had her squeeze them separately into two different jars. And then she took a baster and transferred/mixed the two into a third jar.

Then my hopes were for her to have bright colors to transfer to a coffee filter in order to make a pumpkin. NOT SO MUCH. I had to put a piece of orange paper behind it to enhance it. I cut various facial features for different projects for Reese. She was able to pick and choose what sets she wanted for what projects.

Today she cut orange paper and put the pieces onto contact paper and made a pumpkin mosaic.

Transferring candy corn pumpkins.

Halloween sensory tub.

20 minutes later. :)

"There was an Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything" activity from Making Learning Fun.

She colors very lightly, but she did in fact color... that in itself should be counted as a milestone. ;)

Helping decorate cookies for Daddy to take to Alpha with him.

More pumpkins.

(My Montessori Journey)

I bought the felt board from Once Upon a Child months and months ago, but I cut the pumpkin sets for Reese myself. There were three each of the stems, sets of eyes, noses, and mouths. She spent a little bit of time mixing and matching the features. This was an activity that took me 30 minutes to make and her 5 minutes to play with... le sigh.

This was a joint effort. I had to tell her where to lace the ribbon, but she really got a kick out of lacing it, and it turned out adorable! (I can teach my child)

This week's Art Class projects.