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What I Want for Every Community…

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…An indoor play area NOT part of a fast food restaurant.

I’ve noticed a trend in blog posts, Facebook status updates and conversations during these long winter months. That topic? How to keep from going crazy couped up inside when it’s too cold to play outside. Fast food has not been an acceptable option for me when it comes to feeding my girls. Even as recent as last month I turned down a lunch invite to McDonald’s because I didn’t want to buy that food for my girls. But, one late nap and a very wired three year old had me singing a very different tune.

When trying to find ways for Sammi to get some physical play when she woke up from a nap at 6 pm I was in a bit of a dilemma. How on earth was I supposed to get her tired enough to go to bed when it was already dark and it was very cold and snowy? I finally caved and we went to Old McDonald’s(as she calls it) so she could climb, slide and crawl to her heart’s content. Since that fateful day, we have gone to McDonald’s four or five more times. It kills me! I just want a place to play without the obligation to purchase food.

Another option is the play areas at the mall. We’re fortunate enough that the malls that are close to us all have pretty fun play areas. They provide opportunities for climbing and sliding and, as an added bonus, a bit of imaginative play. But the closest mall to us is 45 minutes away, not exactly a viable option for an evening outing. And not all malls have play areas. I was shocked when a mall in Utah removed its wonderful play area because of lack of funding to maintain it. Seriously?

So, I propose a community indoor play area that is not associated with food, that is not associated shopping, that is just a place focused on play. I want it to be on neutral ground where any family would feel comfortable using the indoor play area.  Just as they would to play at the city park.

What do you want for every community?

CDC’s Learn the Signs. Act Early. Campaign

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I was at the health department last month and picked up an information card highlighting milestones of child development for little ones birth through 4 years old. I thought it fitting to share with you as it has great things to look for in your little ones as they change month to month.

The purpose of the CDC’c campaign “Learn the Signs. Act Early.” is to help parents and healthcare providers catch the signs of developmental delays and disorders early so resources and treatments can begin as early as possible thus allowing children the maximum benefit from those resources and treatments.

I’ve been blessed with two healthy little ones so I love this information from a “oh ya, she does that now!” perspective. But my best friend from high school just told me that her second child was recently diagnosed with high functioning autism. A label to the behavior somehow seems to change the whole experience. Sometimes it’s in a good way because now real information and solutions become available. But sometimes it’s in a negative way when there’s denial or an uncooperative attitude from a parent or teacher. I think information is the key to understanding. That coupled with the love we have for our little ones will get us and them far in this life.

Turkey Crafts

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I thought I’d get these up yesterday, but Brent has a test this week so I’ve been extra exhausted at the end of each day. Ah, the test is tomorrow and I’m looking forward to a relaxing evening. Back to turkey crafts!

Handprint Turkeys by Sammi and Elli

Handprint Turkeys by Sammi and Elli

This turkey handprint craft we made at the library. The template can be downloaded from Family Fun.

Supplies:

  • colorful feathers
  • googly eyes
  • orange beak from foam sheet
  • red gobbler from foam sheet
  • crayon or marker for tracing child’s hand
  • glue dots for quick and easy attachment
Sammi hung her turkey on HER fridge.

Sammi hung her turkey on HER fridge.

The idea for this turkey craft came from Make and Takes Turkey Countdown. We modified the face a bit by using foam sheets for depth and googly eyes for fun. Sammi loves BIG googly eyes! Here’s another one of her posing with her babies by her turkey.

PB120052

Fall Leaf Wreath

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leaf-wreathSammi and I made these fun fall leaf wreaths during Elli’s nap. We enjoyed a beautiful sunny fall day at the end of last week. We went outside with a big bowl and picked up leaves that had fallen from our tree. We gathered big leaves, small leaves and in-between leaves.

supplies-for-leaf-wreathWe brought them in, gathered our supplies and got to work.

making-leaf-wreathWe sorted the leaves by size onto three piles. That inspired us to make three wreaths. We sprayed the glue adhesive on the plates and started sticking. We found, after many leaves fell off, that the leaves stick better if you also spray the back of the leaves and then stick them together. I think the best solution would be to use a sturdy paper plate and then paint white glue on and then stick the leaves.

leaf-wreathsSammi had a lot of fun with this craft. She placed the leaves on all three without getting bored. We hung them in the dining room on our large blank, boring wall. I love the way they look.

Happy Fall!

Stickers

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Sammi has long been fascinated with stickers. I love it when places like banks, the grocery store or the doctor’s office offer children stickers instead of suckers. Sammi thinks it’s a great treat to get a sticker from someone. And I love that she’s not being offered more sugar. Sugar is not the only treat! There’s some residual Halloween-candy-consumption-control irritation here. Please forgive!

Elli has recently discovered stickers. In one day she went from oblivious to their existence to acknowledgment, ability to remove the sticker from the page, and ability to place the sticker on a piece of paper. She made a beautiful collage of Sesame Street stickers. She was so intrigued by the experience that she focused on making her picture for about a half an hour. Pretty good for a 13 month old!

Sammi got in on the fun and enjoyed handing stickers to Elli. That presented a new challenge in how to get the sticker from Sammi’s finger and then manipulate it so she could get it to stick to her paper. She loved it. This was great practice in fine motor skill and teamwork. I really appreciate when the girls can share their interest in a common activity instead of fighting over who gets to do it. They did a good job of playing together on this one.

Stickers are a great thing to have on hand to distract and entertain your little ones.

Fine Motor Skills

Elli had fun learning how to control her finger and thumb to get them to work together. She needed this skill to remove the sticker from the page and then change how she was holding it so she could make the sticker stick to the new paper.

Spooky Monster House

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Happy Halloween!

Here’s one last Halloween craft you can do with all that candy you’ll get Trick-or-Treating!

We have enjoyed Make and Takes Monster Mania eBook. It is full of fun ideas that inspire creativity and problem solving skills. I love the projects because most of them use things I have on hand anyway. It makes it easy to pick and project and do it right away. For the Spooky Monster House, though, I spent some time preparing. I thought the prepping was half the fun and definitely worth it. I used the frosting recipe I found here.

Sammis Spooky Monster House

Sammi’s Spooky Monster House

Mommys Spooky Monster House

Mommy’s Spooky Monster House

Daddys Spooky Monster House

Daddy’s Spooky Monster House

Looking for more monster ideas? Check out my Monster board on Pinterest!

Ghost Craft Projects

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We had fun this week making ghost craft projects. We also worked on a big project inspired by this I saw on a blog I love. But we’ll share that next week, after the Halloween hype is over. Here are our ghosts!

Cotton Ball Ghost

How do you color a ghost white? With cotton balls, of course!

Sammi and Elli both had fun with this project. I downloaded this cute ghost here then printed it in two sizes. For Sammi I gave her the bigger ghost. I let her put the glue on her ghost picture and then put the cotton balls on the picture. Sammi finished hers off with googly eyes. She also dumped some glue on Elli’s ghost and then spread it around.

For Elli I handed her cotton balls one at a time and told her to put them on the ghost. I tapped my finger on different places on the ghost to help her spread them out. She giggled and smiled the whole time. It was a fun activity.

Ghost Trick-or-Treater

We finally made it to the preschool storytime program at the Middlesboro Library (where I do the laptime program) and were treated to this treasure of a craft. This was such a fun project and Sammi was able to do it all on her own, which makes it a success in her eyes 🙂

We used thin glue dots to attach the arms and legs to the back side of the ghost. Those glue dots also worked wonderfully to accessorize the legs with shoes, the ghost with eyes and add the word “BOO.” I loved the glue dots so much I ran out and bought some for our projects at home.

Happy Halloween tomorrow! What’s your little one going to be?

More Pumpkin Crafts and a Book

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After making the Pumpkin Patch craft, we had lots of extra pumpkins so we continued the pumpkin theme in our crafts. In this post we’ll be showing you

Five Little Pumpkins

This is my favorite Halloween finger play. I love the board book illustrated by Dan Yaccarino, who’s got to be one of my favorite children’s book illustrators. I finally bought the book this year since our library here doesn’t have it. We used the pumpkins while we read the book. The first time through we took away a pumpkin for each pumpkin in the book and then the next time we put one pumpkin back as we read about each one. Sammi loved this and we read the book several times with the pumpkins. The pumpkins are fun all on their own with out the book.

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate
The first one says, “Oh my, it’s getting late.”
The second one says, “There are witches in the air.”
The third one says, “But we don’t care.”
The fourth one says, “Let’s run and run and run.”
The fifth one says, “I’m ready for some fun.”
Oooo went the wind and out went the light.
And five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

Make Your Own Pumpkin Faces

Sammis faces are on the left. My example faces are on the right.

Sammi's faces are on the left. My example faces are on the right.


With another set of pumpkins we added cut out shapes to make faces. I cut out triangles, squares, ovals and different mouth shapes. Then I arranged them on the pumpkins to show Sammi what a pumpkin face looked like. Then I took the shapes off and helped her build her own pumpkin faces. We’ve been working a lot on emotions: happy, sad, angry and afraid; so we made a face for each emotion (2 for happy, of course!) Then Sammi glued the pieces on all by herself. I really had to let go of the finished product and let her do it how she wanted. She did a good job, I thought.

Pumpkin Ring Toss Game

We did a Fall Festival Trick or Treat at Brent’s school this last weekend. We decided instead of just having candy, we wanted to have games for the little ones to play so that it was more fun for them. Admittedly, there aren’t an awful lot of medical students with children so we wanted the few who came to have a lot to do! And we wanted it to be interesting for the students themselves who came. So we made this ring toss game. I saw this idea on an old school Reading Rainbow episode. (I sure miss that show.)

We covered a box with orange construction paper. Then I printed off the face from here and colored it in with yellow and black. On the other side, my crafting buddy, Holly, painted vines and leaves. She also painted the craft sticks green, with a shade of green we mixed ourselves for the occasion. When the sticks were dry we taped them with purple duct tape inside the box. Then we cut out rings from sour cream lids. The kids, and even adults, had fun tossing the rings onto the sticks. They were then able to reach into the box and grab their candy.

Pick the Pumpkins Quiet Book

This last activity I’m really happy with. It turned out better than I imagined it would. It sort of developed as I started to put it together. The pumpkins are sitting in the pumpkin patch. You pull the pumpkin out of its pocket and place it on a hay bale on the opposite side to decorate them for fall.

  • I used an old cereal box for the pages. I duct taped the two pieces together to form the book. I covered up the duct tape in the inside with brown construction paper.
  • I used the smallest size pumpkins that we had.
  • I first created the pumpkin patch on a piece of brown construction paper. I used a brown marker to draw the patch and the lines where the pumpkins would slide into their pockets.
  • To create the pockets I painted glue on the back side leaving boxes with no glue under the lines that allow half the pumpkin to slide into the pocket.
  • Then I put a piece of tape over the line and used an exacto-knife to cut just the construction paper along the line. This created the opening of the pocket.
  • On the opposite page I wrote out the instructions then glued six rectangles of brown felt for the hay bales.
  • I finished decorating the pages with stickers of leaves and other fall things.
  • Then I glued smaller squares of felt onto the backs of the pumpkins so they would stick to the hay.

I was thrilled that Sammi enjoyed it. She loved pulling out the pumpkins and putting them on the hay. She even got that each hay bale got one pumpkin. She could even put the pumpkins back into their pumpkin patch pockets all by herself. Yippee! I was hesitant to let Elli touch it since I didn’t get any of it laminated and I was worried she’d do a number on those little pumpkins. But I decided to be brave and let her give it a go. She loved it too. And she was fairly gentle with the  pumpkins. A double success! And it made for a nice activity at church yesterday.

We had lots of fun with pumpkins this week. Now it’s on to bats and ghosts. I have some fun ideas we’ll show you all about once we’ve tried them out. Happy Halloween (uh, in about two weeks!)

Pumpkin Patch Craft

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Update: Click for more pumpkin crafts, activities and our favorite book!
Sammi’s Pumpkin Patch
Pumpkin Patch Craft

Pumpkin Patch Craft

We had so much fun with our last pumpkin activity that we were anxious to make another pumpkin patch craft. I downloaded the pumpkin from Family Crafts and then printed it in different sizes. We then painted the pumpkins with our own version of orange and hung them to dry.

  • Hanging-pumpkinsAfter they dried, we cut them out.
  • I took a brown piece of construction paper and used a brown marker to draw a pumpkin patch (a box with rows).
  • Then Sammi used a glue stick to glue her pumpkins into the patch.
  • We used a green marker to draw vines connecting the pumpkins. I added the little curlies.
  • Then I found some cute Halloween stickers to complete the picture.

We kicked it up a notch

Sammi-with-painted-hairWe couldn’t use just any orange to paint the pumpkins! No, we had to mix out own. Sammi loves mixing colors. I added red and yellow to a plastic plate and let her mix them together. She said it looked like ketchup and mustard. I printed the pumpkins on cardstock so they’d hold up a little better to Sammi’s vigorous painting.

Sammi-mixing-paintShe loved painting and mixing so much that when the pumpkins were done, she mixed a few more colors and made a lovely brown. Then, while I was rinsing brushes, she proceeded to paint her hand and make handprints on the butcher paper protecting the table. Thank goodness for butcher paper!

Sammi-handprintsI’m working on another idea for the rest of the pumpkins. It involves the poem Five Little Pumpkins which is a favorite around here along with a few other ideas. Once we wrap up the pumpkins, I think it’s on to bats.

What Halloween crafts do you love?

What To Do About Night Terrors

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I listened in awe as my friend described watching her son experience a night terror. It gave me chills to think of seeing one of my own girls in a night terror and being helpless in stopping it or comforting her. She described it such (this is a paraphrase):

We had gone to the high school football game and so the boys went to bed late. Then after just an hour or so, he (the younger about 20 months) started screaming. We went to his room and tried to calm him down. His eyes were glossed over. He was not responding to anything we said or did. His body was completely limp.

After a little bit we finally got him to wake up. But he seemed out of it. It took about a half hour before he could move his arms. We tried to hand him his pacifier and he raised his arm, but aimed low. He kept reaching for it and missing.

We packed up the boys and took him to the emergency room. After waiting a very long time, they were finally seen by the doctor. By then he had pretty much returned to normal. We explained the episode to the doctor. He quickly diagnosed it as a night terror and sent us on our way. He spent less than a minute looking at our son and then left.

They felt so unsatisfied by the doctor’s evaluation that they were sharing their story in the hopes of understanding better what happened to their young son. After speaking with a professor at the medical school, they were reassured that it was a night terror and that it didn’t harmful to their son.

I felt for my friend and the fear she encountered during this experience. I did a little research of my own and found some interesting information on night terrors and how to reduce the risk of night terrors recurring.

  1. Evaluate whether there’s stress in your child’s life. The emotion of stress can build up and then manifest itself as a night terror.
  2. Ensure your child is getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep seems to trigger night terrors. In fact, it is the most common trigger.
  3. Develop a consistent sleep routine. Stick with a consistent time to go to bed then prepare for bedtime with the same activities each night. These help soothe the child, releasing any stress from the day and get them in a comfortable mood for bed.
  4. Offer a balanced, nutritious diet. Getting a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains and proteins will help the body stay balanced which in turn helps your child navigate other stresses successfully.

One last note on night terrors. The easiest way to distinguish between a night terror and a nightmare is that a night terror usually occurs at the beginning of the night when the child has only been asleep for an hour or so. Nightmares typically occur closer to morning after a full night’s sleep.