Family Pictures

The title is a bit of a lie - these are family pictures ... at least of all members in our family under the age of five :) We are making a shutterfly book for my grandparents, so I wanted to get some pictures of the kids to put in it. Kiera had other plans. She wanted to run. And run. And run. Ah well, I tried!

 

 

I think Seth was getting a little frustrated ....

 

Then he decided to see the humour in it. If you can't beat them, join them! If only I learned that lesson! I have to admit: I was getting a little annoyed. How hard can it be to SIT??!? Apparently very.

 

Thankfully, we did get a few "gems". (We gave in and threw a "blankie" in).

 

 

 

 Yes, I did make them change clothes half way through. Greg thought I was crazy (and I probably was). I had two more changes of clothes, but the sun disappeared before I had the chance. :)

 



 

 



Down the Railroad Track

Here is me, dragging my kids to random spots in Guelph to practice taking pictures :s Promise them a timbit, and you get a few smiles :D

 



 

 

Chudleigh's

We started off the month of October with a visit to a local apple farm with some friends. We have gone almost every year since Seth was a baby, and have always had lots of fun! The weather this year was spectacular - cooler when we first arrived, but by the time we left it was in the high twenties and sunny! There were quite a few school groups there that day, so we "planned" our trip according to their schedule - we went where they were not :P

We started with a visit to the play area - lots of climbing and sliding! The slides were steep and fast.   

 

The boys weren't into the sliding. They preferred to run and jump along the tops of the hay bales. I was impressed with Seth's jumping skills - he was clearing some pretty big gaps. And he was determined! He got a little hot, though. Silly mom always overdressing her kids :P

There's a large selection of tractors that the kids are allowed to climb on and "drive". They are always a hit! We spent quite a bit of time in that area - until there started being some fierce competition over whose tractor was the "fastest".

Off to the animal farm! There are lots of farm animals for the kids to look at. They are not supposed to feed them, but leaves and apples always seem to make it into the pens. Seth and Maddy both love goats. There was also a horse - one of Maddy's favourite animals (at that point, at least. She's a little fickle when it comes to favourites!) 

You can't visit an apple farm without picking apples! We took a wagon ride to the "gala" part of the orchard. We waited a looonnnnnggg time for the wagon to come pick us up. We climbed aboard, told the driver we wanted gala apples, and discovered they were right around the corner - about a 1 minute ride. :S. Thankfully the driver was a friendly sort, and gave us a bit of a tour of the orchard before dropping us off. We would have had disappointed kids!
As a complete side note: while we were on the wagon I noticed that Kiera had *three* new teeth! Wahooo! No more vampire child!
Even Kiera got to join in the apple picking fun. I did have to put her soother in though, because she had a strange desire to go for the rotten mushy apples that were laying on the ground. Yuck!!

After picking we did some hay jumping and went for a walk along a nature trail. By this point the kids were ready to head home - so we did :) It was lots of fun!
Seth's favourite part: the wagon ride and picking apples. And making a new friend (Tristan B).
Maddy's favourite part: picking the apples.
Kiera's favourite part is a mystery. She won't tell me - ha, ha.

Give Thanks

Seth was giving thanks in his prayer the tonight....
"Dear God. Thanks for convincing mom to give me whatever I want...".
Ummmm, pardon? I guess I have to re-evaluate my parenting???

Letter F

JK week #3: Letter F

Colour: Green

Animal: Frogs

Book: Franklin's New Friend 

 

We had lots of fun learning about the letter Ff. I don't really see "Ff" as a common letter, and yet - all sorts of wonderful things begin with f - frogs, food, French fries, fish, flamingos, faces ... it made it hard to pick what to focus on. Frogs won out, and so we did lots of learning about the "cute" little hoppity creatures God created. We watched two youtube videos (from the SanDiego zoo and from Science North) that told us lots of information about frogs and let us listen to the different sounds that frogs make. I tried to talk during these videos and was hushed rather sternly - apparently Seth was really into frogs :) I was really hopping to make it to a pond, or something equally fun, but it didn't work out :(

 

Here are a few of the things we did for the letter Ff:

We sorted capital and lowercase letters:



We matched faces with their emotions. This was surprisingly difficult for both of them.

 
We made some tin foil f's:

We did our letter search from Confessions of a Homeschooler

We made some pattern block Ff's (also from Confessions of a Homeschooler):

And then just made cool pattern block pictures. Seth loved this part!

 
We made some faces (I picked up this neat activity at Toys R Us. It was a huge hit!)

 

 
We did some push pinning.

We put sticker food onto paper plates. These are some yummy looking meals!

 

We learned that mixing yellow and blue makes green. 

 

And we practised our fine motor skills:

An Illness and An Accomplishment

An Illness....
At breakfast yesterday Maddy was sniffling. Since I REALLY want some family pictures, I said, "Oh, no Maddy! You're not getting a cold, are you?" If you know Maddy, you know how much she can "suck up". She got a little pout on her face, came over to my lap, snuggled in, and answered, "No, I'm not getting a cold. I'm getting a hot."

An Accomplishment ....
Today Seth took a giant leap into manhood. Especially in his eyes. He had his first shower. His first "on his own" shower. And, most importantly, his first "made the mirror foggy" shower. He really wanted the mirror to be foggy, just like it looks after dad has a shower. In order to achieve this accomplishment, he had to take a veerrryyy long shower. He kept calling out, "Is it foggy yet?" and peeking around the curtain. Oh, to be four again!

A Bee-utiful Day

After learning about bees we took a trip to Clovermead - a "local" apiary. Notice the quotations around the word local?? Well, it turned out to be quite the drive! Thankfully my sister Vicki and her daughter Peyton decided to come with us - so I had someone to keep me company on the journey :)

Clovermead turned out to be a wonderful place! Their big harvest / pumpkin / bee festivals only happen on the weekends, so we missed out on some fun activities like wagon rides and bee beard competitions. The bonus of going during the week was that it was so. quiet. Since my kids are rather shy, this worked out great for us!

We also got to see some of the things we learned in real life! Pretty neat!

There was lots of playground areas. Seth loves construction vehicles, so he was pretty excited to try out this excavator. Notice the dump truck? He was filling it with sand. 

 

Kiera and Peyton enjoying the sand. Well, Kiera enjoying the sand. Peyton is a little like her mom ... sand was just a little too dirty for that princess :)

There was a really neat spider web for the kids to climb on. It took some convincing to get them to leave and continue you on our adventures - Seth is turning into a real monkey. He loves to climb. And Maddy is never far behind.

Lots of tractors to climb and "drive".

This has got to be the cutest bee I have ever seen!

A neat wagon that the kids sat on. They were a little disappointed to learn that there wasn't going to be any horse ride.

They had some farm animals for the kids to look at - a cow, some chickens (some really neat kinds!), rabbits and some goats. The baby goats were so cute! Petyon loved the animals. Maddy did too - but that goes without saying! She's our animal lover.

Seth didn't stay to look at the animals for long - he saw a tire swing that was begging to be climbed. We turned it into a double decker swing!

The tire swing was soon abandoned in favour of a large rope swing. This was one of Seth's favourite parts - he loved to climb and swing.

Maddy tried to keep up with her big brother, but it was a little tricky for her. I managed to capture part of the three seconds she stayed on the rope!

Seth's absolute favourite part of the day was the zip line. I was nervous to let him do it by himself at first, and spent a fair amount of time running with him (I think I got my run in that day!). Finally I gave up and just let him do it - and he did great! He loved it and wanted to do it again ... and again ... and again ... My little boy is getting big :( It doesn't look so high in this picture, but it started off fairly high (for a short four year old) then went down.

I thought I better give Kiera some roaming time. It's tough work being stuck in a stroller for a day! There was a nice play area at the back of the farm with a big Noah's Ark play structure. Kiera loved going in and out of the boat and peeking through the window.

There was also a neat castle made out of hay bales. It had rooms, hallways, and stairs inside. Notice the no shoes - yuck!

The king of straw mountain! Once again - climbing.

There was a huge yellow "pillow" for jumping. The kids had a blast on here. And so did Vicki and I. We haven't grown up yet! Seth and Maddy loved getting double bounced by us. They really fly!

Maddy found a horse. This was on our trip to the bathroom. She had to go (which is just a given!) and refused to go in the portable washroom. We had to trek all the way to the front of the park. Apparently she has some royal blood :)

And, of course, the reason for the trip! They had thousands of bees in hives that were behind glass. It was neat to see all the bees working. It was also neat to see the wax rooms being filled up with nectar and changed into honey. They actually had a wall like this behind the toilet in the lady's washroom. Needless to say, Maddy refused to use that toilet as well!

We watched a short movie about the keeping of bees and the process in which honey is made and harvested. Seth and Maddy tried out the bee keeper's hat. Seth doesn't look very impressed ... he wasn't. I tried it on him during the movie and he was trying to listen.

We ended our day with a bee chocolate. Not that bees and chocolate are related - but I thought these guys were too cute to pass up! We did buy some honey, as well.

It was a great way to end our unit on insects / bees. The kids had so much fun! Unfortunately, as we were leaving, Seth started complaining about being cold. He fell asleep in the van on the way home, and had a fever by the time we got home. He was fine the next day, so I'm assuming it was maybe heat stroke? Or just exhaustion. Sometimes I work them hard ... busy like bees!