girl like the sea: Facebook Download Friday + preschooling

I thought it might be fun to download some of the past week of my facebook statuses on Fridays, just as a reminder for myself of some of the "highlights." Though I'm not sure if this will encourage me to document more or less things on facebook...haha.

"Judging by what violet says in her sleep, she dreams of muppets, tortillas, and being naked. Sounds like an MTV spring break...."

"If this stupid behr paint claims to be zero voc, why does it smell like poison? Fantastic."

"not so loud!" I hissed at my kids, who, loudly and with great gusto were belting out a rendition of "my favorite things" that threatened to shake cans off the shelves of Trader Joe's."

"My new favorite word is "heinous". I plan to pound it into contexts it doesn't necessarily fit into. Heinous!"

"We were cruising through Home Depot because I was looking for some supplies to do some educational activities with Clover (sorting, sequencing, manipulating objects). One of the employees came up and asked: "Can I help you find anything?" I said "No thanks, I'm just looking for things for my kids to play with." He replied "Well we have some saws a few aisles down..........................

..............Oh, you're SERIOUS?" *awkward moment*"

Speaking of Home Depot, here are a few shots of Clover doing activities with nuts and bolts. I got this ebook "Montessori At Home" to help me get oriented towards schooling Clover. It's been difficult to really read in depth so far (ok, I bought it yesterday so it's not so surprising) because it's an ebook and the kids tend to start acting crazy when I am on the computer. One of these days I will get an e-reader, but until then I will be trying to absorb all of the info on the computer screen. We scrolled through the activities, of which there are TONS, and got an idea for things we could get started on. Clover was chomping at the bit to "do SCHOOL" once she heard me talking about it.

I've been doing some sequencing and sorting with her. We got these nuts and bolts at Home Depot - two sets of bolts in a thick and thin width and different heights. Each bolt has a nut that goes on it. I showed her how to sort them from biggest to smallest and then screw the nuts onto the ends of them. She did that once and then decided that she wanted to be more creative with how they were arranged. haha. I tried to show her how to make them from smallest to biggest but it seriously offended her sensibilities and I just let her do her thing. I also grabbed a set of bolts all in the same size and a baggie of corresponding nuts. I'm planning on trying to show her how to fill the whole length of the bolts with the nuts.

It's going to be a struggle to find the balance between challenging and too hard. She tends to get frustrated and give up really fast, and she just wants me to do things for her. She doesn't seem to agree with me that, for instance, the point of her sitting down to draw is not so that I will draw everything FOR her. Lol.

Yesterday I was working on numbers with her, without much success I might add, and in the Costco parking lot I was trying to review what we had worked on earlier that day. I asked her if she could count from 1-4 for me. What I got was the most accurate rendition of the alphabet she has ever recited. Hahaha. I'm thinking it might be more fruitful to work on letters right now. She is probably more linguistically inclined than math oriented, just like me.

My sewing machine is still in a timeout right now. I should probably try to organize my heinous mess of sewing crap before chugging onto something else at the moment. (heinous! word!) There is some fabric here waiting to be turned into a baby blanket for my neighbor though, and I would also like to try again to pick some fabrics to make a zephyr sun dress for Clover. The other day I was going back and forth over things in my stash and then one of the kids did something horrible to me, though I can't recall what it was now, and I just kind of gave up. Lol.

Here are the prints I chose for the baby blanket: