So busy so lots of practical life!

I started a new business! (more on that in the future once I get my website up; it's for toddlers!) so A. has had to amuse herself a little more than usual. She also gets to go to her Montessori preschool every weekday morning now that I am working ( Thank-you Canadian Government for paying for Montessori school!) I'm finding that now that I'm busy getting all of the work done in setting up my new endeavor and I'm not observing her at all times she does more activities! She has been helping me do many things around the house. I almost think she has intuited that I need the help now!? She just had to do the vacuuming on the hard floors because in her own words "because it makes it beautiful".

Then because the carpet attachment is too heavy for her to push she used her little carpet sweeper to do the carpet.

She later went upstairs and her Papa was mopping so she helped with that too. (no pic) What a sense of importance and accomplishment she had in helping her family clean the house! The next day A.-girl decided to unzip a "bean" bag pillow I have and to take a lot of the corn out of it. So of course I said "well you made the mess so you please clean it up". Her new word of choice right now is "OK!", which makes life so easy! Everything is Ok, OK affirmative and positive! Broom in hand, she swept it into a semblance of a pile and we picked it up together and put it back in the pillow. Phew!

I've of course been feeling guilty not spending as much time with A.-girl as we are used to. I'm trying to find activities that will still challenge her, make her feel a sense of accomplishment and make her and my life easier. What better ones than practical life which you can incorporate into the daily routine of what you need to do anyway. Case in point, cutting with a knife: at breakfast time instead of cutting up her cantaloupe for her, I cut it into long strips and asked her to get a fork and knife from her dish drawer. One presentation and she was happily focused creating nice little cantaloupe cubes.

I hope in a few weeks everything will get back to close to "normal" after the growing pains of starting a business subside. In the meantime we will be doing lots of practical life activities (as I write this A. is cleaning the chair I'm sitting in because "maybe it has bugs in it"!) and she will get to stay for some longer days at her preschool which are contributing to her increasing independence and social skills. I like to try to look at the positive side of things, however I miss my little girl and look forward to whipping up some great activities for her at home when my time frees up!

We love Masterminds... Beads well, that's another story

Eons ago my husband and I bought a puzzle game called "Super minds" thinking it would be good for the future. I can't even remember where it came from. I got it out the other day to see what it actually was and got very excited when I looked at it. It is for kids age 5-9 but after looking at their marketing materials in the box I realized they have a version for "3-8" year olds called Mighty mind. As they state in their description of Mighty Minds;

Starting with the simple concept of manipulating two wood half circles, the child builds a full circle. Then by following a logical numerically programmed sequence of patterns, the child learns how to manipulate 32 wood geometric shapes to build pictures of increasing complexity.

So since we had bought the advanced set, I had to glean from the ads for Mighty Mind how to set up some puzzles from beginner to advanced. All I needed was some cardstock, a pencil to trace around the tiles and some colored felt pens. The mighty mind set has little colored spaces to first put the tiles that you need to use to build a particular puzzle. You then use those tiles to build the shape of that puzzle.

Here's some of the beginner puzzles I made from the absolute easiest to a slightly harder one.

The difference between these puzzles and a normal puzzle of course is that there is no picture scene being put together with the pieces. You just use geometrical shapes, each piece one whole color, to make shapes. A.-girl isn't interested in doing puzzles very often but as soon as she saw this activity she was hooked! They even have a magnetic set for traveling. We will be getting one before the next long trip!

We also tried sorting some beads by color. Well, that went well for about 5 minutes. A.-girl was so focused and then....beads everywhere! On the second and third attempt sthe following day the beads just went straight onto the floor so this activity has been "shelved" so to speak!

Real life and practical life

Have you ever truly seen a little worm poking its head out of an apple? It is of course a common image in children's books but an elusive one in real life! A.-girl was so delighted to see this little guy peeking out of his appledom. If only it had been a caterpillar, we would have read Eric Carles "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". Maybe I should have anyway!

After 2 weeks of sitting in it's crock, our batch of spicy garlic sauerkraut was ready. MMMM! So A. and I put it into jars to keep in the fridge. She stuffed the jars using her tonging skills (not! She does not like tonging activities) and then used her little fists to pack it in. She then poured in the juice to cover the kraut and after I cleaned and dried the jar she put the lid on. We then bottled the leftover juice to drink. Spicy Acidophillous coctail!