Keira – Page 12 – Search For Seven

Harvest!

October 8, 2020March 10, 2022 Keira

Dear Reader,

Well, tis the season. Things are busy around here. We are harvesting apples and tomatoes before the freeze! We didn’t get our tomato plants into the ground even remotely soon enough, so most of our tomatoes are still in the green stages so we picked a TON of green tomatoes. This season, our preschooler has been super helpful. She has been anxiously awaiting the day the apples were ready to pick, even sneaking out to go check them frequently. The day we decided it was time to pick, she was super excited! Does it really count as an intentional preschooler activity? Maybe not. But it is teaching her life skills I mean, doesn’t everyone need to know how to harvest and preserve? And if I can teach her now, then all the better.

There was a hard freeze warning a few nights ago so we harvested all the tomatoes, green or not. We filled every box we could find and I calculate it’s about 10 half-bushel boxes worth? I have been weighing the tomatoes as I use them (the ready ones and the ones I know are not going to turn red) and keeping a tally, and I’ll add an update at the end of this blog. So far, just in the past few days, we’ve got 2 boxes of ripe tomatoes, and I made 2 batches of green salsa with the ones I knew weren’t going to ripen. The pic with little fingers are the beginnings of the green, as my preschooler helped me sort them. Obviously, for the most part, she can’t tell what is going to ripen vs what isn’t, but she is good at making a pile and picking red and yellow from the green. The other picture is my brag picture. that tomato is huge! I weighed it and it weighs 1 1/2 pounds! It fills both palms! I prayed it’d ripen before the freeze. It’s not quite there, yet but it can ripen in the house now.

There are still apples on the trees (2 aren’t quite ready yet. They’re a later variety), but so far we have gotten 7 boxes (3 of which are coolers) full storing in cold storage while I work on the tomatoes. Although our preschooler loved harvesting all the tomatoes, she loves picking (and eating) apples more. We have plenty of applesauce, so I think most of the apples this year are going to go toward apple butter and pressed apple juice. I’m really excited about the juice. We bought a press a few years ago but didn’t have the time to finish putting it together before we gave up and made applesauce. This year, though, that press is getting assembled. We have soooo many apples! But with 3 littles, it will be such a blessing to have fresh apple juice all winter long. I was talking with my mom this summer about how I always thought it was such a luxury to have juice at our house, but now that I have so many kiddos it makes sense. Keeping that much juice in the fridge is expensive! and one thing of juice only gives everyone only a small glass full before it is gone.

Check back in on a future post to see Canning totals! I like to keep track of them on my blog so that I can go back in next year and see what everything ended up equaling. It really helps me keep a better perspective on what the harvest is compared to the year before.

Kids Need Play

Lift and find

October 8, 2020October 6, 2020 Keira

Dear Reader,

I know, I just said I didn’t think my girls are ready for different sizes in nesting toys. And then my toddler brought me this game her sister set down for her and I thought, “eh, why not?” Obviously we didn’t play the real game, but I realized that although they’re not really ready to nest the objects themselves, a step to helping them get there would be to let them pull each toy up and discover a smaller one underneath. And, since we already had the game (found on Amazon, but I’m not an affiliate, so I wont get anything if you get it from there. we won our copy from a library reading program), and I was a few activities short in my planning (toddlers are hard, yo!), I took the game and ran with it (which is a much different visualization when you have toddlers, lol).

It’s pretty easy to get set up. Simply stack all the figures and then just let your kids lift them up. The felt “hair,” came in really handy in this case, because it is much easier to grasp than the figures. But if you dont have this particular game at your house, you could use anything Russian Doll-ish in it’s ability to stack. Or some of the toys I said we owned last week. I will say, though that these toys are uniquely situated to simplicity for little fingers and being able to … Un-nest. And the hair making it easy to lift is actually a good way to develop pincer grasps in toddlers.

Really, they enjoyed playing with the little figures, even if they didn’t stack them on their own. Every time I had enough to set together, I would, and the game would continue. It is interesting the different personalities of these 2; One liked lifting the figures better and particularly liked the bigger figures (she later stuffed a napkin in it and pulled it out, over and over). The other kept running off with all the littlest figures, as they were just the right size to fit inside her little fists (Disclaimer warning: they are much too small to be left with your children unattended as they’re about as wide as an extra-wide crayon).

I’ve put the game away again, since I don’t want to lose all the pieces, but I will definitely bring it back out and see what their minds do with it again! Maybe they’ll even be ready to stack them by themselves sooner than I anticipated.

Kids Need Play

Q-tip painting ghosts

October 6, 2020October 5, 2020 Keira

Dear Reader,

It’s October! My Preschooler LiVeS for October. It has all her favorite things. Candy, costumes, and spooky things. Did I mention the candy? I don’t know where she gets the love of spooky things from, definitely NOT her mother.

I was pretty excited it was October, but for a totally different reason: Halloween activities! I’ve had a board on Pinterest for a while for all the fun things I’ve wanted to do with a kid for Halloween and they’ve always felt like a “someday” kind of project. But once again, spending intentional time with my children has another positive side effect. I get silly dopamine boosts for checking off an imaginary bucket list item. Said bucket list item 1? Silhouette painting.

The concept is really simple: Cut out a shape (I printed our ghost free printable at 25%, printed 2, and cut them out), and use masking tape (or painter’s tape, or double sided removable tape and tape your ghosts to a sheet of black construction paper. We used Masking tape and it worked better than I thought it would. Then hand your kid a Q-tip (cotton buds? Does anyone actually call them that as opposed to Q-tips? ) for each color of paint (multiple if your kid forgets and accidentally sticks it in the wrong color) and some paint on a plate (white is a given, but not a requirement) and tell them to paint anywhere they want! Make sure there is plenty of paint around the ghost, or he will not show up after the white paper is removed. Once they declare it “perfect,” let it dry and remove the ghosts!

This is a great activity for that Pincer Grasp we keep working on. I noticed she started off a bit shakey, but when I reminded her to use her “monster grip,” as her OT calls it, it got a lot more controlled. As you can see, our ghosts got quite the paint job, too. It doesn’t matter. Just let them paint. I DID, however, have to convince her to put paint along the outside of the ghost. She either wanted to pain him or the “negative” space, and it took multiple reminders to paint around the ghost outlines to have enough paint that it’d even make sense after the ghosts were removed.

Kids Need Play

Monster Dance Party

October 6, 2020October 5, 2020 Keira

Dear reader,

Ever have one of those days where everyone just wakes up grumpy? We had one this morning. I’m pretty sure the twins didn’t like the soy milk I tried to see if it would help their unending diaper rash (spoiler alert: it didn’t. It SOOO didn’t). And I don’t know what’s up with my preschooler. She’s been needing more attention lately. So, within half an hour of waking up this morning, I knew we needed something to change the mood.

Cue the music! Halloween music of course. We take October very seriously around here. But I hate spooky. So, maybe it’s more accurate to say we take October very cute and humorously around here. My preschooler loves monsters and ghosts and skeletons; always has. October is her jam. Her sisters didn’t care what kind of music it was, to be honest, but they loved clapping (instead of snapping. way above a toddler skill set) for the Addams Family song. And they loved wiggling for Spooky Scary Skeletons.

I have one girly that loves to groove, at any hint of a song. she’ll even randomly drum on her tummy or wiggle if you hum. The other takes some coaxing. She’ll eventually get groovin’, but only if everyone else is doing it, and if she likes the song. She has never been the active mover, though. She’s already declaring herself a people-watcher. We will have to see if that changes.

Here is a list of our Favorite Halloween songs, in case you wanna get in on the dancing (although we just use Pandora to create a Kid’s Halloween station:

5 little pumpkins (I remember singing this in grade school!)
The Addams Family (It’s all about the snapping)
Sesame Street’s Monster Mash
Grim Grinning Ghosts from Disney’s Haunted Mansion Ride (We are supposed to be there right now. Boo!)
Spooky Scary Skeletons
This is Halloween from Nightmare before Christmas (although I hate Oogie Boogie and leave the room when my teen puts it on)

What songs do you dance to? I’d love to add them to our list!

Kids Need Play

Cups and Ball Trick

October 1, 2020September 30, 2020 Keira

Dear Reader,

I confess, this isn’t the activity I had planned for today, but watching my preschooler use her imagination from something she had seen before sparked my interest and we went with it. Living in the moment with preschool-aged kids is essential.

I also confess that in order for this game to be real, as in the “magic” game adults know and love, using all the same color of cups is essential. But when I tried that, my preschooler wasn’t nearly as interested. To vary even further from the real cups and ball game, there is a ball under every cup. But my preschooler was not content with only one ball in play. So instead of the real cups and ball game, it was more of a “guess what color is under the cup,” game. Which required a lot of “don’t peek,” moments.

(I tried all green cups. It didn’t seem a interesting to my preschooler)

I think, developmentally, she got more from playing it her way, anyway. We reinforced colors (she knows them all), we built up the basic science skill of guessing as we took turns switching what color was under which cup, and we still got the benefit of bilateral movement as she switched the cups around (which she thoroughly enjoyed). We even video-called Grandma and got her in on the guessing game, which was also a highlight.

After a while, the game kind of evolved and I just let her keep going. She pulled out her stamps and built towers out of the balls, cups, and stamps. It became a sand castle. I left her to play in her new way, as I had to get back to my daily tasks (and harvest season), and watched her imagination soar as the cups became a sand castle, equipped with flags on the towers.

Kids Need Play

Nesting cups

October 1, 2020September 30, 2020 Keira

Dear reader,

There are a ton of nesting toys for kids, and we even have some. Toddlers love them. I would assume it’s kind of the same thrill people get when they complete a puzzle, but I have no real idea. We have this ball, and rainbows like this, (no affiliate links, just toys we own), but I wanted something that they could just collect and stack together no matter what order they were in, and all of our stacking toys have a very specific order. I feel like that is a later skill. So I walked around my house looking for things that stacked together. At first I was going to use real cups, but then I remembered we had these plastic ones, and I had more of them than I had regular cups, so I could scatter them around and let the girls collect them, instead of just handing each of them 2 or 3 cups.

It was a nice day, and the girls were all being super destructive and dangerous in the house (seriously, I’ve gotta come up with a way to convince my toddlers to stop trying to climb onto the piano!) so I scattered the cups onto the deck and sent them outside. Score some points for hand/eye coordination and spatial perception skills, and I sound like a cool and with-it mom! All for distracting a few toddlers with some cups.

Actually, it was a great reset, since we were all getting a little wound up from all the “don’ts” that had been happening just a few minutes earlier. And I’m convinced sunshine is a good thing for little kids. I mean obviously, this activity could have been done indoors, but let’s soak up all the cool weather while we have the chance.

Kids Need Play

Clothespin catapult

September 29, 2020September 30, 2020 Keira

Dear reader,

We needed something fun at our house as we are about to hit major harvest season and be pretty busy, so I searched through multiple ideas and found a picture that turned a clothespin into a catapult. It seemed basic enough, so my thought was, “eh, why not.” To be fair, I probably would never bother if we haven’t been challenging ourselves to play with our kids intentionally.

I could easily reverse engineer what I saw in the picture, as it used a block of wood, a clothespin, a large popcicle stick (we always called them tongue depressors. Is that still a thing?), And a lid from a juice container.

The picture had the clothespin glued into the middle, but as we (my husband and I) tested it out before we showed our daughter, it was incredibly pathetic, hardly doing anything except shoot straight up; and not that far, either. So we pulled it off (as best we could. I gave up on the last piece after the clothespin broke and I had to go get another one.

Moving it to the end helped a ton. It gave much more leverage to the clothespin. Tossing anything heavier than the marshmallows turned out to be a disappointment, too, but marshmallows worked pretty well. So we showed the catapult to our daughter, and all took turns shooting the marshmallows to the target plates.

As far as catapults go, this one isn’t that great, but it was super easy, and my preschooler can operate it herself (although it definitely helps if I hold the base). If my preschooler were a little older, I would make a few other types of catapults and we could have a science day trying them all out and comparing them and then learning what works best and why.

But for now, we are just having fun. And there will be more chances to experiment. Interestingly enough, her favorite part wasn’t shooting the catapult… it was collecting the marshmallows. And it gave all of us a nice reprieve from picking apples, harvesting green tomatoes, and all the adventures of storing food for winter.

Kids Need Play

Toddlers and Chalk

September 29, 2020September 30, 2020 Keira

Dear Reader,

I didn’t exactly know how well it would go, but when my preschooler asked if she could play with chalk, I decided to see how well the toddlers did with it. It was nice weather (although the forecast said it was supposed to be cold today), and these two love to go outside! They beeline for the door if anyone grabs any shoes, so they were more than happy to get to go outside with permission this time.

And boy was that an adventure. I will say, they did “draw.” But it was about 10 seconds in duration. Then I spent the rest of the time chasing after one and then the other to keep them on the concrete instead of booking it to the rocks or the grass or eating the chalk. Part of me hoped that by leaving them barefoot, they’d be more apt to stay on the flat surface but the bumpy rocks didn’t even slow them down.

I mean, I didn’t expect much, they’re still really little for chalk, but I figured that exposing them is the first start. And since winter is right around the corner, now seemed like a good enough time. They knew that holding the chalk and touching the concrete was the general idea, and made a few marks. But, alas, the joy of being outside was much more of a pull than putting color on the cement.

The preschooler, however, did enjoy her time to be artistic, so all the chasing was worth it. She started with drawing lines (or 1’s), then we drew shapes. She just discovered that she can spin around with the chalk and it makes a circle. I was kind of impressed when she turned those circles into fruit. One was a pear, one was an apple and one was an orange, all with added green leaves.

I’m sure there will be more time to play with chalk, but it may not happen until next spring, so it was a good time to get in a little practice. And some sunshine. Around these parts, we could always use a little more sunshine.

Kids Need Play

Animal Feelings Dice Game

September 24, 2020March 10, 2022 Keira

Dear reader,

As we have said before, we are focusing on feelings this week. It actually started by accident when we were talking about activities we wanted to do, and both of us mentioned activities that had to do with emotions. We just decided to make a week of it! Today’s feeling activity is a good game to help get wiggles out while also thinking about “others” and their feelings.

It’s a pretty simple game, but that makes it fun! Roll the dice, and act like the animal if it felt like what is on the feelings dice. I even made this free printable to go along with it!

I just printed mine off on regular white paper, but I highly recommend cardstock, because by the end of the game, our dice were pretty hashed. And I just have to vent my frustration at how awful Elmer’s Gluesticks have become. It’s a brand new gluestick I bought for back to school and it is sooo worthless. Doesn’t glue anything. Therefore, I also recommend tape instead of glue. Super frustrating.

Anyway, I put a lot of work into this activity, so I’m glad the preschooler loved it. I’ve never designed animals on the computer before, but now I think it’ll be fun to make more!

She played with them while the twins napped, so it survived their little fingers, and I loved her budding acting skills. An angry elephant stomped through my living room. A sad monkey swung his arms in despair.

It was fun to think about how an animal would behave when it was feeling surprised or scared or angry. I may have even gotten in on the action.

What do you think? What would a happy flamingo do? Or a sad penguin?

Click here to get all of our dice games in one printable

mileage may vary
some assembly required

Kids Need Play

Calm Down Jars

September 24, 2020September 25, 2020 Keira

Dear Reader,

As we have said in previous posts, we decided to take a week and focus on emotions and feelings with our kiddos this week. This is easier said and done when said kiddos are still super little. While thinking about what toddlers need as far as emotions, I realized that what toddlers need fairly regularly is redirection and distraction when things just aren’t going their way.

I’ve had these for a while, but I decided to pull them down and see how my toddlers responded to them. Of course, they love them, and they are a great diversion. I usually just pick them up while I clean the house and set them out of reach but somewhere central and easy to access when babies just need a distraction.

Although they’re kind of heavy for littles, they can roll and shake them and that is enough for their little attention spans.

There are multiple recipes all over the internet and I highly encourage you to play around with the exact proportions because it is nice having multiple jars that “calm down” at different intervals. My dark, “galaxy” themed one takes the longest to get all settled, and my patriotic jar goes the quickest. But you can see the trinkets in the patriotic one better, making it ideal for toddlers.

Also, I used clear glue for my patriotic bottle and regular white glue in my winter hearts bottle, and it has totally different vibe, so don’t count out the regular white glue! It makes the hearts kind of appear and disappear.

… okay, I can’t really take credit. My mom made the winter one, but I added the teal because she had it in a cute little bottle and it broke 🙁 But when I put it in the smart water bottles (seriously perfect for this project), it just looked so blah, so I added the teal (that was the color of the bottle she had it in, so it didn’t change the feel of it, really). Actually, she made it and my kids loved it so much that I made the other 2. They worked really well while I was watching my brother’s kids. I intended to make a bunch and keep experimenting but 3 seems to be a good amount and I’m not constantly picking them up if there is only 3. Maybe when my toddlers get old enough that these are “old news,” I will make the others.

So, to make a calm down jar (I know, finally, a recipe… but I wanted it at the end because these aren’t rules, they’re “guidelines”), you will need:

a clear bottle (Smart water bottles are seriously great, but as long as it’s mostly solid and will hold up well, it doesn’t really matter. We have some distilled water bottles from a local grocery store that I think will work well and they’re not so huge.
glue. Best choice by far is clear glitter glue, but there is flexibility here.
water. HoT water!
Glitter (yes, more glitter).
Little sequin and trinkets to go in the jar. My patriotic one actually has little beads I had been saving just because they were cute, so this was a good use for them!
Food coloring

I’ve found for me, personally, the sweet spot is about 1 part glue and 2 parts water. And then as much glitter as you want. I personally like lots of glitter, but I have 3 different variations and they all have obviously different amounts of glitter. Just know, you want hot water so the glue mixes in!

FYI it is really hard to get a picture of all 3 at their prettiest! Which is your favorite jar? What would you put in a jar? Let me know!