Blog – Page 15 – 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

Ghost Busters

October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 Summer

Dear Readers,

I have always enjoyed science. I love seeing how things react, so when I was trying to think of things to do that had a Halloween flare to them I just couldn’t resist making ghost shaped baking soda blocks and letting my kids melt them with vinegar.

The process was very simple. First make a paste with your baking soda and water. Second form into ghost shapes, I used a cookie cutter. Third let them dry. Fourth place in a cake pan or cookie sheet. Lastly give your child a way to drip the vinegar onto the ghost to melt it.

There is one thing I would do differently though. When I let the baking soda dry directly on the cookie sheet they were hard to remove. Next time I will let them dry on the cookie sheet I am giving to each child, or use baking paper for it to dry onto. That way they are easier to get where they need to.

My kids had a blast with this. They enjoyed watching the ghost melt away. My middle child didn’t want to stop and had I spun it out longer we probably would have been still doing for an hour.

This activity can be done with both toddlers and preschoolers. You just have to modify which tools you use. For toddlers pipettes would be the easiest, but you could also use a spray bottle. Preschoolers do well with syringes (the kind you get with liquid baby medicines) or spray bottles as well.

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

Beginners Connect the Dot

October 5, 2020October 6, 2020 Summer

Dear Reader,

Do you remember the first time you connected dots to make a picture? I certainly don’t. I wanted to introduce my children to it slowly, see where they were at. Later I will add the numbers, but letting them connect different dots to make their own picture seemed like a good way to introduce my children to the concept.

I know I made a whole lot more work on myself, but I made dots on 3 papers to see what my girls were capable of. For the most part I just let them draw lines between the different dots. I let them choose any dots to connect.

The idea behind this activity was to work on controlling the crayon and practicing the correct grasp. My oldest really struggles holding her writing utensils correctly so this was a great way to practice.

They really liked it, but I may have put too many dots on the paper. Next time I think I will just try to dot them randomly on the paper, if my OCD doesn’t kick in and force me to make them evenly spaced.

Kids Need Play

Travel Dough

October 5, 2020October 1, 2020 Summer

Dear Reader,

I have been struggling to get my child to stop playing with her spit. I don’t understand why she started in the first place, but she will spit on her hands and rub them everywhere.

As you no doubt know, this is very unsanitary and really really gross. Nothing I have tried so far has worked.

I have been at my wits end so I finally asked my other childs Occupational therapist for some ideas. Thankfully she had some.

The therapist suggested that we play with things like slime or playdough when she has the need to play with her spit. There was a significant drop in playing with spit when I finally let her play with the playdough.

A problem occurred though when I realized that some of the time she plays with her spit is in the car. Playdough/slime do not go well with a car.

That’s where this idea comes in. Placing the playdough in a ziplock bag she gets to play with the playdough without making a mess in my car.

There has been even less playing with her spit since taking the playdough in the bag, with only one instance where I had to tell her to take her hand out of her mouth. Even with this instance though she wasn’t sliming up her hand in spit, just placing it in her mouth.

So if you are struggling with a child playing with thier spit, like i was, or just want something for your kids to do in the car this is a good idea. Just place the playdough in a Ziploc freezer bag, tape it up, and let your kids have fun.

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

Rainbow Foam

September 30, 2020September 29, 2020 Summer

Dear Reader,

My kids were sick over the weekend and I decided that now they are starting to feel better playing with soap would be a good thing.

To make the foam all you need is water, some soap (I used baby bath soap), and some food coloring. Mix the solution together with a blender, hand blender, or even an electric mixer.

As you can see I chose to mix this in my blender. The solution is 1/2 cup water, 2 T soap, 4-5 drops of food coloring. For most of my colors 4-5 drops was enough but you can’t really tell that the green is green in my foam.

I made 4 batches, but by the time I was able to get my foam out for my kids to play the first batch was already returning to water state, so I suggest you don’t do more than that or somehow make bigger batches.

My kids loved this, though the youngest was wierded out by the whole thing. He got a little on his hands because older siblings were flinging the soap around and didn’t know what to do with it.

As I said earlier the kids started flinging the foam around, so be prepared for this to be messy. I knew it would be a little messy and so I had them go outside to play with it. The great thing about this is that you can just hose off any mess.

Hope you enjoy this activity as much as my children did!