Happy Halloween from Fireman Sam and Radar!

Adam has me figured out, he knows if he says, “Mama will you get me those jammies please and can Luke match too?” That I will cave. But really, matching flannel Mickey Mouse football pajamas – how could I resist?

As soon as Adam finished dinner tonight he asked if he could wear his new jammies. Once he was properly attired he told me that Luke wanted to wear his too.

I think these new pajamas are guaranteed to produce sweet dreams.

Oh, and speaking of dreams, Adam has started to remember his a little bit. After he woke up this morning he kept squeezing his eyes shut. When I asked him what he was doing he told me he was trying to go back to Aunt Stacy. He said “we were going to go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I need to ask her”.

One night last week he woke up screaming at 4 AM. I ran in to his room and asked what was wrong. He told me, “Mama, if we go to the moon, we can’t take our house with us. Our house is too heaby (heavy) to carry to the moon”.  I told him that we would take boards and nails and build a new house on the moon. He thought about it for a minute and then told me that I am not tall enough to build a roof. So I told him we’d take a ladder to the moon too. He seemed okay with that plan, rolled over and went back to sleep.

Silly kid.

On Sunday we took the boys out for some fall fun at our local children’s zoo.

Of course we had to spend some time with the baby goats (I guess they are more like toddler goats now).

Luke still loves the goats. He thought it was so fun to walk up to one, pet it, and then run away. I think this is much better than his previous method of showing affection by pulling on their ears.

Adam was not a fan of the goats at all and tried his best to stay away from them. I found him (what I thought was) a nice safe bench to sit on. He was fine there until an overly-friendly goat tried to eat his sweatshirt.

Both boys loved playing with the boxes of grain.

Luke kept trying to transfer spoonfuls from one area to the other – unfortunately he was using a slotted spoon and it didn’t work that well.

Adam entertained himself by making octopus pie.

After the pies were done, it was time for some painting.

And while the pumpkin dried the boys ran around on the playground.

Adam has gotten so much braver since the first time we went this year. He climbed the nets like a little monkey and went down the slide like a pro.

Luke stayed in the area for the smaller kids.

Before we left we stopped in the gift shop area so that Adam could say hello to the talking pumpkin.

He told her all about his Halloween costume and that green is his favorite color and Papa’s favorite color is green too, but Daddy likes orange and pumpkins are orange. I think he could have talked to her all day.

When Adam and I were done talking to the pumpkin we found Luke and Dave playing on one of the scooters. Luke absolutely loved it (if you couldn’t tell by that picture).

We had a great time and I am so glad we were able to go again this year.

What could possibly make my child think this is a good idea?

Don’t worry, I rescued him before he and his horse went over the cliff.

On Saturday, in addition to celebrating my dad’s birthday with him and my mom, we went and got pumpkins for the boys.

We only got one carving pumpkin this year. We did get a few smaller ones too, but they are all out of sight right now, since Luke likes to throw them.

Adam and my dad drew a picture of what the finished jack-o-lantern should look like for Dave to use as a guide.

Adam and Mabel watched. Adam was staying far away from those pumpkin guts (so was I).

Adam did help with the pumpkin’s face though.

I think they did a pretty good job.

Last week was “E Week” here and we really enjoyed it. Adam insisted on putting on his fireman costume after breakfast most mornings (and it was pretty adorable).

I had gotten some fun new school supplies for my birthday and Adam was so excited to try them out. Thanks mom and dad for the alphabet tile magnets. I printed out this tree with all the letters on it in lower case and Adam had to match them up with the correct upper case letter. We did this activity a few times and he really liked it. He had a bit of trouble with lower case b/d and p/q, but other than that got the rest of the letters with no problem.

Both boys loved playing with these pom pom magnets that we made (thanks Gram & Lo for the gift cards).

I plan on picking up the supplies to make more the next time I go to the store. Luke played with them for a long time, moving them from the cookie sheet to the desk and then to the dishwasher and any other magnetic surface I pointed out.

I also got some bingo chips for my birthday (thanks Stacy) and so we used those a couple of different ways.

Adam used them to find all of the letter e’s in a story. When he was done he asked if he could do it again “his way” and put markers on all the other letters too. The story reads: “Elsa the elephant balances eleven eggs on her head. Careful Elsa!”. When I read it to Adam the first time he added, “And Elsa said, I have it all under control”. (And just for the record Gramma E, I didn’t make up the story, I found it online).

And it wouldn’t have been E Week without some letter art. We made a pink elephant (no grey construction paper, but Adam didn’t seem to mind).

We also made a fun eagle. The wings were made by tracing Adam’s hands and I thought that was pretty neat. When I had him tell Dave about it though I said, “Tell Daddy what the eagle’s wings are made out of” and Adam looked at Dave and said, “They made out of paper Daddy”. Not quite what I was going for…

We did some math equations this week with these fun monsters. Adam told me what kind of mouth/face he wanted each monster to have and then he had to complete the equation using eyes. In the picture above he was holding up some of the extra eyes and pretending to look through them.

I made sure none of the monsters ended up with more than four eyes and that worked much better for him than the frogs last week.

I think Adam’s favorite part of “E Week” though was watching the movie Dumbo for the first (second, third, fourth, and fifth) time. I have never seen him so mesmerized by a movie. When I asked him if he liked it he said, “It’s really, really good Mama”. It was his Uncle Steve’s favorite movie when he was a kid and I love seeing Adam enjoy it too.

Poor Adam hurt his upper lip Saturday night and after two mommy kisses didn’t make it feel better, he insisted he needed a bandage (he did have a small cut on his lip).

I had to cut the band-aid in half to get it to fit, but it seemed to do the trick and he said he felt better.

I think he looked very distinguished too.

I realized the other day that Adam’s trusty fireman boots are technically a size and a half too small for him. They don’t seem to be bothering his feet, but I figured it was time for a new pair in his current size (actually half a size larger than his current size – room to grow and all). Adam was quick to pass the old boots on to Luke.

They are too big for him, but Luke doesn’t let that stop him. When he walks out of one of them he will bring it right over to me so I can put it back on for him.

I think we’ve definitely gotten out money’s worth out of those boots.

I try to make sure I post pictures of both kids (somewhat) equally, however I know with the schoolwork we’ve been doing lately that it’s been a little heavy on the Adam.

That’s not the only reason though. In fact, unless Luke is eating or sleeping it’s pretty hard to get a picture of that boy. He is a nonstop ball of energy lately.

I’m not complaining, I love my wild little guys – even if they can be tough to photograph.

F Week was a lot of fun at our house. I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, but here are some of the ones I did take.

We did a lot of fireman related projects, and Adam loved it. He has really been on a fireman kick lately and in fact he is going to be a firefighter for Halloween. His costume came this week, so that was a happy surprise for him.

We also talked about how frogs are born and he had fun lining up these cards to show the changes from egg to frog. “First the eggs hatch in to poles, then they grow legs, then they grow arms, then they start to look like a frog, then we take their tails away!”

We also made a nifty fox. Adam is getting to be pretty handy with a glue stick.

Normally all of the projects we do come from ideas I find online. I was pretty excited about this next one though, because I came up with it all on my own (I’m a dork, I know).

I made flags using pipe cleaners and masking tape and wrote a different number (1-12) on each flag. Adam’s job was to add the correct number of beads to the flag pole. He worked independently for a while and then started to lose interested about halfway through. So I helped him by handing him the beads. I gave him more than the required amount each time – just to make sure he was really doing the counting and not just relying on me – and he stopped each time when he had the right number (smarty pants).

The best part of that activity was I already had everything on hand to make it. This next one is not one I came up with on my own, and did require a little shopping.

I started with 24 little frogs (thank you dollar store) and wrote numbers (1-9) on the backs of 9 of them and left the rest blank. I had Adam start with the numbered frogs and line them up in order.

Then I got out the lily pads I had made (out of sheets of foam) to go along with them. I had written equations on them for Adam to solve. I knew this was a little advanced for him and would require a lot of help from me, but I wanted to challenge him a bit. In hindsight I shouldn’t have had any of the equations go higher than 5 because he got very frustrated with this initially.

When we first started he told me that he didn’t want to do it anymore because he wasn’t good at it. So I flipped the lily pads over (so they were all blank) and had him group the frogs by color (or family as we called it). Once he had a chance to calm down a bit and build up some confidence we started over.

We kept the blank frogs in the pond (the green basket) and used them to show the addition. Adam and I would put the correct number of frogs on the lily pad to correspond with the equation, then he would count them all up and once he knew what the answer was the unmarked frogs went back in the pond and he replaced them with a numbered frog.

Once he got the hang of it he really seemed to enjoy it. Luke liked to play with the frogs as well – you can see his hand sneaking into the pond in that last photo.

So that was some of our F Week. There were a few projects I wanted to do that we didn’t get to, but I’m sure I’ll be able to sneak them in later.

Next up? Letter E.