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.

Luke’s head appears to be healing really well. There is a small mark left and he still has a little of the glue on his eyebrow, but other than that I think he looks pretty good!

Adam has a thing for flamingos (or mingos as he calls them).

So of course, when we saw this guy we couldn’t resist bringing him home with us.

He’s pretty proud of his mingo.

Last week was “I Week” in our house. It tied in nicely that Dave brought home ice cream on Wednesday. Poor Adam had to work for his treat though.

When I saw Dave walk in with ice cream I went downstairs and printed out this observation sheet for Adam to fill out.

He didn’t seem to mind a little homework before his snack though.

Here are some of the other interesting “I” things we did last week.

Adam made an igloo. I originally had planned on having him cut strips of white paper to make the blocks of ice, however I think scissors are a bit beyond his skills for right now. It would probably also help if we knew for sure if he was right or left handed. So instead I cut the paper and he used the glue stick to attach it.

We also did a couple of fun counting activities. One where he had to roll a die and count the pips (did you know that’s the technical term for the spots on dice?) and then color in the corresponding number on an inch worm.

The inchworm had twelve segments so I was able to use the numbers 1-6 twice each. He was allowed to pick whatever colors he wanted.

He also had another activity where he had to count the number of holes on a leaf and match it to the inchworm with the right number on it.

He liked that one a lot and would pretend the inchworms were munching on the leaves when he put them in their place.

Then I asked him to put the inchworms in order. He insisted on doing it from 10 to 1, instead of 1 to 10.

I think Adam’s favorite activity this week was making inchworms. He knew exactly who he wanted to make them for and chose the colors accordingly.

Once the inchworms had dried he decided which ones would get big googly eyes and which ones would get smaller ones.

He was very proud of his fleet of inchworms and was quick to correct me each time I mistakenly referred to them as caterpillars. Luke was happy to play with the puff balls too (once he realized you can’t eat them). I gave him a handful of them and an ice cube tray from the dollar store. He played for a while putting a puff ball in each spot, dumping them out, and then doing it again.

Of course there were lots of tangrams, dot-to-dots, and color-by-numbers this week as well. Adam never gets bored with them.

He insists that ice skater is really Aunt Stacy. And no, he didn’t screw up making the skates purple instead of white – I changed the color code because he really does not like using white crayon on white paper (I can’t say I blame him).

So that was “I Week” in a nutshell. It was also the first week we got to use our new magnetic white board to house Adam’s work. We picked it up at Target on clearance ($2.50 – couldn’t pass that up!). And it is working really well for us. Adam insists that most of his work live in his desk, but I’ve been able to convince him to let me show off a few pieces.

That’s an iguana above the igloo. I wanted to name him Izzy, but Adam decided his name is “Adam”. “To why Adam is a nice name” – can’t argue with that.