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Per RANDOM.ORG:
Keeling, who said:
Second question– I actually HATE writing because I have to do it so much for school…right now, I’m supposed to be writing a paper about landmark special ed court cases, instead, I’m entering your blog contest :)
Jenna Z, who said:
I LOVE the peach! And I like to write birthday cards. I try very hard to remember everyone’s birthday and send a nice card!
Thanks to everyone who entered this giveaway! If you’d like to try another yogurt, you can download a coupon for $1.00 off of a Fiber One Yogurt multipack here.
I feel this photo captures my two children’s personalities perfectly: Emma painting carefully with a brush, and Johnny moving quickly from paintbrush to hands…
…and then from paper to hair (sorry this second photo is so over-exposed):
 I love washable paint!
Picnic Table Talk this week is all about physical activities and outdoor games. We are really fortunate to have a lovely yard for the kids to play in, and when the weather is nice they will spend most of the day outdoors. I wrote a post back in February on keeping toddlers active indoors, so here are a few of our favorite things to do outdoors:
- Exploring: Both kids love exploring the yard and neighborhood – finding plants, flowers, birds, and other animals. We sort of live in the middle of nowhere, which means we get lots of animals: deer, groundhogs, and wild turkey in addition to the more common squirrels and birds.
- Outdoor toys: This summer we made a thrifty sandbox using an underbed storage bin. We have a couple Little Tikes climbing toys, one inherited from a friend and one that I picked up for $5 at a yard sale. We also have a trike and a ride-on toy, also picked up at yard sales for $3 apiece.
- Art: My kids love homemade sidewalk paint as well as chalk. Not exactly active, but a fun outdoor activity.
- Picnics: It’s always a treat for my kids to eat on a blanket outside, and I love the minimal cleanup. Also not that active, but picnics are always preceded and/or followed by active outdoor play.
- Walks: Emma and Johnny love to wander around our neighborhood.
- Water: Our town regulates summer water usage pretty heavily (even during super wet summers like we’ve had this year), so this is somewhat limited at our house, but both kids are happy to engage in any water-related activity.
- Balls: Throw them, kick them, chase them – endless fun!
What are your favorite ways to stay active indoors and outdoors?
Emma helped me press some flowers recently, and then wanted to play with the finished product. Because she didn’t want the fragile dried flowers to fall apart, we decided to laminate them using some packing tape. Now she has beautiful dried flowers she can play with to her heart’s content without worrying about crushing them!
We pressed the flowers by placing them between two sheets of paper in a dictionary and leaving them there until they dried. Be sure to wait until the flowers are completely dried to laminate them, or they might mold.
 Mike took the kids to the Children’s and Science Discovery Museums in Acton on Saturday and I had a quiet morning at home. It’s amazing how much I can done without two toddlers underfoot! I decided it was the perfect occasion to tackle my fear of sewing cloth diapers. I decided to start off with Shar’s free (for home use) newborn diaper pattern off of The Nappy Network. It’s designed to be a pocket diaper, but I decided to just turn it into a fleece cover instead. I have plenty of prefolds to stuff it with, and covers are slightly easier to sew than pockets.
I had some soft purple fleece left over from making Emma this jacket and some velcro from making crayon rolls, so I didn’t have to purchase any materials for this project.
Here are the pattern pieces with the velcro pinned on:
 And here the pieces are sewn together and the elastic has been added:
 I was really confused about how to add the elastic (it’s different from adding elastic to, say, shorts) until I found this Youtube video. Hooray for Youtube!
After adding the elastic I turned it right side out and hand-stitched the opening I had left for turning. I was originally going to topstitch it, but I liked the way it looked without the topstitching and so left it that way. Making this took 20 minutes tops after all of my drama over being intimidated by cloth diapers, and I definitely plan to make more! Many thanks to my online friends (especially Ally) for inspiring me to try this project! Now I just need my baby girl to arrive so I can test how well this diaper works!
Mars is offering coupons for free chocolate every Friday this summer. We used ours to buy some M&Ms, which we then used to make M&M graphs. I simply divided a paper into six sections and had Emma create a graph of M&Ms in the various colors. We talked about which colors we had the most and fewest M&Ms in, and counted the M&Ms in each column. Emma loved this activity (especially the part at the end where she got to eat some M&Ms), and is asking to do it again as I type.
 Johnny looks so innocently attentive in the top photo that I had to add this second picture, which is a much more accurate representation of his involvement in this activity. I was amazed that Emma had the self-control to not eat any M&Ms until the end, especially when her brother was gobbling them up as quickly as possible.
This giveaway is now closed, but if you’d like to try another yogurt you can download a coupon for $1.00 off a Fiber One Yogurt multipack here.
We eat a lot of yogurt at our house, so I was happy to accept when My Blog Spark offered me the opportunity to review Yoplait’s Thick & Creamy yogurt. They sent me a gift basket like the one pictured above with cute stationary, a pen (which Emma immediately claimed since it was pink, a trait I can’t fault too heavily since I would undoubtedly have done the same thing at her age), and a coupon for any flavor of Yoplait Thick & Creamy yogurt. I had actually tried this kind of yogurt before (like I said, we eat a lot of yogurt so we’ve tried most brands), and I used to eat it a lot in college. One 170g (6oz) yogurt contains 28 grams of sugar, which for me puts this into more of a healthy treat than a healthy snack category – treat because of the sugar content, and healthy because of the fact that it does have live and active yogurt cultures and vitamin D to help absorb the calcium. The creamy texture makes this yogurt a healthier alternative to pudding or custard.
Now for the giveaway:
I have TWO gift baskets identical to the one I received on offer for readers of this blog (US entries only, I’m afraid). To enter, leave a comment with your answer to one of the following questions (or answer both questions for two entries):
- What is your favorite flavor of Yoplait Thick & Creamy?
- Outside of blogging, what is your favorite way to write?
Leave your email address in your comment if you don’t have an email address in your blog profile so I can contact you if you win. You have until 9pm EDT July 30th to enter this giveaway. Winners will be chosen randomly from all valid entries. Winners must respond within 24 hours, or another winner will be chosen.
I try to provide my children with as many opportunities to explore their world and express themselves as possible, while maintaining a reasonably clean house. Organization is something I think about frequently, and a topic I have blogged about before.
I haven’t done much to organize learning in our house; I think very young children learn a lot by exploring their world, particularly if parents pay attention to and discuss their children’s interests. I am considering a loose adaptation of Sue Patrick’s Workbox System to provide Emma and Johnny with things to do at their play table with minimal supervision when I am busy with the baby. If anyone has used workboxes in this way with young children, I would love to hear about it! Some things I would put in the workboxes:
- Play dough, sometimes on it’s own, sometimes with one of our homemade play mats.
- Pattern blocks, sometimes with templates like the ones I referred to in this post.
- File folder games like this one.
- Their travel felt boards with the activities mentioned in this post.
- Their crayon rolls and paper/coloring pages
- These paint brushes and paper
Have any other suggestions as to what I should put in these bins? I’d love any other ideas!
Here are a few things that work well for us in terms of physical organization:
- Divide craft materials into categories. I have some supplies (colored paper, fabric scraps, and pipe cleaners) that I let the kids use with minimal supervision. The next category is supplies that both kids can use with light supervision (crayons, markers, glue), followed by materials that require close supervision (small beads, scissors).
- Categorize toys. We keep our building toys in a different part of the house from stuffed animals and dolls, which are also separate from books. Puzzles are kept separately from other toys also.
- Make clean-up fun and easy. Each toy has a place where it always goes, and I use containers that are easy for my kids to put toys into. Sometimes they will clean up a toy on their own, but more often I clean up alongside them. If they’re reluctant to help pick up, we’ll sing a song and/or turn clean-up into a game (who can find the most red duplos, who can pick their toy up the most quickly, etc)
- Catch destructive mode before it’s full-blown. Emma and Johnny both occasionally go into destructive mode. For Johnny, this typically means he needs a nap; for Emma it’s a signal that she needs to do a structured activity.
What organizing tricks simplify your life?
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