Story Time

Today at story time the kids were learning about Groundhog's Day. Ms. Christine was telling the kids about Phil in Pennsylvania when one girl yelled out "Aunt Cathy is there", Ms. Christine responded "Oh Aunt Cathy lives in Pennsylvania?" and the girl responded "yeah thats what I said."
Story time can get pretty loud with the comments from the kids.
So as the book continued it talked about other animals related to the groundhog including a hedgehog. Abby yelled out "That's Pinecone, Auntie Sally lives with her." Ms. Christine just nodded and kept going not really sure how to respond. Apparently not everyone has a Pinecone or Auntie Sally.

Sesame Street Live

I scored some tickets to Sesame Street Live a few weeks ago so the kiddos and I met F'uncle (fake uncle)  Kai there since it was during a school day and Dave couldn't come with us. This year they added something new this year, a Playzone where the kids could play in Elmo's World.... "lalala, elmo's world."

 And every 15 minutes characters came out and sang songs with the kiddos, this is Murray performing "happy and you know it."

Checking out Big Birds nest.

Dancing in Zoe's dance studio.

Chillin' on 123 Sesame Street.

 Noah trying to eat the cookies.

 Abby with Abby CadAbby.

The show was great too, no pictures of it. The playzone was diffentely the highlight of the whole experience.

Numbers!

We've been working a lot with Abby on letters.  She likes to draw them and she has now started pointing them out wherever we go (billboards, street signs, etc).  She is particularly fond of the letter A and finding it wherever possible.

We haven't really done much with numbers though.  She can count to 16 or so (after 16, she says a few random numbers then ends up at 20).  She's pretty good counting numbers of things as well.

Tonight, we were all sitting around playing, and Abby was drawing on her magna-doodle.  She turned it towards us and said "what number is this?"  She turned it around, and this is what we saw:

Yeah, she drew that all by herself.  She then decided to erase it, and draw another number.  She drew an 8 and asked what number that was.  We then asked her to draw a 1 and 3, both which she did almost perfectly.  She's so darn smart!

Quotables

Two different quotables in a one hour period:

Abby: "Mommy, are you old?"
Peggy: "No, I'm only 29."
Abby: "You are old!"


Abby was drawing on her magna-doodle.  She decided she wanted to draw me.
Abby: "Do you have a little head or a big head?"
Dave: "I have a little head"
Abby: "Hmm, it looks like you have a big head!  I gonna draw a big head."
Dave: "Haha, thanks kid."

Busted! (Again....and again)

The other day, I was getting the kids ready to go outside.  I put Noah's coat on, then let him roam.  Then I was working on Abby.  I finished with Abby, and went to find Noah.  In just a minute or two, he had gotten in to the laundry room, stood up to the dog food container, unscrewed the lid (Abby feeds Proton now, so I don't think it was on too tight), grabbed the cup and was starting to scoop out dog food.

Seriously, this kid gets in to everything.  The other day, Peggy was upstairs in our bedroom with the kids.  Noah found his way in to the bathroom, stood up, and flushed the toilet.  And now he wants to do it all the time. 

Noah Climbing Steps

Noah is quite the adventurer lately.  He's all over the house, and in to everything.  We never had this much trouble keeping Abby out of stuff, although I think Noah's behavior is more typical for this age than Abby ever was.  We would tell her "no" once or twice, and she would stop.  Noah.....not so much.

Last weekend, I was working on the cleaning the house and the kids were playing.  I walked by the front door and discovered Noah had climbed up two steps all by himself.  He laughed and giggled and was very proud of himself.  I was terrified.

So, what did I do?  Try to recreate it for the camera of course!  I got this picture of him halfway to his goal.

And I got this video of him climbing the first step.

Abby Doing the Perplexus

Last year, I got a Perplexus maze game.  Abby played with it on and off, but it was pretty tough for her.  They now came out with a Perplexus game for younger kids.  Knowing how much Abby liked the original, my mom get her this new one for Christmas.

She LOVES it.  She plays with it on average an hour or so a day.  She doesn't devote that much time to any other toy.  We've been trying to be very encouraging with her so she sticks with it.

I honestly have no idea how she is so good at it.  It's surprising for her age I think.  On the old one, she was able to get to the 8th position or something.  Her current record on this one is 27 (the course is marked with numbers....the end is 70).  The other day she ended up somewhere around 45.  She either got lucky and got past the really hard part around number 30 (even Peggy hasn't beaten this part yet!), or the ball jumped the track and she skipped it.  It does jump the track occasionally (falls off and just happens to land farther along in the track) so she's actually gotten to the finish at least 10 times.  It so funny, because she looks up at us, startled and so proud of herself for getting (although illegitimately) to the end.