Eye Candy

Do you ever feel like squealing because your kids are so dang cute? I do this daily.
A little eye candy for you. Enjoy!

A little bit of randomness

We can't seem to get better at our house...for the past 2 months it's been a constant cycle of ear infections...pink eye...bronchitis...unknown viruses, and now...flu. GAH! We are so over being sick! Right now it's Matt and Emmie (and possibly prime...he's one cranky kid) But even in the midst of boogers, puke, eye goop, and poop there have been some cute moments. These are 2 from yesterday.

Emmie wrote "her name"!

Now you may be looking at this and thinking..."um, Elyse, you need to check your eyes because this does not spell her name." yes, yes, this is true BUT they are LETTERS!!! how huge is that?! AWESOME!


I love them

On our Menu this Week:

Yesterday on "I Am Momma Hear Me Roar" she posted about "Make 5 dinners in 1 hour". This is totally awesome! We are in a major food rut at our house and I think this may be our ticket out! This lady as already done all the prep and outlines everything. All I need is time to go grocery shopping and 1 hour (or so) to prep on Saturday...totally doable. Ceri went on her blog and looked up some of her menus. She picked 5 that looked good so we could test them out this week before committing to purchasing the program (it's really inexpensive..I'm just totally cheap).

What I've discovered is that it really does only take about an hour of prep time to get all the meal in order for next week. So...do you want to know what we're having? I know you do.

Monday: Greek Chicken
Tuesday: Italian Baked Bowties
Wednesday: Hot Ham Cornbread Sandwiches
Thursday: Coconut Chicken Strips
Friday: Sweet & Sour Meatballs

I'm pretty psyched...mostly because I know that I'm not going to be standing in front of my refrigerator at 6:00pm this week thinking, "what can I throw together today". Is it silly that I feel completely liberated and empowered by something this simple?

oh..and this is a picture of our weeks worth of meals...minus a loaf of french bread and salad. It fits so nicely on my shelf.

ta-da!

February Shelves

As a working mom, I get a lot of sympathetic looks from those who are fortunate enough to do the stay at home mom thing. And while, yes, I would love to be a stay at home mom - that's just not in the cards for us right now and it's all good. I have the best job in the world. I work for my mom and I get to do what I love. And really, I think doing what I do has made me a better mom. What could be better than that?

I don't really blog about my work life and I'm starting to wonder why. It's a huge part of my life and I'm really good at it (if I do say so myself) so...for those who are interested (and if it's no one, that's okay) I'd like to start sharing bits and pieces of what it is to be a Montessorian.

Every few weeks I change out my Practical Life shelves. Usually the "works" (our word for activities) revolves around the time of year and what my theme for the month is.

For the first 2 weeks of February I did...ta-ta-da...valentines. These are my 2 Practical Life shelves:


From Left to Right:
Top: pom-pom into mail box, heart clothes pins, ladybug eggs
Middle: cake sewing, heart stringing, heart decorating with strait pins
Bottom: Shoe lacing, buttoning, zipping

From Right to Left:
Top: Heart spooning, rose tonging, rose sort/tweezing
Middle: heart pouring, heart pouring (sharing the quantity), wet pouring
Bottom: peg hammering, cookie cutter grading, place mate puzzle matching


This is a close up of a few works:

Hear buttoning: I got this idea from Counting Coconuts (LOVE her site)

pom-poms and mail box. For this work the child uses a full fist grasp to fill the mail box

Ladybug eggs. The goal for this work is to open up the egg and place one wooden ladybug in it then close it back up. The children LOVED this work!

Rose tweezing/sorting: The tweezers are used to place the pink roses in the cup with the pink sticker on the bottom and the red roses in the cup with the red sticker.

okay...so this work is more "Halloween" looking...but a lot of my students needed major help with their zipping skills so I stuffed one of Primes 3-6 month Halloween shirts because it matched the jacket. As an added bonus it had a monster face on it. Although it was valentines time they completely ate it up! I'm happy to announce the my children need less help with their zippers now. ta-da!

A Valentine Party

Every year our school puts on a valentines's party with a little petting zoo and goodies and, of course, a valentine exchange. I was not able to get any pictures of the petting zoo because Emmie wouldn't let me put her down - the Llama freaked her out. but here are some other highlights from the day.

Emmie's sack (I did her name and the ribbons...then she told me that I needed to stop and Grammy was the one who would help her with the stickers)


I wonder what she's thinking...Emmie with her friends

Cousin Monson got to join in on the fun

For dinner we had "Valentine Pizza" we may have to make this a new Coleman family Tradition!

31 years and balut

A perfect birthday morning:

Sleeping in and snuggling with your very own giraffe

After a little bit Emmie noticed what daddy was wearing...so she rushed out and changed. Nothing says, "Happy Birthday" quite like matching shirts!

Happy Birthday Matthew!

This was my first ever double decker cake...Cake Boss, you inspire me

Maybe one day we will turn into party animals...but for now we're a pretty low key bunch...a little cake, some good company, a gift or two, and we called it good. : )

A side note: For Matt's birthday he requested Filipino food. A friend of his made some for him and included some balut (boiled fertilized duck embryos) Matt already had enjoyed his, offered me one, I said, "no thank you", so he passed them around to the boys. Calvin, Clif, and Adam braved it.

They liked it!

To you, From Emmie

Happy Valentines Everyone!
Hope it was wonderful and full of love, hugs, and chocolate!

p.s. I tried for 20 minutes or so to get the site that had the idea for Emmie's valentines...I can't find it and can't spend any more time looking...if you do know where it is would you fill me in so I can give credit to whoever came up with that cute idea? cool. thanks!

Jessica filled me in...thank you! Click Here for I am Momma Hear Me Roar's instructions! cool.

Happy Birthday Matthew!

To celebrate, please enjoy some photos from birthday's long ago.
Happy Birthday Matt! We love you!

Laying Low

We just can't seem to get well at our house! Seems like after we finish one round of antibiotics 2 weeks later we start another round. Emmie was down with a fever and an ear infection this week and then I just went to the doctor today and got 4 prescriptions for bronchitis (yes, I did just have this 2 weeks ago...it just never went away...stupid zpack), an ear infection, and to top it off, Pink eye (gross).

So, this is us - laying low.

Emmie loves looking at books. One of her favorites right now is a REALLY long version of the 3 little pigs...I think she likes it because it puts off going to bed just a little longer. clever.

He's getting so big - Is it terrible that I don't encourage the walking? Something happens to babies when they start to walk...they grow up all the sudden... JUST STAY LITTLE!

Emmie and Prime are starting to interact more and more. In this picture Emmie is playing a game with Prime where she drapes Matt's suit coat (don't tell Matt) over him and he figures out how to get out. They just laughed and laughed.
Makes me smile.

So hopefully the antibiotics will take this time and we will be able to get back to being ourselves...but for now we are just laying low.