Flooring Finished...And Two Cute Photos

We finished the flooring in the office/schoolroom.  We still have to put up the baseboards, but that's okay.  It's 99.5% done.

Now I just need to get a rug so I can cover it all up.  No, that's not the reason I need a rug.  I need a rug so we can sit on the floor and comfortably read books together.  I think.

We're slowly getting everything ready for first grade, starting August 13th!  We're also taking full advantage of the lazy dog days of summer before we start school.

Eli likes to pull his trousers all the way up past his belly button.  Silas did it to him once several weeks ago and now he's constantly hitching them up as high as they'll go.

Mr. Banana Face came and got me and said, "Cheeeeese.  Picture?" So I, of course, had to take his picture.  It's blurry because he won't stay still for half a second, but it's still cute.  And I won't think badly of myself for posting two photos of Eli and none of Silas because Silas was at his grandfather's for four days and wasn't around to have it taken.

Crazy Brothers

First there is this darling dear of mine:

Look! He's showing me how he's all done with his yogurt.  Ummmm...obviously, the 'all done' command has overridden the 'no messes' command.

 And then there's this one:

How can he sleep like this?!  His head is completely off the bed but he's out like a light.

Summer Fun Kids' Projects

I intended this summer to be full of reading with Five-In-A-Row, but my library card expired and I haven't felt like paying for a new one yet (because we live so far out, we don't qualify for the free membership). Instead this summer has so far been filled with science and art projects.

This was a simple, cheap and fun thing to do.  We took an empty cleaning bottle (or a 2L bottle would work) and I let Silas drill a couple dozen holes in it.  Then we simply duck taped it to the garden hose, and voila!  We made a sprinkler!  

We have sturdier and more interesting sprinklers, but sometimes it's fun to take a piece of trash and make it worth something.

Note to self:  next time make sure the garden hose is dry before wrapping it with duck tape.  

As promised, an update to our ivory soap experiment.  This is Eli playing in the bath with it. He loved it (although it's obviously not tear-free and he did get it in his eyes).

 I was a little worried it would stain his skin because of the food coloring, but the soap washed it right off.  I did have a blue ring around my bathtub, but it just gave me motivation to actually clean the tub.

We've been doing a lot of art projects.  This was a birthday banner for a family friend.  Silas did an excellent job painting in the letters.  For Eli, I painted a bunch of glue onto the right side and let him stick all sorts of things on it: feathers, confetti, sequins. 

Our latest project was cloud dough.  A mixture of flour and baby oil, it's intended for sensory play for toddlers.

And this toddler had loads of fun with it.  It's kind of like wet sand, in that you can mold and form it into things.  And as it's been too hot to really enjoy the sand box, this was a good substitute.

I was glad that I put a tablecloth underneath the box.  I just took it outside and shook it off.  The dough made some mess, but most of these projects do.  Or should I say, Eli made a mess.  It wasn't the dough's fault that he couldn't keep it in the box (i.e. see picture below of Silas with bits in his hair).

Silas has issues with getting his hands dirty but he loved this one because the dough is really soft and smelled like babies (clean babies...). 

This was a fun experiment that was easy and cheap to make.  The boys played with it for about 45 minutes, but they could have gone on longer if I let them.

I'm sure we'll be doing more things before the summer's over.  Although I am getting excited about starting my new job as a first grade teacher...of one.

Euro Cup 2012

I don't know if being involved in a sport helped or if it's just his age, but Silas really got into the EuroCup games this year with Christian.  Besides somehow becoming a Portugal fan, he also started drawing the games on the dry erase desk: 

Poor Daddy, England lost to Italy on penalties.  I love how he got the goals, the pitch, the crowd and the players in different colors, the scoreboard, and how he spelled out England, albeit incorrectly.  We can have a discussion another day about how teaching phonics with two differing accents can be confusing for a child.

July 4th, 2012

We spent Independence Day with my sister and her family.  We didn't do anything too terribly patriotic.  It's been too dry and hot to do any fireworks on our own, and all of us were too exhausted to stay up and watch the city's fireworks that night.  

But we did get ice cream!  

This might be my favorite kid photo of all time.  This was before the grape sherbet went all down her white shirt. 

Eli got plain old vanilla.  He managed to eat the whole thing, while making his father cringe by biting into the ice cream.

Silas loved his Rocky Road.

Happy Independence Day!

Alice in Modeling Clay

I've been reading Alice in Wonderland to Silas.  It's a weird book!  His favorite part so far is where the Mad Hatter recounts his version of 'Twinkle, Twinkle' and the Queen yells, "He's murdering Time!"  He thought that was great.  So we decided to make the King and Queen, the Cheshire Cat, and Alice out of modeling Clay: 

That's my version of Alice on the left.

This was Silas' version of Alice.

Office/School Room Renovations

We've been redoing our computer room, getting ready for this fall when Silas starts First Grade and we'll need a dedicated space for school.  The old computer room had a lot of desk space (it was originally built as a sewing room) and lots of bookshelves, but no floor space and no ventilation.  When the weather got too hot or too cold, we basically shut that room off.  If we were going to use it as a school room, we needed to open it up a bit.  

Bear with me, I forgot to take BEFORE photos, so these are some old ones I managed to find:

The main desk area.  We wanted to move the computer monitor around so that it could be seen from the kitchen (on the right).  

Wasn't Silas cute at 2-1/2 years old?  We also needed to take out the bookshelves to create floor space and take out the exterior door because it was constructed poorly

Taking out the exterior door.

And removing the sliding glass doors between the office and the dining room.  This was a chore and a pain.  Thankfully, Christian did half of it while the rest of us were away.

Taking out the sliding glass doors (and the bookshelves behind them) brought a lot of the morning light into the dining area.  Good morning, Silas!

Another view of how it opened up that room.

Hi, Eli!  More morning sunshine.

After that, we removed the rest of the bookshelves and got to work on the desk space.  It was just too much and took up a lot of square footage.  It also created these vast spaces underneath that were difficult to get to and clean, but perfect for little boys to crawl into and get covered in spider webs.

The mess!

Insulation in the door, to help maintain the temperature a little better.

No more exterior door!  After that we mud and taped (ugghhh!) and re-painted the entire room white.  We also took down that wallpaper.  Silas was really good at picking up the pieces I pulled down.

Onto the bookshelves.  We reused the ones we had, just pulled all the old nails out and repainted.

Silas was good at hammering out the nails, as well.

Eli was good at playing on his own.  For a little while, anyways.

Then Christian started laying the flooring.  This is the same stuff we put in our kitchen and dining area in May.

AFTER!  

We still have to lay the rest of the flooring, but otherwise it's done.  I used some chalkboard paint we had from Silas' room to make a chalkboard.  Now we have plenty of floor space for Eli to play around on while Silas and I focus on schoolwork. 

The books are up and out of the way and everything has a place.  There is still plenty of desk space for the boys to grow into.  It's been a lot easier to keep this room cool, even in 100 degree weather.  It's also a lot easier to keep clean.  

This is still a bit of a mess, but it's actually pretty handy.  Eli's toys are accessible to him, as is scrap paper and the crayons.  Silas' games and puzzles are a little too high for Eli to reach, but just at eye level for Silas.  Their art supplies are higher up, ready for me to grab.  And the more grown up games are way at the top.

By reusing things we already had, like the wood from the bookshelves, we only had to buy a few things.  In all, with the flooring, paint, and few bits of construction materials, we paid around $200 to completely transform our office!

Science Day

The boys and I had two science experiments this week.  The first was 'Gloop' or 'Flubber.'  It's really simple - equal parts school glue and liquid starch.  Once mixed together, it makes this soft silly putty that can be colored, marked on, stretched, cut, etc.  

Eli loved this stuff.  I got out the old markers and let him color on it.  

 He went to town.  He was stretching and pulling it.  He somehow managed to get it in his hair, too.  Thankfully it came out pretty easily in the bath.

Eli lasted a lot longer than Silas with this stuff, amazingly.

It was a great opportunity to try out the desk area in the newly renovated office.

Silas liked cutting it up, mostly because it's a little gooey and he has issues with dirty hands.

Here's the stuff.  I didn't have much school glue so I couldn't make a large quantity, but it was enough for an afternoon of play.

After that we did an experiment with Ivory soap.  I forgot to take pictures of the best part, however.  Put one bar of Ivory soap in the microwave for one minute and it will start to explode into a big cloud.  It's pretty cool.  After it cooled off, the boys were able to play with it a bit, and basically get soap flakes everywhere.  After they got as much fun out of the soap cloud as they could, I put it in the food processor with a little bit of water and mixed it back together.  Then I gave each boy half and let them put a bit of food coloring in it.  

Then we made molds out of my cookie cutters.  It's soap, so I didn't worry too much about what effect it would have on the cutters.  Now that they're dry again, we'll use them in the bath tonight.  I'll have to take pictures of it for an update.