Friday, April 30, 2010
Puzzles Galore
Yesterday, Caleb accepted my challenge to complete all five of his floor puzzles in one stretch. Three have 100 pieces, another 51 pieces and the last 24 pieces. It took him a couple of hours (with breaks), but he was so proud of himself when he was done :)
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Coloring & Drawing
Lately, the boys have been very into coloring. My mom told me a while ago that I should encourage them to draw on blank sheets of paper, instead of just printed coloring sheets, but that has been a hard sell. They LOVE getting online at http://www.educationalcoloringpages.com/ and picking out a character to color. Caleb's favorites are all of the superheroes, while Ethan prefers Disney characters and Dora the Explorer. They ask me several times a day to print out a coloring sheet of some specific character. I love the website that makes this possible, but I sincerely hope I am not thwarting their imaginative/artistic potential by giving them such a steady diet of pre-drawn images.
I realized this weekend when Alli asked Caleb to draw animals with her that he doesn't draw anything on his own except patterns of shapes. I can't even get him to try to draw a face. When given blank paper, he always draws concentric circles, lines, or rows of some shape. It is always very regular and formulaic. He traces all of his letters very well, and can write about half of them without tracing, but he always wants each letter to be perfect. He is forever holding up a traced letter and saying, "Do you like my 'M', Mama?" I say, "It's great, Caleb! Great job!" Then he says, "I think it is not good. See that part? I'm gonna wipe it off and do it again." Sometimes I try to talk him out of it, wanting to avoid the perfectionism that he is so prone to, but other times I say nothing.
Ethan also prefers a printed sheet to a blank one. He will make a few lines across a blank sheet and be done, but he spends a long time coloring a printed sheet. First, he uses a marker to color over every letter and number on the sheet (like the web address and title at the bottom of each sheet). Then, he picks one object, like all of the flowers, and he meticulously covers each flower with whatever color marker he is using. Then he chooses another color and repeats the pattern with another object. He does not have Caleb's attention span, though, and he never finishes a picture before growing bored and getting up from the table to do something else.
I realized this weekend when Alli asked Caleb to draw animals with her that he doesn't draw anything on his own except patterns of shapes. I can't even get him to try to draw a face. When given blank paper, he always draws concentric circles, lines, or rows of some shape. It is always very regular and formulaic. He traces all of his letters very well, and can write about half of them without tracing, but he always wants each letter to be perfect. He is forever holding up a traced letter and saying, "Do you like my 'M', Mama?" I say, "It's great, Caleb! Great job!" Then he says, "I think it is not good. See that part? I'm gonna wipe it off and do it again." Sometimes I try to talk him out of it, wanting to avoid the perfectionism that he is so prone to, but other times I say nothing.
Ethan also prefers a printed sheet to a blank one. He will make a few lines across a blank sheet and be done, but he spends a long time coloring a printed sheet. First, he uses a marker to color over every letter and number on the sheet (like the web address and title at the bottom of each sheet). Then, he picks one object, like all of the flowers, and he meticulously covers each flower with whatever color marker he is using. Then he chooses another color and repeats the pattern with another object. He does not have Caleb's attention span, though, and he never finishes a picture before growing bored and getting up from the table to do something else.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Old Friends In Town
This weekend, one of my closest friends from college brought her husband and 3-month-old daughter for a visit. Alli and I have been very close friends for more than ten years, but it was especially enjoyable to spend time together this weekend because now we have motherhood in common. I loved swapping stories about pregnancy and new motherhood with her, as well as seeing her with her precious little girl.
In addition to becoming a Mommy and, at least temporarily, retiring from her speech therapy career, Alli has gotten into birding since we saw each other last. Everywhere we went this weekend, she pointed out to me the unique sounds of all different kinds of birds. I have a bird feeder on our deck, mostly for the boys' entertainment, and she taught all three of us the names of our frequent visitors. Although I was fascinated by her ability to identify so many birds by their calls, I'm afraid I made a very poor birding student, since my hearing is not the best.
Alli was much more successful at teaching me a few speech therapy skills to work on with Caleb . She said the age four is an important year for honing sounds that have not yet developed naturally. She taught me about auditory bombardment and auditory discriminaton. Even after just two days of being intentional with these things, Caleb is pronouncing the initial "f" sound much more clearly than he was before. I have just gotten used to the sound replacements and ommissions in both boys' speech, and it was good to have a fresh ear (specifically the ear of a seasoned speech therapist) call attention to some easily-corrected articulation errors.
On another note, Alli's husband Damon is really into games. "Into" doesn't accurately describe his relationship with games. He brought a whole suitcase of options for us to play. And to top it off, we were telling him about what we thought was an obscure Asian game that another friend tried to teach us, and he pulled that very game out of his suitcase! Teasing him aside, we did have a lot of fun learning and playing the game Dominion. Marcus added to the fun by interspersing questions from our coffee table "If..." book whenever one of us had to step away from the table.
We had a great weekend with our old friends, and I really hope we don't let another couple of years go by before we do it again.
In addition to becoming a Mommy and, at least temporarily, retiring from her speech therapy career, Alli has gotten into birding since we saw each other last. Everywhere we went this weekend, she pointed out to me the unique sounds of all different kinds of birds. I have a bird feeder on our deck, mostly for the boys' entertainment, and she taught all three of us the names of our frequent visitors. Although I was fascinated by her ability to identify so many birds by their calls, I'm afraid I made a very poor birding student, since my hearing is not the best.
Alli was much more successful at teaching me a few speech therapy skills to work on with Caleb . She said the age four is an important year for honing sounds that have not yet developed naturally. She taught me about auditory bombardment and auditory discriminaton. Even after just two days of being intentional with these things, Caleb is pronouncing the initial "f" sound much more clearly than he was before. I have just gotten used to the sound replacements and ommissions in both boys' speech, and it was good to have a fresh ear (specifically the ear of a seasoned speech therapist) call attention to some easily-corrected articulation errors.
On another note, Alli's husband Damon is really into games. "Into" doesn't accurately describe his relationship with games. He brought a whole suitcase of options for us to play. And to top it off, we were telling him about what we thought was an obscure Asian game that another friend tried to teach us, and he pulled that very game out of his suitcase! Teasing him aside, we did have a lot of fun learning and playing the game Dominion. Marcus added to the fun by interspersing questions from our coffee table "If..." book whenever one of us had to step away from the table.
We had a great weekend with our old friends, and I really hope we don't let another couple of years go by before we do it again.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Spring Pictures!
Here is the link to the boys' 2-year-old and 4-year-old pictures: http://www.heatherswannerphotography.com/OnlineViewing/. Click on the drop down menu, select my name, and type in "2boys" for access to the gallery. In case you look at the prices and wonder, know that I had to save up all the extra money I earn/recieve for a year to be able to buy 5x7s or 8x10s of a few of these pictures. Regardless, Heather (the photographer) is amazingly gifted and it is worth every penny to me to have such beautiful pictures of the boys.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Daddy's Home :)
After more than three months of Daddy working around-the-clock, we have been enjoying a couple weeks of him being home a lot more. With only one exception, Marcus has been off work by 5:30 every night for the past two weeks. Even better, he's been free to enjoy family time both weekends, instead of having to study or prepare presentations. Work responsibilities will be picking back up again soon, but it has been great to have a couple of weeks of feeling like a "normal" family (assuming there is a such a thing :)
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