Becca – Page 18 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Poster Painting

When it comes to crafting, I don’t need much bravery. But when it comes to PAINT + My Toddler…. this Mommy needs more bravery than can possibly exist in one human. But, every time I get up the courage to haul out the paint, it ends up being a super fun time, and I’m always glad that I did it. So, for those of you who need bravery like me, and for those who love to let your little ones paint… here are some fun ideas to experiment with different textures.

Supplies we used: red and yellow washable tempera paint, lots of newspaper (to cover the wood floor), big sheets of white butcher paper, and bubble wrap, dryer balls, a toy car, and a square metal votive holder for painting with.

She first just finger/hand painted, but then she really got into using the car, and then the dryer balls. I was surprised that the bubble wrap wasn’t high on her priority list – since she loves to play with bubble wrap.

Her finished art actually ripped because she decided to walk on it, and put too much paint all in one spot. Still, she was super proud of her art! Once it is totally dry, I’ll cut the paper into a couple of different sections and use them as cards to send to the Grandparents.

To keep myself from over-correcting her, and to truly just let her do what she wanted to do, I did my own painting right next to her. It was super fun, and helped me to relax and just laugh with her. When she was done, she decided to paint most of her body (I had her just in a diaper for this activity), so I carried her to the tub amid a burst of giggles, and we got her all scrubbed up. She enjoyed her impromptu bath, and was so proud to show Daddy her artwork when he got home.

Lily Pads and Saying “yes”

In an effort to turn around my attitude as a mom, and to make parenting a two year old somewhat more enjoyable, I have tried to start saying “yes” a whole lot more often… and “no” a whole lot less. She says “no” enough for the both of us! HA! I like this article that Ashley over at Play at Home Mom wrote about saying yes to her kids. Obviously, I’m not her, and she’s not me… and I don’t say “yes” all the time. But I’m working on responding in a positive way instead of immediately saying “no” to something. Giving her a sound reason- like, “well, if we do the puzzle now we’ll be late for dance class. How about we do the puzzle when we get home and aren’t going to miss dance?” Instead of saying “no – put that away,” when she gets out a puzzle right before we need to leave. If I just say “no,” old world order would say that she as a child should immediately stiffen up straight, say “yes ma’am,” and put the puzzle back. But I don’t have a robot, or a trained seal, for a two year old. She has her own (very strong) brain. When I say “no,” her first response (in her brain) is “why not?” But if I instead tell her we’ll be late for dance class, and suggest that she do it later, that gives her the reason why without her ever going on the defensive. It doesn’t mean that at this option for a fork in the road she’ll jump and run to put the puzzle away, but she is FAR more likely with this response from me vs the immediate “no.” I’m also finding that simply following the “no” with the reason isn’t good enough. When she hears the word “no,” her brain shuts down and goes into defense mode. She is no longer the receiver downfield just waiting for whatever I can throw her way, she is suddenly on defense – for the other team – fighting against me.

So by now you’re wondering – how to lily pads play into all this? Well, a couple of afternoons ago, I was washing bottles (I’m forever washing bottles), and she started throwing all the pillows off of the couch. (We have one of those couches you can rearrange the back cushion – it’s all just big pillows.) Now at this point I could consider the fact that I really need to vacuum, and our living room floor probably isn’t the cleanest, or I could just say, what harm is there? and move on, which is what I chose to do. She proceeded to stack the pillows and crawl over them, lay them out and hop from one “lily pad” to another, attempt to hop on one foot, and then when she got tired, she grabbed a catalog and laid down and started flipping through. What harm is there in letting a kid be a kid? NONE! She loved it, she had fun, and… BONUS! She WORE HERSELF OUT!!!

Am I saying that the word “no” shouldn’t exist in your vocabulary with your child? No. But what I am saying is that you pick and chose when to use it wisely. When your child runs away from you in a parking lot, begins to start crossing the street in front of a car, starts to stick his/her hand in the fireplace, marches barefoot toward a fire ant pile they haven’t seen… dangerous situations call for an immediate “NO!” and sometimes it is shouted forcefully. THAT IS OK! Especially if you don’t use the word “no” very often… it immediately tells your child that this is a safety situation that could be very dangerous, and if they aren’t used to hearing it, it will likely stop them in their tracks (or you can hope it does, anyway). So many things in life can be “yes” – even if it’s a “yes, later” answer. If you don’t want your five year old getting her ears pierced, then when she asks, perhaps a better response would be, “I think you will be beautiful with your ears pierced, but I think you need to wait a few years before you get that done. Let’s re-visit this idea in a couple of years.” If she pushes further, the answer is not “I said, no!” The answer is, “Let me talk to your Daddy and we will come up with an age we think is appropriate for you to get your ears pierced, and then we’ll talk to you about it and make a plan.” Then do it. Follow through. If it’s something like this that is simply in your mind not going to happen until a certain age, then stand firm! Don’t lose your backbone because your child begs. But don’t just give them a “no” comeback. Involve them in the process. Tell them your reasoning. Especially with an older child. Work on answering “well, how about we….” I’m still working on this. It’s a long road to walk to change your behavior. But since “no” is instilled in us from the very beginning (simply by the osmosis of being alive on this planet), we have to work at becoming “yes” parents. I’m willing to take the challenge. Are you?

Pumpkin/Halloween Center

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A few weeks ago, I posted about play with orange colored rice. (Here’s that post) And then a few days after that, I took the purple rice I had, and added lavender essential oil. I’ve heard that it has calming properties, and thought – what better thing to add to Becca’s rice? Well, so I added a couple drops too many and the whole house smelled like lavender for two days. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.. just unexpected. To try and combat the strong lavender scent, I mixed the purple rice with the orange, and then let it sit for about a week or maybe even two before we used it. Now, it has a nice lavender scent, but isn’t overwhelming.

I love our water table – such versatility. You can get yours here (aff link). It works great for centers like this because I can fit several activities on the different layers.

I will give a qualifying statement to this post – like I did on my Apple Theme Center – if you are just starting to do sensory activities with your kids, you might not want to take the time or have the energy to put together an entire theme center. THAT IS OK!!! Just pick one or two of these and start there! 🙂

So here’s the big picture – the overview of everything. This center has a high emphasis on math and art, where my Apple center was a combination of Language Arts and Math concepts.

First we’ll look at that sensory rice. Isn’t it pretty? And it fit so well in the top of the water table. I added some fall cookie cutters – they are super fun to sink down and bury in the rice – as well as a variety of sizes of pumpkins that I had collected the past couple of years at Dollar Tree. She definitely likes the cookie cutters the best. She likes to hide them and then dig around to try and find them.

Another fun activity is the pumpkin coloring activity. We went to Michaels and picked up a white craft pumpkin, and I actually introduced this activity with her BEFORE putting it in the center. We talked about how this pumpkin is MADE for coloring, and remembered that other pumpkins we have around the house that are decorations were NOT made for coloring. We also remembered that crayons are only for coloring on paper (and this pumpkin) – not on the table, the couch, the hearth, or any other surface. So I felt confident that I could put this activity in the pumpkin center and allow her to pull it out and take it anywhere to color, without getting crayon everywhere. So far, she has done great with it, and will occasionally just go grab it and go to town coloring! It’s really starting to look cool, and she can definitely take ownership of this and next week, I’ll let her select where she wants to put it to decorate our home!

I also gave her a little pumpkin ice cube tray that I had bought at Dollar Tree – and I added the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 to reinforce counting by twos. My thought was that she could put one little pumpkin in each space, and count them by twos. She had another idea all together – which reinforces the differences in the way she thinks vs the way I think… and makes me glad I didn’t limit her thinking by telling her what to do with it. She put two grains of rice in each pumpkin on either side of the two, four by the four, six by the six, and up. She actually sat there and counted out ten grains of rice two different times to fill up the “10” pumpkins. Not quite the skill I was hoping to cover, but she kept saying 2,4,6,8,10, so it did end up reinforcing the skill after all.

In addition, I gave her a mesh bag that she could practice putting her pumpkins into (for a gross motor skill of holding a bag open and coordinating the drop to put them in), along with these little black bags for sorting (definitely a much more fine motor skill – these bags are LITTLE). I got this “fall scatter” (shown below) at Michaels for super cheap. She had fun sorting them by color and shape, holding them up to the lights to look through them, and of course, making patterns. (Note: we ended up having to put the acorns away because she kept wanting to pretend she was a squirrel and put the acorns in her mouth, which is of course not safe. She hasn’t done that with the pumpkins. Not sure what it was about the acorns – other than her desire to be a squirrel…)

We also used the cookie cutters, plastic pumpkins, and pumpkin scatter to sort small, medium, and large, and talk about “big, bigger, biggest” and “small, smaller, smallest.” She informed me that NONE of the pumpkins were big, so it wasn’t correct to use those words about these teeny pumpkins, so then we said they were “teeny, teenier, and teeniest.” That was super funny, and giggles ensued.

Wacky Wednesday

It’s that time again – hope these give you a chuckle.

“I’m sighing.” Yes, my dear, I can hear the drama oozing out of you. But thank you for telling me just in case I thought you were having an asthma attack. And needed to go to the ER. Because that kind of drama from my little hypochondriac is quite possible. Any. Moment.
“Halloween is here soon.” And, from drama to Captain Obvious.
“I need a coo-wer shirt, Mommy. It’s so hot today.” I love how she talks. You just never know when that L is gonna turn into a W.
“Ugga mugga!” and “I’m a big helper like Daniel Tiger!” We do love Daniel Tiger around here.
Flamingo= “fluh-ming-duh-go”
After a whole morning of telling her to be patient, the Netflix took a bit to load, and she said “We have to be patient mommy, it’s wording.” Well, I’m glad she can be patient about that!
“Oh! Daddy’s home! That’s perfection!” ❤
Juggle= “jungle” Cody has some special bean bag balls for juggling that she loves to play with, but it’s just so hilarious to hear her say “Daddy, we play jungling balls, please?” Sounds like something you’d go to Academy and buy before heading to the jungle. Perhaps for lion taming.
After being gone all weekend on a scrapbooking retreat, I went up when I heard her wake up from her nap and she said, “Oh! Mommy! I’m so glad to see you! I missed you SO MUCH!” Melt. My. Heart.
“It’s the best day EVER!” Granted, she says this pretty much every day, but the dramatic tone that she uses is just super super cute.

Sticky Football Field

As you know, I’m always looking for ways to make Sunday afternoon football games more interactive for Becca – since she’s not as interested in staring at the screen as we are! So, in my ever-continuing love of all things contact paper, and knowing how much she loves putting her hands on the sticky tree we made, I thought – why not let her walk on it?

Here’s what I did – I printed off two end zone signs for our favorite team (#WEARETEXANS), and printed off the sideline numbers (you could easily print them for both sides – I just did one). I laid out the contact paper on the floor, and taped it down with painter’s tape (don’t use masking or you’ll leave residue on your floor!). Then I laid down one end zone sign, and Becca placed the other. I put down the 10 and 30, she put down the 20. I put down the 50, she put down the 40. Until all the numbers were down. Then we counted them by 10s. Then, we ripped green paper for grass, and sprinkled them all over the “field”, and she began to walk on it. She LOVES the stickiness on her feet! She says it feels cool. It’s also super fun to run cars on because they make a great sound, and she loves to roll the football across it because that makes yet another cool sound!

You could also extend this by cutting yard lines, and putting a center logo on the field. We just didn’t do that this time. 🙂

Total Prep Time for Mommy: About 10 minutes – since I had to type up the yard line numbers, and print out end zone logos.

Total Play Time for Becca: About 20 minutes at a time every day, all week. Very worthwhile activity! She has been recognizing the numbers and counting all week, too. 🙂 Sneaky mommy.