Week of the Young Child

Every year at the day care, they have Week of the Young Child, which is a whole week full of fun activities for the kids.  There are confetti, painting, pizza, family-style lunch, and more.  This video captures Molly at the grande finale on Friday.  It was a concert on the playground.  This also happened to be pajama day, so everyone is dancing around in their pajamas.  Molly is in the white shirt and yellow print pants.

Maps

Claire has been learning about maps at school.  It is interesting to see her perspective on the world.  Here are a couple of her first maps.

Claire House Map 4/2012
A map of our house.
Claire Classroom Map 4/2012
A map of Claire's classroom.

Monkey Bars After School

The kids in Extend-a-Care cannot do the monkey bars when they go out to play after school.  I guess some kid fell or something.  So whenever we pick up Claire, she loves to so the monkey bars before heading to the car.  She still loves the monkey bars more than anything else on the playground and has now moved up to the most difficult monkey bar on the playground.

In this video, she is just chatting away while she handles the monkey bars with ease and grace.  (I personally tried the monkey bars a couple of times, and I just cannot do it.  They are hard!  And it hurts my shoulder too much!)

Claire and Little Sister Annie

Claire and Molly have a good time in those precious unoccupied times after school or on the weekends.  They often run up to their room and come up with some silliness, which this time, for once, I captured on video.

If you are curious about the sound in the background, it is the audiobook of “How to be a Pirate” by Cressida Cowell.

Art Portfolio

The short-lived art-samples feature has been converted to a portfolio.  The new format seems to make more sense for art samples.

Check out the new portfolio page for the girls’ art.  The portfolio will be continually (if intermittently) updated with their latest work.  It also has some other cool pictures that the girls did not do, but you can pick to see Claire and Molly’s pictures specifically.

Sweeping = Fun

Molly, the sweeping fiend
Molly, the sweeping fiend

As part of Claire’s allowance plan, we all clean up the house together every Sunday morning.  We wanted to include Molly in this activity, both to be fair to Claire and to get Molly in the habit of cleaning too.  At first, Molly was the biggest challenge.  She would basically spend all her time undoing our cleaning.  If we piled books up nice, she would go scatter them around again.  If we put little toys in a drawer, Molly would go get them and put them somewhere else.  Molly was trying to help, but had a little trouble doing it in an optimal way.

Recently, though, we have discovered two things that Molly loves to do.  Her favorite thing is to wipe down the tables.  We spray a little cleaner on the table top, give Molly a damp sponge, and let her go nuts.  She wipes and wipes, continually asking for more cleaner.  The table ends up pretty clean, albeit with a good amount of clean bubbles on the surface.

Molly has also discovered the joy of sweeping.  Once we get a broom out, both girls want a shot at it.  Luckily, we have two kid-friendly brooms.  There is only one dust pan, but Molly is more fond of that than Claire is, as you can see from the picture.

Fun Run

Claire’s school hosted a fun run for the students this weekend.  Claire got to take part in the quarter-mile run around the track at the middle school.  She was not too enthusiastic about the run until she got there and saw her friends.  Claire finished near the end of the pack, but to be fair, one of her friends took a nasty tumble on the second turn, and I think Claire slowed down to see what was going on.

Molly was thrilled to get a shot at running the track after the race was over.  We asked if she wanted to run, and she said, “Yeah!”  So I thought I’d take her for a run on one straightaway side of the track.  But Molly turned the corner and just kept going.  She wanted to do the whole track.  Molly gave it her all, bouncing up and down like a bunny rabbit down the track.

Kit got some great pictures with our new Cannon G12 camera, so mostly, I wanted to include those.

Claire in mid-stride
Claire in mid-stride
Claire celebrating after the race
Claire celebrating after the race
Claire celebrating with her mom
Claire celebrating with her mom
Claire celebrating with Molly and me
Claire celebrating with Molly and me

Easter 2012

A few pictures from Easter.  Easter itself involved a familyEaster egg hunt in our backyard, and me driving to Dallas for work.  The two days before, my parents were in town, and we enjoyed some Easter-ish celebrations and dinner with them, as well as a trip to Pease Park.