A Little Leave of Absense

Well, my goodness......it's been WAAAAAAY too long since I've written a post!!!!! I assure you, we've picked back up with doing a little more school stuff, but I haven't taken pictures of everything we've done nor kept track of any type of plans to know what we have done. I do know that we've been mighty busy around here welcoming this little guy into our family:

Isn't he gorgeous?? And such a wonderful baby to have around :) We all love him VERY much!

In my weak attempt to get this blog caught up, here are just a *few* of the things we've done in the last several months that I actually caught pictures of:

Water Color Painting! Got these cute little water coloring books at Target. Pretty much a mess-free project, except if you have a toddler who likes to dip her elbows in the bowl of slightly-colored water ;) It's JUST water though!

We finally broke out the Wikki Stix the girls got LAST Christmas...they are a big hit! No, Little Bear didn't get glasses, those are Wikki Glasses!

REAL painting, with washable paints and Do-A-Dot paints....I haven't ventured to let them do this INside yet so we took advantage of a beautiful day and painted on the deck.

This was Tiny's first time with REAL paints...she loved it and did a great job! (and actually stayed somewhat clean!)

We took a trip to our favorite orchard, TJ's Orchard and actually did some apple picking this year, Granny Smiths! We made lots of goodies with our apples and even got into some of the apple games I made last year :)

Fall Tree art project: this was a LOT of fun for the girls. We took paper towel tubes and painted them brown, I cut strips down the top to make the branches and we attached the leaves with double sided tape (we tried glue, but the leaves did NOT cooperate so tape to the rescue!). They used fall colored dot paints to fill their "ground" with leaves. I got this idea from 1+1+1=1 and this was/is indeed my favorite fall decoration in our home :)

We have done MANY other things since my last post...too many for me to even begin to think of trying to write here. Little Bear has been writing her own name, her sister's name and Mommy and Daddy for quite some time now. She can pretty much write every letter of the alphabet and loves to "spell" things on paper. She is a HUGE lover of drawing and has become VERY detail oriented, I think we might have a budding artist on our hands!

Tiny is proving her skills as well, counting to 10 on her own and doing just about everything big sister does. She is really into lacing things right now and could sit for a long time playing with the lacing spools, clothesline, and alphabet beads we have. She recognizes a few colors and knows a couple shapes...she loves the triangle (I think she just likes the way it sounds).

The girls are growing up so fast and before I can blink, we'll have a cute little fella doing Tot School right along with us! Scary and exciting all at once! Hopefully I can do a better job of keeping up with the blog (haha) from now on :)