Saturday, January 29, 2011

Kristen . 5months

Kristen's first tooth came out exactly on the day she turned 5 months. 25th Jan. Two days later, another one popped out. 


I used to take so many pictures of Ellie. Not as many of Caitlin.  And now for Kristen, I have to remind myself to take those photos. Photos of significant moments, photos of the banal everyday life at home because you just don't remember the times when the girls are little when they grow up. Ellie is almost five and Caitlin is three and if it were not for photos I wouldn't have all those memories. They grow so fast. So fast my mom says that suddenly they are 30. She is talking about me. And of course I am much older than that already.

I really got caught up with the phototaking this time round.

 Five months old and loving it. 

 Look at that arm(pit).

Our new fuzzy rug.  Really effective in cutting down the visual clutter in our home. We try desperately to gain some sort of control over a space taken over by toys toys and more toys. At least now every toy looks good against this neutral background.




Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Arty Farty Artwork

One of my resolutions for the year is to have a more structured home programme for the girls. For most part of 2010 I was 1) nauseous from my morning sickness, 2) achy because of the pregnancy 3) tired -my energy levels were at an all time low, 4) recovering from my delivery. We did stuff (now what did we do?) but largely on an ad hoc basis according to how I felt for the day.

This year, I decided to have a weekly schedule of after-school activities. Monday-Art or something crafty (what I enjoy doing). Wednesday-Science and Math (what I need to get the kids interested in because we don't do much of that), Friday-Baking or outings. And chinese every morning. (I think the girls have so much to catch up on because we don't speak it enough). I bought two great books on Amazon with lots of ideas so that I don't have to do my research online the night before. I just need to choose something in the book and follow the lesson plan.

We started with our first "formal" art lesson last monday: An introduction to the LINE. Adapted from a book called ART for the very young. What I did was cut up a whole lot of strips of different lengths and get Ellie and Caitlin start looking at what lines can do. The first exercise was to drop the strips of black paper all over and glue them down- let the lines become something. Caitlin wanted me to help her make a fish with the lines, and contributed the seaweed. Her next piece was titled "happy" because the lines "make me happy".


Ellie couldn't get past the desire to make her lines resemble something. Just drop the lines and let them decide what to be, I told Ellie. The end result was pretty interesting even if the most "random" drops were deliberate.




Last Wednesday, we experimented food colouring in a science lesson about with diffusion. Ellis's more calculated piece and Caitlin's more random one.



And yesterday, our 2nd Art lesson. Still on the subject on the LiNe. Using scotch tape to explore lines created in the negative space. Both girls loved the scotch-taping.

Caitlin's piece. (I had to fill in the orange background). She couldn't sit to finish her piece.  I thought she did a good job with the one horizontal line tying up the vertical ones.


Ellie's piece. Titled "Rainbow floor". "I want the floor in my room to look like this". Drawing is one thing Ellie will sit down for- no matter how long it takes. 





Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Christmas

For the first time in years we have

1. presents under our Christmas tree.
2. decorations evenly spread throughout the tree

This is because

1. Ellie is now patient enough to wait for christmas before opening her presents.
2. Caitlin isn't quite interested in opening her presents before christmas
3. Caitlin isn't pulling down the decorations from the christmas tree or rehanging them somewhere else
4. Kristen is too little to chew up the presents or to pick the decorations off


We took this on Christmas morning. Kristen's first christmas by the way...