Stand-by Activities

We haven't done much of anything formal since the Fourth of July activities, except Levi's math lessons, but I thought I'd jot down a quick list of the things we have been doing regularly, as the mood strikes.

*Coloring. Owen is newly interested in coloring all the time, and since I'm newly interested in strengthening his fine motor control, I'm all for it! Levi has a little box of supplies for his math lessons -- crayons, colored pencils, scissors, pencils and erasers, etc. -- that Owen has been pulling the crayons out of most mornings while Levi has his lesson. I save all one-sided sheets of paper from anything so they always have coloring paper available (and so I'm not wasting paper!). Mostly Owen just scribbles, but today he was excited to show me the circle he drew. Progress!

Levi's Sunday school papers have proven that he is getting quite adept at staying in the lines on real coloring pages, but he usually draws clocks or writes numbers. Today, for example, he announced that he was going to write down "doubles facts." I took a picture about halfway through his writing:

It looks like he wrote 109+109=48, but it's just the "equals" sign spilling over. Yep, this is what my firstborn does for fun. I especially like the hill of addition facts on the top right.

*Cutting. As I said, the supply box includes scissors, so Owen has been asking to cut frequently as well. Levi pretty much joins in whatever Owen is doing when he's done with math. I used to think it was a big deal to pull out paper and scissors, and yeah, I suppose it does make a big mess, but they clean up the paper themselves, so it's really not a big deal at all. Occasionally if I'm on top of things I'll write down a few wavy or zigzag lines for Levi to follow, but mostly they're happy just to snip, snip, snip. We usually only do this if Silas is napping.

*The Duplos have been making a big appearance lately. Silas loves to knock over towers, which amuses all three of them. Owen generally wants to push around the police motorcycle and the fire trucks (all Duplo), and act out little stories with "the LEGO mans." (Some have names, some don't.) In the past few weeks, Levi has been building "cities." Last week we had our first big "I don't want to take my city apart!" crisis at clean-up time, so we took a few pictures of it (below). When the big boys get moved into their new room in a few weeks, I might let them keep creations out longer instead of insisting on clean-up every night. Or maybe that will wait until we move to the real LEGO at Levi's next birthday, I'm not sure.

One of these is the front and one is the back, but I'm not sure which.

It's been too hot to do much outside, but we often go for short walks early in the morning, and I pulled out the sidewalk chalk one morning this week (again, while Silas was sleeping). I've been more deliberate about getting lots of library books this summer (and actually reading them more than once). And, when I haven't provided an activity, Levi and Owen are both really quite happy to drive trains and trucks up and down the back of the couch (the stripes of the couch make great roads) and make up stories about their adventures. 

When all of that fails, I turn on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, thanks to Amazon Prime!

Oh, and then there was the day I put water in the sand/water table, and they took it upon themselves to transfer all of the water into the pool and go swimming . . . fully clothed . . . without my knowledge . . . 

 . . . but boy, did they have fun!