Archives for November 2008

hi ho! it’s off to school we go

November 27, 2008 by Wendy S

Instead of doing Parent-Teacher interviews, the teacher scheduled times for the parents to come in and watch what goes on for an hour.

My first reaction when seeing all the little kids sitting on the carpet was “Wow. That a lot of little kids”. There are 21 SK/JKs.

She starts of with telling the kids what will happen throughout the day (each activity had a magnet on the board so they could see what was happening).

Then they did some songs involving dinosaurs and numbers. Very cute. After that it was time for their “work jobs”. The kids are split in to 3 groups and each group has a different activity (lacing and bingo dabbers, cutting and pasting, paints and plasticine). I guess each day they rotate until each kid has done each activity. Munchkin got to paint and make a dinosaur out of plasticine.

For painting, they had to paint numbers. Munchkin paints on the paper 1 to 12 without blinking. The teacher comes over and randomly points at the numbers and Rachel tells her what she is without hesitation. I was blown away.

Then came our chat with the teacher. The teacher tells us that she has no concerns with Munchkin and that she’s doing really well for her age. I asked about the “Noisy Reader” (duotang of reading pages and small activities for them to do over the week) and the fact that Munchkin has memorized each poem and song. Teacher said that’s good and we should start making Munchkin point out words in each of the poems. She said that she’d include a list of words that they focus on in class when she sends the reader home today. She said that this would be extra because not all the kids are ready for this. Again, I’m blown away.

I’m so proud of her. She’s been in school for 10 weeks now and she’s already learning so much!

sharing

November 25, 2008 by Wendy S

I’m not sure illness is what I have in mind when I teach my girls about sharing.

Munchkin has been sick off and on since Halloween but it was just a runny nose with the occational cough; Peanut had a runny nose. Nothing alarming.

Sunday night, Munchkin was up most of the night coughing. This translates to Mommy and Daddy being up most of the night. I woke up (if you can call it that) Monday morning with a cough and a sore throat; took some lozenges and headed out to work.

Last night, Munchkin, Peanut and I headed out to the walk-in clinic associated with our doctors office. Surpisingly there was’t any line up! Oh, and there was a chalk board to keep the kiddies entertained while I flled in the forms since this was our first visit there.

Got in to the room, waited a few minutes and the doc arrived. Munchkin went first. I explained the history while the doc checked her ears, throat and chest. Ears and throat were all clear. Doc guessed that the length of sickness may have been due to back to back viral colds. For her lingering cough she prescribed 2 inhalers to help her lungs finish healing. Easy enough.

Peanut was up next. Same routine. Exept Peanut has an ear infection so she gets 10 days of antibotics.

As for me, normally I would just have taken some OTC meds and dealt with it, but since we were there, I had the doc check me too. She didn’t like the look of my throat and swabed for strep. Great.

Here’s where the fun begins. The “quick” strep test that they do at the office takes 5 mintues. At 6:40pm at night, 20 mintues to bedtime, 5 mintues is not quick. To keep Peanut from playing with the phone and Munchikin from exploring every drawer in the office, we sang songs.

We did The Wheels on the Bus, Itsy Bitsy Spider and the dinosaur song from Munchkins school (remind me to blog about that another day). Thankfully after those songs the doctor came back.

My throat is fine but they’re sending it to the lab to see if strep grows in the next 2 days. How gross does that sound? Eeeew. So no meds for me.

*Knock on wood* the girls health is generally great so the fact that we have one trip to the doc where everyone is sick…I can’t complain.

I’m just really glad that the meds started working already and Munchkin slept through the night. In our bed (ugh)

childhood Christmas memories

November 25, 2008 by Wendy S

Nothing takes me back to my childhood at Christmas time than see this book.

There is one image and recipe that always pops into my head. And thanks to Google, I found someone else who likes them too so go over to their blog and see what I’m talking about because this post sounds a lot like his.

Some of my other favorites that my Mom made at Christmas time include:

I’d love to start baking but I can’t get ahead of myself. We have to get through the birthday party this weekend first. Then we can start Christmas!!