Hidden Pictures Fun

Remember hidden pictures?  Those drawings that had all kinds of random stuff inserted into the drawings, so a person's sleeve looks like a cup, or their hat has a banana in it.  My dad sent a couple sets of them to my kids as a surprise present, and we have been using them during our school time a day or two a week.

Someone came up with a completely brilliant idea:  make stickers of everything that's hidden!  When you find that pencil or book or golf club, you put a sticker over it.  This makes the whole process a lot more fun for really small kids like mine.  My five-year-old is a little past them (he rarely needs help finding anything), but it wouldn't be fair for the 2 1/2-year-old to have all the sticker fun, so we're sharing.  She can find about a third of the hidden objects, and then I give her hints for the rest.

We also got a set of the regular Hidden Pictures, which I'm keeping until we've finished the sticker set.  The advantage of those, of course, is that you can do them over and over because there are no stickers showing where everything is.  But they're harder, so we may hold off on them for a little while, or do them together a little at a time.

You can buy both sets here on the Highlights website, along with other sets.  These are great for encouraging attention to detail, the idea of perspective, and pattern recognition.  And they supposedly help develop depth perception.

Buried Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiive!

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.  (from SouleMama)

The History Behind Halloween

Growing up, I had several friends who did not celebrate Halloween.  Their parents saw it as an anti-Christian holiday, and so would have nothing to do with it.  My brother and I did go trick-or-treating, but we never were interested in the scarier Halloween things like ghosts and skeletons and witches.  We did carve a pumpkin every year, but we generally carved a cross in it, not a scary jack-o-lantern face.  I've carried on that tradition, and here's our pumpkin this year:

But anyway, I just read a very fascinating article about the history of various Halloween traditions.  It's called "Hallowe'en:  A Short History," and is written by Rev. Joseph Abrahamson, who I had as a professor when I was in college.  This article is aimed at refuting the idea that Halloween was originally a pagan holiday that Christians somehow co-opted and tried to make Christian, and I think it makes some pretty convincing arguments.  This article is first in a series about the true history of various holidays, and I'm interested to see what the next will be.  I actually found this article via a friend's link on Facebook, and I'm so glad I did, because it's part of a website dedicated to confessional Lutheranism, and I can't wait to explore it more as I have time.

Battening Down the Hatches

Hurricane Sandy is supposed to hit our area tomorrow.  So yesterday and today, we got things cleaned up outside so if we do get high winds, we won't have big plant pots coming through the glass doors at us.  I'd been meaning to uproot and dispose of the remaining plants in my container garden for a while anyway, as they were mostly done for.  But wouldn't you know it, we had lots of warm weather last week and the snapdragons flowered again.  I didn't want to waste those last blooms, so I just cut them off and put them in a little bud vase to bring inside.  That way I didn't feel so bad about uprooting the plants.  Aren't they pretty?

I especially like these pink-and-yellow blossoms:

And this beautiful pot is from the Etsy shop The Ring and the Lion.  In the Elvish "Tengwar" script, it says "For the love of things that grow."  Here's a little glimpse of the beautiful hand-lettering:

I'm praying the hurricane does little damage and causes no more chaos than just my hubby getting to stay home from work tomorrow.

Holding On

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.  (from SouleMama)

An Autumn Expotition

Yesterday, I took the kids on a long explore.  Okay, not a really long one -- we went to Prince William Forest Park for the first time.  I wasn't sure how well they would like it, or how much there was to do there other than picnic benches and hiking trails, so I only got a day pass ($5).  The rangers said I could put that toward upgrading to a year pass ($20) if I wanted, and that the day pass was actually good for a week (so then why not call it a week pass?)

We trooped off to the picnic area and had a jolly lunch, at least until an enormous, bee-like insect scared us away.  It was the size of my thumb.  We were about done anyway.

The picnic area

Earlier that morning, I had helped Daniel and Mercedes make "explorer journals" from two pieces of fun card stock with ten pieces of printer paper in the middle.  They got to choose the card stock they wanted, help punch holes, and thread the yarn through to hold them together.  

The library mouse with his journal, and our journals

I got the idea for the Explorer Journals partly from a similar journal my mom helped me keep for a while when I was little (which I still have!), and also from one of Daniel's favorite books, Library Mouse:  A Museum Adventure by Daniel Kirk.  The two mice in that book take journals with them when they explore an art museum, and I figured Daniel especially might like  to try to do the same.

Daniel got his own copy for his birthday -- it's #4 in a series

While we were having lunch, I asked them to observe things and tell me what they saw, heard, and smelled.  Daniel heard truck motors.  Mercedes heard birds.  Daniel saw our car.  Mercedes saw trees.  Daniel smelled the bathrooms.  Mercedes smelled her peanut butter sandwich.  Hmm.  Anyway, I wrote their observations down in their journals and helped them trace around a few leaves they found.

When we got scared away by the gigantic bee, we found a short walking trail the rangers had told me about. (Every time I write 'ranger,' I hear Barliman Butturbur's voice from Fellowship of the Ring saying, "He's one o' them rangers."  Ahem.)  It was less than half a mile long, and paved with ground up tires that looked like mulch and were smashed together to make a soft, but sturdy walking surface that I could also push the stroller on.  Daniel took the lead, carrying his Explorer Journal with him.

It took us about 45 minutes to complete the loop, thanks to lots of trees and logs and bridges and benches to exclaim over and enjoy.

And when we were done, we discovered that this park has a magnificent playground.

The ranger (yes, one o' them rangers again) had mentioned they had a playground.  He didn't mention that it was huge, had the speediest slide I've seen on a modern playground, and had picnic tables nearby.  Next time we go, we will hit the playground first.  We had so much fun, we stopped back by the visitor's center and upgraded to a year pass.

The visitor's center had lots of pamphlets on trees, flowers, and other things you can see in the park, which my kids weren't quite old enough for, but would be great for grade-schoolers on up. And there are more challenging trails too, not just the easy one we took. When my kids are older, I know we'll enjoy those too. If you live in Northern Virginia and have little kids, consider this as a fun and educational place to spend a day.  

Useful (Free!) Clip Art Site

I bought a bulletin board last week, after thinking about having one for a couple months now, and I hung it up yesterday.  I've had a bunch of ideas for how it could be useful, and I'm working tonight on how to start implementing them.  I want to do a Bible memory verse for the kids, as I meant to start that already last year.  And I want to let them help decorate it, since it's for them.  I'm starting off simple, just an autumn theme, and I went looking for some clip art of things like pumpkins and acorns that they could color to put on it.  I found this very simple site that has great clip art for every season, as well as birthdays, letters, and more (though you might have to dig a little to find everything by clicking the "parent directory" link a lot -- it's not very organized).  Many of the images are big enough you can paste them into a program (I'm using MS Word) and print off full-page versions for coloring.  It's an off-shoot of an elementary school's site, and my security program says the pages and images I visited are virus-free.

Here're a few images I downloaded:

Daniel and Mercedes like to pretend they're mice, in fact, they want to be mice for Halloween, so I think they will both love coloring that last one.  I'll post pictures when my bulletin board is more than just a blank slab of cork!