Sleep sitter?

Haha, poor Dequan. He went to sleep a little while ago but he keeps half waking up and when I check on him he's sitting up sleeping. I have never seen that before. :)

Here's a cute picture of Dequan from three days ago:

Javari and Dequan wore matching clothes at Javari's preschool Thanksgiving party:

Hihihi

Brothers

Yesterday was Thanksgiving and hubby went all out and bought a turkey and a ham. I was just gonna buy a few slices of turkey so I thought that was pretty ambitious, haha. I helped cook it though and we made a couple of easy sides. Hubby put some jams topped with marshmallows in the oven. He's the only one in our family who eats that. I can't even bring myself to try it. I put more effort into cooking the Christmas meal. For me it's very important that I uphold Swedish Christmas traditions and I buy all the typical Swedish Christmas food that I can find here. It's all about the food! Ok, family too. Last year I got the tree out like a day or two before Christmas Day. Dequan was born in November so that's my excuse! I promise I'll do better this year, although I hate putting the plastic tree together. It has too many pieces! Not to mention we have a 1-year-old now that will take all the decorations off so we can only decorate the top. That will be awfully pretty.

I did it again

Yep, I raised another crazy one.

Bonjour, Hola, Hej, Hello

The title represents all the languages that Hakeem and Javari were speaking/learning today. They had French class with a couple of other families, and when we came home we continued with Spanish videos and games, and Swedish songs and rhymes. After that the boys wanted to make up their own songs and draw pictures to them (like I did on my Swedish song cards, except I didn't make the songs up). Then they played with their Little People toys, which they haven't played with in a long time. I spent the whole day with the kids, only spent maybe an hour on the computer this morning and didn't get back on until after the kids went to bed. I can't remember the last time I spent this much time with the older ones. It was fun to learn something together. I need to focus on math with them someday too. I showed Hakeem how to do single digit multiplication last week and he got it right away. He hasn't had multiplication at school yet and he's in second grade so I was pretty amazed. I gave him several problems and he figured them out so fast. Way impressive! We used this website to generate lots of problems: http://mathfactcafe.com/ You can specify a range of numbers to include as well as how many problems you want on one page. You can print the page too but we didn't do that.

Yesterday we did a service project with the playgroup. We filled three shoe boxes with toys, hygiene items, candy, books and more for Operation Christmas Child. Tomorrow the kids and I will take the boxes to a nearby church for further distribution to various countries. I hope we can do more service projects like this one since it helps kids to get a sense of community and helping others.

The weather is pretty pissy so we'll be staying indoors a lot now. Perfect excuse to be learning something. I try to make learning fun with music, games, coloring, reading, movement, playing, imagination, etc. Formal learning is for school, at home you can make it informal and just plain fun. It is very important for Javari who is 4 that it is fun. If he has to sit still for a long time and do a lot of writing or answering questions he gets bored quick and just whines. It's also important to avoid testing at this age and to not test the kids at home. I like the Montessori teaching and how they avoid testing and too much instruction. They let the kids figure out a lot of things on their own. I would love to take a Montessori class to learn more, and I wonder if I could find some of the materials they use somewhere? It would be nice to have a couple of things at home.

Sorry, no pictures today but next time for sure. It's time for me to get some sleep. Hopefully the kids are worn out after everything today and wake up late tomorrow. I actually got 9 hours of sleep last night! It was much needed. Bonne nuit, Buenas noches, Godnatt, Good night.

Dequan's Birthday Party

I think I mentioned that Dequan's first birthday was last week. We celebrated it with a little party two days ago. We had planned to do it at the park but it was too windy so last minute we decided to do it at our house. It got a little crazy trying to tidy up before the guests came (I got some help from the first guests), and then it was pretty crowded in our little house with 6 adults and 16 kids! And the clean-up afterwards is always fun...play doh on the kids' bed, water on the floor, candy wrappers all over the kids' room, toys everywhere, leftover cake, dishes, etc. Well, at least nothing broke haha.

I took Dequan for his one year check-up yesterday. He didn't gain much since the last check-up, he weighs 23 lbs putting him in the 65th percentile. He got two shots, didn't like that of course. Today I took him to get his blood drawn as we're still trying to figure out what he's allergic to. His allergy levels were really high a few months ago and the doctor said yesterday that it's possible Dequan is allergic to many things, like pollen, milk, etc. I guess we'll see what the tests reveal soon so I try not to worry about it. Think positive thoughts for him.

Cute comment of the day from Javari: "This morning the baby loved me a lot!" Awww.... :)

And here are pics...

Dequan chilling on the floor the morning of the party.

Posing on the table.

Pizza time!

He took a little nap in the middle of his party.

Playing "red light, green light."

"Happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Dequan...."

See the cake? Home made by me, Swedish style of course.

"This is suspicious."

Checking out the new toys.

Crazy kids. :)

Hakeem wanted to cuddle.

Hubby.

At the Dr's office yesterday.

"He he, I might get in trouble for playing with the Dr's chair."

"This is fun!"

Sorry about the million pictures, it's hard to choose only a few. :)

Los pollitos

Believe it or not but I have a Spanish kids song stuck in my head. Los pollitos dicen pio pio pio....no stop! We have been talking about doing Spanish classes (and other languages) for the kids in the playgroup so tonight I found our Spanish activity book called "First Spanish" (from Scholastic). In it I had a couple of papers with Spanish and French songs that Hakeem got from a Spanish activity we went to when he was real little. I just love the Los Pollitos (little chicks) song. I sung it to Dequan a couple of times tonight and then it got stuck and it's replaying in my head over, and over, and over. Well just the first line because it's all I remember by heart, even worse! Here's the video. Watch the video and maybe it will get stuck in your head too, hehehe.



This one is totally cute too:



I'm sure you can tell which song this is:



Speaking of Spanish songs. The boys love La Bamba with Alvin and the Chipmunks. It's quite catchy, and screechy (like nails on the blackboard)! There's no way to avoid Spanish when you live here so you might as well just learn it. Hakeem has a few classmates who speak Spanish and he has Spanish class once a week (starting in first grade). And here is the song, cover your ears!

The Halloween weekend

This is late but here are a few pictures from the Halloween weekend.

Halloween party with the playgroup.

Activities included apple bobbing, pumpkin painting, a spooky craft, and more.

Mummy wrap.

Trick or treating at Home Depot.

The love of my life

The love of my life at the moment is not my hubby, it's my baby. He's special and new and little and helpless and sweet. I just love him SO much. Don't get me wrong, I love the rest of my family too but right now Dequan is number one. So much is happening in his development and it's so exciting. It seems he learns something new every day. Right now his thing is walking and running around the house, spinning around, wrestling with Javari, chasing Hakeem, giving us things and waiting for us to say "thank you", laughing, saying "mama", making us smile, fake crying (he'll even lay down and put his face on the floor, very dramatic), spilling my drinks, putting his hand in the toilet when Javari pees (yuck!), nursing, pooping dark green poop, kissing us, biting my chin, sleeping through the night, dancing, etc etc, everything he does is so darn cute, even putting his hand in the potty. :)

Look how cute he was yesterday. He had an accident and I only had this body in the diaper bag, no pants. :)

He took my water bottle and ran!

"Here you go Mommy."

I helped Hakeem with a Nevada project for school this weekend. We were able to use our recent pictures from hikes to Red Rock and Mt Charleston. The rest is clippings from the Nevada Magazine that someone at their paper nicely sent to us for free.

I would love to see wild horses some time.

I just managed to forget about my ramen noodles and burn the pan a little while writing this (Dequan was falling asleep in my lap so I didn't get up when the timer rang). Thank God for Javari being my extra eyes, and mind!

Farm visit

This past Saturday we went to a real farm here in the area. Strange enough we never knew it existed and they have a Halloween event every year. The boys really liked it because they got to ride a pony and see other animals. They had a small hay maze as well. We didn't get a pumpkin since we don't decorate our house for Halloween (only for Christmas).

Mario aka Hakeem.

Ninja Turtle aka Javari.

Running around with friends.

Go Dequan!

"Hmm, what's this?"

I can never get them all to look at the camera.

It's getting cold here finally. Yesterday morning when I got up at 6:30 it was 69 or 70 degrees in the house. That feels really cold when you're used to 80! Outside it was even colder with a chilly wind. Today is a little better.

Halloween has started already

Javari made a super easy halloween craft at preschool today that I just have to share. We have almost everything at home so I will have Hakeem do it too. Or maybe save it for the halloween party we're having with our playgroup soon (not at my house but I'm helping since I'm the group organizer). I have a leftover pumpkin craft too from yesterday's halloween craft that we did at one member's house that I'm saving for the party. I've been getting stuff for the goodie bags this week and it's so fun to prepare for an event. I think I like the planning part more than the actual party. :)

Pumpkin we made yesterday and Javari's ghost picture.

How to: you need black construction paper, cotton balls, googly eyes, and stars. These stars are punched out of construction paper but you could just trace and cut your own or use star stickers. Then just glue everything onto the paper. Pretty self-explanatory right?

More pumpkins plus sun catchers that we painted.

Javari dressed up as a Ninja Turtle (there's an eye mask to go with it too).

Dequan absolutely hates hats so this was the best shot I could get of his alien (from Toy Story) costume.

Oops, I think he's mad at me.

Look at all that fun food! :)

The following pictures are from last year's halloween craft playdate. The host had us paint spiders and make little pumpkins, so cute. One spider is a ladybug, one has a cross on it's back, one looks Darth Vader-ish with red eyes, some have heart-shaped lips, etc. You can really use your imagination with these. If you want to be more realistic you can put eight eyes on them. We need to make some more of these because I don't know where I put them!

Spider attack!

Look how short Javari's hair was!



Learning is fun

I was just thinking that it's important to not just focus on reading but other areas of knowledge as well, like math for example. So many kids struggle with math in school so I think it's a good idea to lay down the foundation for math concepts early through informal teaching at home. I was one of the kids struggling with math and thought math really sucked. One time I was so frustrated with my homework that I threw the math book on the floor and took off running in the forest behind my house. I hate running but that's how mad I was! I didn't get it until college and then I even had A's in all my math classes. I just wish I would have gotten it earlier and not struggled so much. Early math activities for young children may include; numbers, counting, simple addition, puzzles, shapes, patterns, the concept of more or less and bigger or smaller, color by number sheets, sorting, comparing, etc. Most important of all - make math fun and don't force it!

Javari told me today that 2+2 is 4. He sounded so proud when he said that. :)

What do you like to teach your kids?