Pumpkin Snow And Homeschool

 It's been a busy week. Our days have been filled with activities and homeschool, writing and lesson planning. Our nights have been even busier with dance classes, errands, and meetings. I crushed Friday, so that I could enjoy the weekend, where our busy life continues. Between traveling and busy days and nights, I haven't been great about updating about daycare. Daycare continues to be a highlight for me. I have a couple of toddlers, babies, and one or two school age kids on any given day. 

In truth, those first few weeks of the school year kicked my butt. It's been a long time since I've had such a young age group and nearly two years since it's only been ME as the sole caretaker! I've been spoiled with big kid around, eager to take littles to wash their hands or wipe down a table or lead an activity (all without being asked). Sure my three are home, but their days are busy with schoolwork. Lots of it since they're list of what they'd like to learn only gets longer and longer!

So, it's been me and the littles. I can say it's been 100% amazing! It's so much fun to listen to them talk, give them all of my attention and focus, and watch them learning. Since returning from our big fall trip, we've upped our fall activities. This week we broke out the fall and Thanksgiving books, celebrated Day of the Dead, did some of my favorite art projects, and some very fun sensory activities, in addition to lots of playing. Take a look:

Another Dia de los Muertos celebration. We chose to have our ofrenda on one of our side tables, so we couldn't have some of our offerings we'd usually set out. We made sure to cook delicious Mexican food all day long: soy-rizo and eggs (with tortillas), paletas for morning snack, quesadillas, elote, and rice for lunch, chips and salsa for afternoon snack, and pozole for dinner. The middle one loved the broth of the pozole and drank it out of a cup for "dessert." I managed to grab a picture (below a few frames) before turning away before I gagged.

The eight month old crawled into a bin. I carefully kept my eyes on her to see if she could get out herself (she did). Meanwhile, the two year old picked up my scraps of paper as I cut out the day's art project. 

The dog is never far away if it's snack time! We're working on him NOT grabbing food from the kid's plates as they eat and we're working on them NOT giving him their food when they don't want it. The dog and toddlers are about on the same level of understanding this topic.

My favorite art project we do each year: our Tree of Thanks. Read about it here.

The dog feels the need to nap in the middle of everything. He continues laying there no matter how many times he's crawled on, over, stepped on, jumped over, fell on, shoved, and knocked into with that shopping cart. As long as he's with the kids and me, he's happy.

Sometimes the nine year old feels the same and insists on doing her school work while the kids play around her. I usually say no, but since this was a project day for her, I said yes.

Baking soda "snow," pumpkin spice edition! As it turns out, I didn't have enough flour for a large batch of homemade play dough, so I whipped up some of this. The kids were thrilled, as this is one of their favorite things to play with. 

I spend a good amount of my afternoons writing away during rest times. You can read my thoughts about it all here.

The littles did some painting on paper, the bigs painted windows. Take a look at their latest window creation here.

A quick Spanish vocab test to end the week.