Family « karenika

Reading with David – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

David says:
I liked that Glinda was nice to everyone but I didn’t like when Oz was trying to trick everyone. He said he could do magic when he can’t.

I thought the china city was silly. I also like that the witch kissed Dorothy because it protected her and I liked that the shoes carried her back to Kansas.

My favorite characters were Toto and Dorothy because they were very nice to everyone. Like how she took the scarecrow off the pole and she oiled the tinman. My other favorite character was Glinda.

My least favorite character was the Wicked Witch of the West because she was bad and she tried to fight them with the golden cap but they couldn’t hurt Dorothy because she had the kiss.

Reading a book a week with my six-year-old son David is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Us Right Now – January 15

jake
This was Jake’s first week back at work after the long vacation. I think the vacation was a huge success for all of us and it gave him tons of energy to power through the long days he worked since he went back. He’s been happy and energetic and productive the whole time. I think there’s a lesson about the value of rest somewhere in there and I think I need to pay attention to it.

karen
I’m still mostly doing the same thing: preparing for CHA, working, exercising, and making portraits. Three of my classes started this week so I have a ton of homework and I have promptly begun to feel like I am falling behind but I am trying to coach myself daily and give myself permission to pace it all so that I can keep getting the sleep I need and not drive myself insane. This year is just as much about slowing down as it is about moving forward, so I keep working on reminding myself that.

david
David had another great week at school. We finished another book, did some more workbooks, and he even had a playdate all by himself. He’s growing up and there’s nothing I can do about it. Part of me loves watching him grow and part of me is so sad that pieces of his life are happening without me already. He’s such a kind, gentle soul and I am so thankful to have him in my life.

nathaniel
Nathaniel continued to be about the choo-choo. But now he’s also got a blankie. He seems to like having it around and grabs it from his crib when he gets up from sleep or naps. He started saying more words this week like “up” and “nana” for banana. He also has a word for the blanket. He’s been eating carrots and corn and even green beans sometimes. He laughs a lot and hugs me a lot. He also cuddles under the blankets with me often which is my very favorite thing. I love and adore him and I am so glad I am here to see him grow up.

and here’s the card version:

Us Right Now is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Reading with David – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

David says:
I liked that Mr. Wonka gave the factory to Charlie because he is so poor and has so little chocolate and it was really nice of Mr. Wonka to give it to him.

What I didn’t like was that the other kids bad things that Mr. Wonka told them not to do. The one I liked the least was the girl who tried to get the squirrel (Veruca Salt) because she could have hurt the squirrel.

My favorite characters were Charlie and Mr. Wonka. I liked Mr. Wonka because he gave the factory to Charlie and Charlie because he didn’t do anything bad.

My favorite part was when the bar of chocolate goes through the TV because if that were true anytime you saw candy on the TV, you could reach out and get it.

Reading a book a week with my six-year-old son David is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Us Right Now – January 8

jake
Jake was off all week and as I expected, it was absolutely wonderful. He took David to the bus and picked him up, he helped with both kids so much and they loved having him around more. He also looks so well-rested and relaxed. He’s home for four more days and then back to work. It’s going to be hard for me to go back to doing it all without him.

karen
This week started with a lot of pain but thanks to an emergency trip to the doctor, it got much better. It was a busier week than usual with lots of CHA prep to work on and several nights out. I accomplished a lot, but also fell behind in some important things like my email and getting back to people. I’ll have to do better with that next week. I also have three classes starting next week so let’s see how that works out.

david
David went back to school this week and he’s back on his routine. It all worked out much more smoothly than I thought. He went back to going to bed earlier. We’re reading in the mornings now while he eats his breakfast. We do some workbooks when he gets home. He’s rather use all of his time to play on the computer. It’s his favorite thing to do. Being the wonderful kid he is, he doesn’t fight with me and does all of the other activities willingly. He’s getting so good at spelling and reading and even math. I am very proud of him.

nathaniel
Nathaniel is still all about the choo-choo. Meltdowns occur when the TV is not on but he will occasionally let David watch something or even me sometimes. But only for a short duration. Even if he’s in the other room, when I change the show, he comes back and says “choo choo.” He also learned to say wa-wa this week for water and uses it a lot already. I’m excited that he’s learning to speak more. Part of me is worried he’ll have speech issues like David did but we’re doing good so far. He’s much more communicative than David was.

and here’s the card version:

Us Right Now is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Reading with David – Winnie the Pooh

David says:
I liked that Pooh saved Piglet because Piglet was in danger and Pooh was being nice. I like that they make good choices. I wish I had friends like that because they are very nice to each other. I like the story of Eeyore’s birthday because it ended happily.

My favorite character is Pooh because he is the nicest of all of them because he does nice things for his friends like he saves Piglet, he finds the North pole, and he found Eeyore’s tail, and he throws Eeyore a birthday party.

My least favorite character is rabbit because he’s makes a bad plan where he tries to steal Kanga’s baby Roo. I also don’t like that Kanga tricks Piglet and gives him the medicine so she grows.

I also liked that Pooh had a good idea when he was trying to save Piglet because he didn’t do that anywhere else in the book.

Reading a book a week with my six-year-old son David is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Us Right Now – January 1

Text Reads:
Jake
Jake is taking a nice amount of downtime this week. A rare vacation and well deserved. Which also means some wonderful downtime for me since he will be around more to help and be with the kids. It’s been so nice to have him around more than usual during the holidays and I am happy to have that continue for a bit.

karen
This week is about new beginnings for me. New projects. New leaps. My word, free, is something I plan to keep in the forefront of my mind every single day this year. I want to be productive but I also want to prioritize. Health and family are first and foremost this year. I also want to compartmentalize my days a bit so I focus better and more purposefully on a task and am not jumping from task to task too often. I also have to get going on my CHA samples. Very excited to be going alone this year so it will be much less stressful.

david
David goes back to school this week. He’s had a long time off and the routines have mostly gone haywire so we’ll see how much adjustment time he will need to get back on track. We have been reading quite a bit during his vacation and we did a lot of activities together but most of it has honestly been spent on the computer but he still writes his gratitude journal and does all of his chores so I let him play as much as he wants.

nathaniel
Nathaniel is all about the choo-choo lately. The first word out of his mouth when he wakes up is choo-choo and same when I go to get him from his nap. If we put anything else on besides Thomas, he throws himself on the ground and cries. He doesn’t even watch it but it must be on. If he’s sitting in his chair to eat, he will watch it and then get really upset during the sadder scenes. I have to calm him down and tell him it’s going to be ok. I am not sure how to handle this just yet but I am going to be patient and work with him. David went through a phase watching Baby Einstein just like this and then it went away so I am not freaking out just yet.

Us Right Now is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

2011 Projects – Us Right Now

This project started with the goal of getting in the photos more. I wrote a long post on shutter sisters about how I want to be in our family photos more often (full post here which got me thinking about how I can do that on a regular basis.

If I learned one lesson last year, it’s that things happen when they’re put on a schedule. A frequently recurring schedule.

I’ve been a huge fan of Tara Whitney’s Six people Twelve Times project.

And then there was this layout I made for Big Picture Classes last summer:

I decided to combine all those ideas and make a commitment this year to take weekly photos of all four of us.

I’ll be honest that this is the project I’m most worried about. Because this one requires commitment from my whole family and it means I have to use my tripod and self-timer more often. But I am blessed by the most amazing and kind family so I am going to take a leap of faith and I am going to assume it’s going to work. It might end up in the same spot in the house each week but I am ok with that. The idea is just to have photos of all of us together. It doesn’t have to be super-exotic or creative. We can try that for 2012, for this year I just want to start the habit of getting photos of all of us.

So I take the leap.

I spent a long time trying to figure out the format for this project. I thought of using the template I did for Weekly Gratitude last year but I wanted the photo to be bigger. I wanted a full 4×6 photo of us each week. So instead of going with a 4×6 album, I decided to go with a 2-up. Much to my delight, the colorful albums I love at Target also come in a 2-up format so I came up with this template:

Just in case any of you are interested in doing something similar or using the template for yourself, here it is: download me.

It’s two 4×6 photos. The top one is just a photo of us with the date on it. The bottom one lists each of our names and gives me space to put a sentence or two about each of us from that week. (Things like thoughts, mood, current obsessions, etc.)

I will then print them out and put them in this album:

and there will be a page for each week.

So here’s to crossing our fingers that this project comes to life. I will really really love to have this one at the end of 2011.

2011 Projects – A Book a Week with David

One of the new projects I’m adding this year is to read a book a week with David. Since I love reading so much and since he’s just learning to read I thought it would be a wonderful way for us to spend time together. The idea is to pick books that would take 2-4 hours to read out loud. And I will likely read all of the book to him. I might ask him to read sections. I haven’t decided yet if it will be two-three days a week or a little each day. At the end of the book, we will create a little book log with his favorite quote from the book and some of his thoughts.

To capture all of our books, I’ve created a simple template to fill each week:

Just in case any of you are interested in doing something similar or using the template for yourself, here it is: download me.

My plan is to print these 4×6 cards regularly and put them in an album similar to what I used for my Weekly Gratitude project. I love these colorful albums from Target and they are less than four bucks.

The idea is to make sure we don’t just read but that David spends time reflecting on the book and tells me a little about what he took away from it.

Since I didn’t grow up in the United States and didn’t learn English until my teenage years, I haven’t read most of these books either, so it will be extra-fun for me. I’ve asked my awesome friend Kathy to send me a list (she’s a teacher) of books she’d recommend.

Here’s what I have so far:

Alvin’s Swap Shop series – Clifford B Hicks
Because of winn-dixie
Black Beauty
Bridge to Terabithia
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlotte’s Web
Chasing Vermeer – Blue Balliet
Cricket in Times Square – George Selden
Danny Champion of the World
Everything on a Waffle – Polly Horvath
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Freckle Juice – Judy Blume
Frindle – Andrew Clements
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler – E.L. Konigsburg
Hank the Cowdog series – John Erickson
Harriet the Spy – Louise Fitzhugh
Holes
Homer Price – Robert McCloskey
How to Eat Fried Worms – Thomas Rockwell
James and the Giant Peach
Last of the Really Great Wangdoodles – Julie Edwards
Lemony Snicket series
Lion witch wardrobe – CS Lewis
Little House in the Big Woods
Mad Scientists’ Club series – Bertrand Brinley
Magic Treehouse series – Mary Pope Osborne
Maniac Magee – Jerry Spinelli
Mouse and the Motorcycle (or most of Beverly Cleary – some are girl-oriented, but i think that’s fine)
Mr. Popper’s Penguins – Richard Atwater
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH – Robert O’Brien
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series – Betty Macdonald
Pippi Longstocking series – Astrid Lindgren
Silverwings series- Kenneth Oppel
Stuart Little
the BFG
The Borrowers series – Mary Norton
the cricket in times square
The Golden Compass
The Secret Garden
The Tale of Despeatoux
The Twenty-one Balloons – William DuBois
The Westing Game – Ellen Raskin
Top Secret – John Gardiner
Tornado – (or most of Betsy Byars)
Trumpet of Swan
Tuck Everlasting
Wimpy Kid series – Jeff Kinney
Winnie the Pooh

It will be a great way us to spend time together.

As you can tell, I don’t have 52 books here so if you have any suggestions, books you loved as a child, I would love to know about them (pretty please?) and I will add them to this list so everyone else can benefit too. Just remember that my son is six years old and while I will read it, it still needs to be relatively age-appropriate.

Yey, can’t wait to start reading!

Crafting with David – Studying

Since David and I haven’t been crafting all that much lately, I thought it might be interesting to post some of our pages from the studying we’ve been doing lately. Apologies for the terrible quality photos.

For math, so far, we’ve been talking about places, comparing numbers, addition and subtraction:

for writing, we’re using lines from a stamp I have to practice upper and lowercase letters. So far, we’ve done a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, and k.

and we’ve been doing reading with 3 or 4-letter words. So far we’ve done b, c, d, f, g, and h.

At the end of each session, he gets a mini-quiz and if he gets it all right, he gets a gold star, a little wrong is green star and then silver. We have yet to go below silver.

So far, so good.

Crafting with David – Father’s Day Card

This week’s craft was simple but meaningful.

This is the Father’s Day card David made for Jake. He picked the colors of the papers and he even laid out the hearts the way he wanted them.

And inside it says: “Happy Father’s Day Daddy. We love you. David & Nathaniel” He wrote it all.

Lovely isn’t it?

Crafting with David – Building for Lego Men

I’d like to say this amazing marketplace inspired us but really our project this week is so terrible that I cannot even remotely compare it to this incredible project.

I am really not good at doing these projects without detailed instructions and we’ve been running behind a bit so we didn’t have a lot of time this week to do it. But he really wanted to do this one. So we did it. We opened up some windows, made some floors.

We then cut up paper to cover it with.

I only had sparkly modge podge so it’s super-sparkly. And I am so not proud of it and almost didn’t even post it.

But David’s delighted and thrilled and loves it. He’s already put his men on it and they’re wearing parachutes so if they fall off, they don’t get hurt.