A Southern Illinois Adventure

Last weekend we headed to southern Illinois to see some family. Every summer Jeremy's aunts host Camp Cousins for all their nieces and nephews, who are over five. It's basically a weekend long pool and junk food party. This was Big Buddy's first year. He had a blast! His favorite part was sleeping in the tent with the older boys.

While he was at Camp Cousins Jeremy's aunts put the rest of us up in a cabin at Giant City State Park. It was beautiful. There were lots of rock cliffs and gorgeous trees.

Watching these two sleep together was so precious, they are such good friends!

They had restaurant at the park where we ate a couple times. Little Lady loved looking at the menu and then telling the waitress exactly what she wanted. One day morning it was, "bacon, just bacon, please!"

Our first morning there I went for a run on one of the trails. It was so much more breath-taking than I expected.

Later that day I drug ever one else back so I could share it with them.

Mini Man was running around like crazy trying to see everything but still managed to spot more wildlife then the rest of us. He said saw a couple newts, a lizard, and even caught a couple frogs/toads.

Our last morning there we climbed up to the top of parks water tower.

They were also draining it, which Mini Man thought was the coolest thing ever!

After Camp Cousins was over, we stayed at Aunt Tonya and Aunt Patsy's for two more nights. We were afraid if we headed straight back home that Mini Man and Little Lady would be upset that they didn't get to enjoy their pool. The temperatures had dropped, so it was cool, but we still swam. When it comes to water my kids have no since of temperature.

One of Jeremy's cousins is engaged to fire-figther so we also got to tour his firehouse.

We also stopped by Jeremy's grandma's house for a bit of fishing.

I caught my very first fish. To say I was ecstatic would be an understatement.

Mini Man had the best luck, though, he caught five fish! Later that day he told me that when he grows up, "i'm going to be a fisherman...when I'm not driving race cars." I think he would fit right in with Nascar.

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A Little Red Cardboard Barn

We've finished our farm unit and are moving on to a new theme tomorrow - but before we do I wanted share the barn we made. The wooden farm animals came with a beautiful handmade ark that we gave Big Buddy for Christmas a couple years ago. I would someday love to have a wood barn but it's currently not in the budget. So in the mean time we decided to improvise and make our own. I stumbled upon this perfectly sized milk box (4 gallons per box) while subbing and thought it would be sturdy enough to handle play. Hubandie and the boys used an x-acto knife and wood glue to build a barn shape. to get the doors to fold out hubandie used an x-acto knife and scored the inside of the cardboard We then painted with a basic primer and outlined a window and a door with painters tape. cardboard is very porous so priming is a must if you want decent coverage Big Buddy however insisted that we add more windows so it looked like the barn in our book The Big

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Preschool Syllabus: Dr. Seuss

Normally I'd do a Dr. Seuss unit in March around his birthday. We had to do one now though because on Saturday Big Buddy and I going on a date to a Dr. Seuss exhibit . The exhibit is only at the museum until January and I'm afraid if we don't go now we might not get the chance. We are of course reading lots of Dr. Seuss's books. A great advatage to studying Dr. Seuss in November rather than March is that all his books were available at the library. I also found a great children's biography which is perfect for preschoolers. Pebble First Biographies: Dr. Seuss We've read it a couple times and Big Buddy loves reciting all the facts he's learned WRITING CENTER ADDITIONS big buddy's name in sand paper letters, coloring pages & mazes from seussville.com skills practiced: fine motor, letter recognition, creativity, reading comprehension LEARNING "TRAYS" - I rotate these, setting out about four a day from which the boy&#

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Jack-O-Lanterns on the Fridge

Last fall I saw the idea for refrigerator pumpkins with face pieces in FamilyFun Magazine and have been anxious to recreate them ever since. It was pretty quick and easy and since the only thing we didn't have on hand was magnetic sheets ($1.50 with coupon at Joann's) it was also very cheap. my supplies: magnetic sheets, orange & black construction paper, white pen, tacky glue *i know they have self adhesive sheets but my Joann's didn't carry them glued (very messily) and ready to cut Both the boys were quite enthused when they discovered them after rest time :) Hopefully it will keep them entertained until we carve real pumpkins.

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Joyfully Weary

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