Nesting?

Could I possibly be nesting this early into the pregnancy?  I've been going crazy getting everything organized and I've made a lot of fun changes to the playroom.  My husband and I built this awesome ball pit.

L loved trying all the different tubes.  We plan to make the tubes more elaborate as he gets older but this is perfect for him now (13 months).  I also switched the sensory bin to homemade moonsand and bought a drawer set to house his blocks, hot wheels, and animal figurines.  Those three items are toys that get played with often so I decided to have them a permanent house in the playroom.  Everything on the shelves gets cycled through monthly (sometimes longer if I'm feeling lazy lol).  Anyway, L loved the homemade moonsand so much that I wasn't able to get his clothes off of him prior to him climbing in.  :P

  I've also been making busy boxes, an idea I took from the Play At Home Mom blog.  These busy boxes will come in extremely handy when I have to nurse the new baby, but I wanted to go ahead and make them now in anticipation of morning sickness.  If my morning sickness is half as bad as it was the first time around then L is going to need to be occupied for quite some time while mommy hugs the porcelain throne.  :(  Our first busy box is dyed rice and a few little condiment cups for scooping and pouring.  As you can see he liked it quite a bit but it's been put out of sight for now so that when the need arises it will be new and cool again.

New play ideas

With Christmas came all kind of great gifts for play.  We got water beads for L's sensory bin and he LOVED them!  I think he could have spent 12 or more hours in there if we would have had the time to let him haha.

We also did a glow bath on Christmas Eve night.  Can we say HUGE hit?  We put those cheap little glow sticks in the bathtub with L and turned the lights out.  He was entertained for quite some time with them.  He would lift out two at a time and compare them and then throw them back in the water.  :)

Another big Christmas hit was his fiber optic light.  He didn't really get to play with it until a few days after Christmas because we forgot to get batteries with it!  haha  He loved hitting the fibers as the lights would change colors, it looked really neat as if the light were making squiggly lines.

I think we did good this Christmas!

Big Announcement

Our family has recently made a big announcement.  :)  L is going to be a big brother!!

We are so excited that we can't hardly stand it!  L has been saying bay beh all day today.  :)  I think that he kind of knows that something is different because he has become super protective of me lately, and very affectionate toward me and other babies.  It's so sweet.

Other than that we've just been up to our usual activities.  We changed out the sensory bin and L was eager to help sweep up the mess we made while trying to dump the old sensory bin into a storage container.

Then we played in the new sensory bin: packing peanuts!

We made a new discovery recently:  seran wrap can keep a man busy for quite some time.

That's about all we've been up to lately, except for staying busy with all of the holiday festivities and the new pregnancy.  Merry Christmas!

Discipline

Discipline is something we're doing a little differently in our family.  We have decided to throw out the current model of rewards and punishments.  I believe it stifles the self discipline that is already present within each child.  I believe that children naturally want to do what is right and to use punishment or rewards to "teach" them right from wrong seems to contradict that.  So far the hardest part of this has been to not tell him "Good job!" for every little thing he does.  I have been working really hard to substitute in phrases like:  "Thank you," "You worked really hard for that," "You must be really proud of yourself," and "I can really tell you like to take care of your toys and keep your house clean!"  Since I believe that children naturally want to do what is right, I don't really have to resort to punishment right now (hopefully never).  My latest example of this is something we've been working on for months now.  L loves to get into the refrigerator and pull out the glass bottles from the door.  He's never been gentle with anything so we've had to work with him on that in almost every area of our lives.  Anyway, I have repeatedly demonstrated how to gently set the glass bottles in the floor.  He would always watch intently and then give it a try....except his try looked more like slamming the glass bottles on the floor LOL.  He has worked so hard to be gentle with these bottles and it has not been at all easy for him.  However, today I think it clicked.  It was so wonderful to watch him pull out a glass bottle and set it every so gently on the floor!

Another area we have recently made progress in is being gentle with faces.  L was really into hitting faces for a while (no idea where that came from haha).  Every time he would begin to hit my face (or someone else's) I would take his hand and gently stroke my face with it and say, "Gentle, aaahhhh that's nice."  Then I would take my hand and gently stroke his face repeating myself.  Lately he has been coming up to me at different parts of the day and gently stroking my face and saying, "Aaaaahhhh"  haha it's pretty adorable.  He's such a great little guy, I'm amazed by him daily.
Another big part of how we discipline is that we see mistakes as a learning opportunity rather than a reason to get angry or shame the child.  When he slams glass down on the floor I say, "Uh oh, it looks like it broke and made a big mess!  That's why we have to be gentle, here's a rag let's clean this mess up together!"  rather than, "See I told you that would happen, this is why I can't trust you."  Admittedly the latter is sometimes very tempting to say.  What I've learned though is that he DOES want to do it right, he's worked hard for months to do this right!  Another example would be when he throws food in the floor at dinner.  We respond by saying, "Uh oh, food doesn't belong on the floor, it belongs on your plate."  Sometimes he'll even start to throw the food in the floor before he stops and decides not to.  Yet another example was when I filled a pool full of dried beans for his birthday party.  He put a bean into his mouth and I said, "Oh those don't go in your mouth, these are all to play with."  I've done this with various different sensory bins BTW.  After spitting out the bean I caught him out of the corner of my eye beginning to put another bean in his mouth.  I pretended to be preoccupied and he stopped himself, threw the bean down, and kept playing.

A Night Off!

Last night my husband and I got a much needed "night off" from parenting and let grandma have some time with our little guy.  :)  I think that I have forgotten what it's like to not be sticky somewhere LOL.  On Friday we did quite a few fun activities.  After pulling out all of the books and reading them, L found the container of household items I put in his playroom a few days before.  It's amazing how much fun they can have with these things!

  I decided to get a little creative with our teething issue so I froze plain yogurt (one of L's favorite snacks) into Christmas tree shapes.  He seemed to really like it, I'm excited for next year when he can help me decorate the trees with frozen fruit.

We involved dad in our science work.  :)  We did a little demonstration that involved whole milk, food coloring, and dish soap.  You put out a pan of whole milk and put food coloring in different areas of the milk, then you add the dish soap and watch all of the colors spread out and swirl.  It's so neat!  Apparently dish soap is designed to break down fat and that is exactly what it tries to do in the whole milk.  It's neat to be able to watch it through the colors!

Afterward L helped his dad put together the remaining chairs to his table.

The end of the highchair!

Last night I couldn't sleep and I couldn't resist snapping this picture!

Anyway, today was great and packed full of activities!  Our first adventure was with colored vinegar and baking soda.  Here's the colored vinegar all set up.

L loved this little activity.  He was just amazed every time I put baking soda in and the vinegar would begin to fizz.  The blue was the only one that bubbled over because it was in a different container than the others.  He was seriously amazed though.  haha

L helped me do dishes and fold laundry after all of the excitement.  This evening his table came in!  We are all really excited about this because the high chair really wasn't working out for any of us anymore.  Independence is something we're working really hard to foster in our son and he really takes notice when things limit that independence.

I decided to join him for dinner at his table so he wouldn't be eating alone.  We had steak and sweet potatoes and he picked off every bite of steak from his plate, he's such a meat eater.  We have also been using shot glasses for his water because sippy cups never worked for us either.  He learns by watching us do things and he really took to a glass that was small enough for his hands to get around.  He isn't a fan of special baby things for him, he wants to be just like the adults.  He's so perfect!  Notice the table is crooked, he really enjoyed pushing it around between bites of dinner haha.

Cookies!

Today we made peanut butter cookies!  L really enjoyed watching the mixer blend all of the ingredients together.  I am so happy we have a learning tower!  He was a great helper, he watched me and kept track of the spoon I used to scoop the peanut butter out with. ;)

Peanut Butter is one of his favorite foods so he really loved these cookies!  I think he would have eaten every cookie we made if I had let him.

He loved doing dishes afterward, that's pretty much his favorite activity now.  He's also really into books these days.  I never can get a picture of that but it's pretty adorable.  He will go get a book off of the shelf and hand it to me to read and when I'm done he'll either grunt for me to read it again or pick another book out and hand it to me.
We also worked on a little color recognition today.  Since it's December I thought it would be fun to do Christmas colors!  I just used water and food coloring.

He really enjoyed touching the different colors and exploring both pans.  When he started losing interest I combined the colors to make a dark purple and I think that had him stumped for a while.

New sensory bin!!

Today has been really busy.  We started out the morning with a little cleaning, L was eager to help his dad do dishes...that's his favorite activity now.  :)

We did a Montessori inspired activity comparing warm to cold.  We had warm water in one pan and a block of ice in the other.  I had planned on doing this activity a few days ago but I had trouble finding two identical containers which is an important part.  Today I searched the kitchen and found two identical cake pans.

We ended the day with a new sensory bin.  While we were at Walmart today we picked up some Polyfill that is kind of beady and used to fill beanie babies with.  It's a "snow" sensory bin!  We had a great time playing with it too.  L spent forever playing in it.  He found the scoops and filled several of them by hand.