The Commencement That Almost Wasn't

For the past year and a half, Chris has been taking online classes through Ottawa University in order to finish his bachelor's degree in Police Science. And tonight, he walks. :-)

It is really a very special thing that he gets to be a part of this commencement; his last classes don't even end for another month, and his degree doesn't actually confer until May somethingth. If it was up to the two of us, we wouldn't have bothered with the ceremony at all -- it's held in Phoenix, and with the driving, and the kids, and work and everything, we would be happy to just receive the degree in the mail and be done with it. But we knew that the fact that Chris is graduating means a LOT to his parents and, especially since his dad was diagnosed with colon cancer, we felt that it was important to try and make it happen. We were expecting commencements to happen in May/June and December, like they do for the state universities around here, but OU's commencements in April and September, and this year's September ceremony coincides very closely with the arrival of our new baby, so it was not a reasonable option. It really looked like commencement was going to be a no-go after all, but then Chris explained our dilemma to his advisor-type-person. This woman, someone that Chris has only ever communicated with via e-mails and phone calls, jumped in and got special permisson for him to walk this April. Very, very cool. *

So this afternoon, thanks to a person we've never met, Chris is going to get to walk across the stage in cap and gown, and make his parents' day (assuming they both show up... which is another blog post entirely).

Now the only problem is why, oh why, did I not realize that I was going to have to keep a toddler happy and busy during the ceremony and what, oh what am I going to bring along to keep him occupied?!?!?!

* The whole Ottawa University experience was really positive -- if you are in the market for an online university, I would definitely recommend looking at them!

Thrifty Thursdays: Cancel Cable

Weekly Savings: $10.60 + tax
Monthly Savings: $46.00 + tax
Yearly Savings: $552.00 + tax

I love TV. More than I should. Waaaay more than I should, truth be told. And that is one of the reasons that we do not currently have cable. Even before the whole HD switcharoo (did that finally go through? I stopped paying attention since it didn't really apply to me), we weren't able to get the major networks, because we live in (what tries really hard to maintain its reputation as) a small town. Anyway, I haven't had access to immediate television gratification since October of 2007, and although it has definite benefits, sometimes it's kind of a bummer.

BUT!

Did you know that virtually any network TV show, as well as several cable TV shows, that you would ever want to watch (and a whole bunch that you wouldn't ever want to watch, ever, ever, EVER) can be found FREE and LEGALLY on www.hulu.com and/or www.joost.com? Not to mention on the networks' websites themselves. This means that I can watch what I want when I want... it's almost like having TiVo, except that I can't fast-forward through the (really quite brief) commercials and there are usually only the 2-5 most recent episodes of a show up at any given time. Being able to watch my favorite TV shows online has not only helped me to use my time more appropriately (no more stopping everything because a new episode of The Office is airing in 5 minutes and I just HAVE to watch it or I might DIE), plus it means that Chris and I can sit down and watch a show together when it works for both of us (which is no easy feat since he works shifts that change every 3 months!), and last but not least, we are NOT spending $46.00 plus tax every month (aka $552.00 a year) on cable.

It's also worth mentioning that you can get just about any TV show that has been released on DVD via Netflix, several of which are available from their "watch instantly" menu... so for the price of our monthly subscription ($13.99 a month, still $32.00 cheaper than cable), I can catch up on, for example, Battlestar Galactica, and finally watch all of the All Creatures Great and Small episodes that I missed on PBS back in the day. And, as I mentioned before, I can watch when it fits into my life, and don't have to fit my life around my viewing.

I know that there are a lot of people who make do without watching TV at all, and I really respect that. But I will almost certainly never be one of them, LOL. For me, it is important to be pop-culturally literate, as long as I can do that without dishonoring God or neglecting my family. And for me, doing my TV viewing online is good stewardship, not just because of the money that we save, but also because it permits me to be a better steward of my time.

Tot School Sunday #3

This post was supposed to go up on Sunday, but we were out of town visiting Grandma, so it's a couple of days late. But we can pretend that it's still Sunday. :-)

Monday
Nathanael was Mr. Super Cranky Bottom today... he's cutting some molars, and it is not going well. So all we did was watch an episode of Blue's Clues (figuring out what song Blue wanted to sing), and then he went in the other room and banged around on the piano for a bit, completely off his own volition. I didn't get any pics because in the mood that he is in today, as soon as he noticed the camera we would have a meltdown.

On the "well, that went well!" side, during Blue's Clues he wanted to find his gourd that makes a fun shaking noise (I have no idea what to call it!) so that he could play along with the music. :-)

Tuesday
We did nothing today. Chris came home from work early, and Thanael was still very crabby (I think he's getting sick on top of teething), so we just chilled and snuggled and read stories. Which isn't doing "nothing," I suppose, but it wasn't anything amazing.

Wednesday
Ahhh... this week's tot tub idea was a huge success. It wasn't planned at all; I was sleepy and headache-y and on the spur of the moment just dumped some dried beans, pasta and wheat berries into some small tubs, got out a couple extra tubs for pouring, some ladles and a measuring cup for scooping, a pair of tweezers (for tweezing), and the tray that our beads came in for sorting.

He was really tickled about all the spoons ("Poon?!")

and started transferring beans between containers right away.

It turns out that he doesn't quite have the motor skills yet to successfully use a pair of tweezers, but you have to admit that he gave his all in the attempt.

Fairly quickly he realized that he could pour the contents from one container into another container, and he soon had emptied all of the tubs into the same container and spent a few minutes pouring the mix from one container to another.

Then, being the bizarrely tidy toddler that he occasionally is, he stacked the empty containers inside the large tub, put the full container on the top of the stack, and started scooping from there... onto the table

and then into Mommy's hand.

Next, we had fun with gravity, as he gleefully scooped up a ladleful and then poured it out onto the floor (at least I hadn't swept yet!).

Finally, we got out the vacuum & dustbuster and cleaned up together.

There was no part of this that wasn't fun!

Thursday
This past Christmas, my mom bought us the game of Rumis. All of the big people in the family really enjoy this game... it's challenging, but not too challenging, and it is one of the few games that none of us seem to have any sort of natural-talent-advantage over the others in. Of course, all of the colorful blocks are very intriguing to Nathanael and every time he sees the box, he wants to play with the game. So this morning, that's what we did. :-)

Fun as just throwing the blocks around is, Tot School is about learning, right? So I showed Nathanael some of the matching shapes in the different colors; 4x4 squares, 3x1 bars, and 4x1 bars.

Then I pulled out three "L" shaped pieces; the green, blue, and yellow ones. After I showed him how they were all the same shape, I lined up three different red pieces, one of which was the matching "L" shape, and asked him if he could find the shape that matched the others. And...

he grabbed the right one and started playing with the four matching "L"s together.

He built with the blocks for a quite while, but then he just started to get too rowdy with them, and that meant that it was time to clean up. Learning colors is something that we're kind of focused on right now -- not super intensely, but whenever the opportunity arises, I try to make a point of identifying colors. So putting the blocks away was an excellent opportunity to work on reinforcing red, blue, green, and yellow.

I lined the boxes up for each color, put a few blocks in each box, and then asked him to put the blocks away according to color.

I would hand him (for example) a blue block and say, "Look, Thanael, this block is blue. Can you put it in the box with the other blue blocks?" If he put it in the wrong box, I would explain that it didn't match, and then show him where it did belong; if he put it in the right box, I made a big deal about what a good job he did and reinforced that the block matched the others. At first he was about 50/50 for putting the blocks away, but after we had done half a dozen or so, he started getting them all right... and then he started teasing me with it! He would put a block in the wrong box and give me a happy, "I know that's not right, but let's see what you're going to do about it" look. Then when I said, "No, that block doesn't match!" he would pull it out, giggle, and either put it in the right box or put it in another wrong box and enjoy my reaction again. :-)

Friday
Today's "Fun Friday" was super fun, because what is funner than having a birthday?! Nathanael turned 2 today, and we spent the day opening and playing with presents. His favorite? The Melissa & Doug Band in a Box. He especially enjoyed sharing it with his big sister (she had the day off from school since it was Good Friday... so great to have her home to share her baby brother's birthday!)

He did end up getting sick, like I suspected. And so did I. :-(

Saturday
It snowed!!! In our bizarre-weather-world here in the mountains of Arizona, the weather from March through May fluctuates from blizzards all the way up to the mid-70's, sometimes in the same week. And for some reason, regardless of when Easter falls we almost always get snow Easter weekend. This year was no exception.

After coming in from the snow and taking a warm bath, it was Easter egg dying time! Oh my goodness, this was SO much easier last year, LOL. Nathanael of course wanted to help with everything, and it was about to become disastrous. Fortunately, it was also snack time, so I just popped him into his highchair and let him watch while he ate his snack. He told me which eggs he wanted to put in which color dye, and he mostly enjoyed himself.

We only dropped one egg on the floor, and only spilled one cup of dye (orange... all over mommy... it washed right out, thankfully!). I am looking forward to next year, when he is big enough to be trusted with some actual helping things; I don't mind cleaning up messes, but this year he would have enjoyed making the messes more than dying the eggs. :-)

On a side note, Aliyah mixed her own egg dye this year with food coloring, water, and vinegar. She did a really good job and the eggs came out very nicely.

Happy Birthday, baby!

Two years ago:

One year ago:

Today:

A sentence!!!

Nathanael is not a very verbal little man. In fact, compared to what Aliyah was like at this age, he is practically mute. After having one child who was speaking in complete, complex sentences by the time she was 1 1/2, having a kiddo with a vocabulary of less than 50 words at the age of almost-two has been extremely frustrating at times, especially since he gets so frustrated by our inability to understand what he is trying to communicate to us.

BUT!

Today when it was time to get dressed, Mister Strong & Silent said plain as day, "Yes, shirt on da baby." Hooray!

OB/GYN day

Had my... 3rd? 4th? no, definitely the 3rd... pre-natal appointment today. Very uneventful. My OB has a heck of a time finding where the baby is to listen to its heartbeat; last month she couldn't find it at all and since I was the last appointment of the day, the ultrasound tech had already gone home so we couldn't make sure everything was okay with an ultrasound until the following morning, and it was all very nerve-wracking and unpleasant. But this time my doctor was able to find it after hunting for a minute or two, and everything sounded great. At next month's appointment we should find out what the gender is, if the baby cooperates for the ultrasound. Very exciting!

Tot School Sunday #2

Whenever I go and look at the "official" Tot School website, I get completely overwhelmed by how many different things we can do! There are dozens of ideas on that site alone, and then looking at the sites that link to it... I wish I could do all of them! But I can't, so I'm having to pick and choose things that work for us; I decided to assign a theme for each day, in the hopes that this will help us have a well-rounded "curriculum" without getting tired of anything. Also, I'm kitschy and neurotic that way.


Music & Movement Mondays
Nathanael loves music... dancing, singing, banging on the piano, anything that involves music makes him a happy boy. We got out a drum, a gourd that rattles when you shake it, Nathanael's train whistle, big sister's recorder, and a water whistle, and played some tunes on the iPod. I was expecting Nathanael to try and make music along with the songs we were listening to, and he did at first, but he was really very sleepy and started zoning out fairly early on.

I couldn't let him go to sleep, since we had somewhere we had to be in an hour, so I put on his Wee Sing Children's Songs and Fingerplays CD. Here he is showing "out came the sun" from the "Eentsy Weentsy Spider" song (we say "Itsy Bitsy" in our house, but the good folks at Wee Sing disagree).

We did a lot of the clapping and finger games, and then got down on the floor for "Head, Shoulder, Knees & Toes" and "Ring Around the Rosy." Wee Sing's "Ring Around the Rosy" has several verses with different activities like "skip around the rosy," "hop around the rosy," and "run around the rosy." As I mentioned earlier, Nathanael was sleepy and by the end of "Ring Around the Rosy"... well, this is how his last "we all fall down!" looked.

The kicker was, he never did take a nap, even though we spent quite a lot of time in the car and that usually puts him out faster than anything.


Tot Tub Tuesdays
We don't have any trays, and I like containers with lids, so instead of "tot trays" we are using plastic tubs.

This Tuesday, we brought out the beading tub. I recently got a really good deal on a Melissa & Doug bead set, with lots of different shapes & colors & alphabet beads. The beads are quite a bit smaller than the beads that Aliyah had to play with at his age, so once again hyper-vigilance on my part was a must. Also given the smaller size, I thought that it would be easier for him to successfully thread them if we used something sturdier than the laces that came with the kit, so I substituted some florist's wire. And instead of the entire box of beads, I only got out 10 pairs of shapes and the letters in Nathanael's name so that I would know exactly how many I had out and could be sure that they all got put away!

Success!


Sliding

Florist's wire is bendy!

After a while, he started noticing the matching pairs of shapes, and began separating the pairs from the rest of the beads. These are the only ones that he wanted to thread; I was impressed by how deftly he got them on the bent wire.

"Ish!"

Workbook Wednesdays
(Not really "workbooks" per se; things like lap books and flash cards and other sit-down bookish things.)

Side note about yesterday's activity: this morning when we were playing in the front yard, Nathanael was trying to thread leaves and pieces of ground cover onto pine needles. So I guess he enjoyed the beading. :-)

I bought these Sesame Street flash cards in the $1.00 section at Target several months ago.
I have another set that is "Shapes, Colors, and Opposites" but it is currently hiding somewhere in the chaos that is my living room, so we didn't get to play with it today.

He can't use the cards "as intended" since he doesn't know his numbers yet, much less can he read any words, so this is what we did with the "first words" cards: first I pulled out 2 cards for each of the Sesame Street characters that I know he knows by name.
I like how even though two cards have the same character on them, the characters are different sizes, or facing a different direction, or are doing something (flying a plane, driving a car) that makes finding that character's card in a group a little bit more work.

Then I lined 5 cards up in front of Nathanael on the table and asked him to find a specific character's card.
Once he found the card, I would set it aside, remove the other cards and lay five more cards down, asking him to find the same character. After he found the 'matching' card we would look at the differences for a little while and then do it again with another character.

With the number cards, I pulled out some cards with both pictures that he would recognize and words he could say.
None of the items repeated on any of the flash cards, so I couldn't do a matching game with these cards. Instead, I'd show him a card and ask him what was on it. Once he correctly identified all of the items, I put all seven of the cards I'd chosen down on the table and asked him to find the different items. When he found the item I had asked for, we would count how many were on the card before moving on to the next one.

After we had done that, I got out all of the counting cards and let him look at them however he wanted. If he was particularly interested in a card, I would name the item on it and then we would count how many of that thing there were. He loves to count things, and can count to three on his own, but he forgets about "one," so counting with him sounds like this: "Doo, doo, dree." It's awfully cute, if I do say so myself. :-)

Themeless Thursdays
Generally speaking, Thursdays are errand days. It's story-hour day at the library and it's the one day that we always have to pick Aliyah up from school, so if the weather is nice we try to go to the zoo before we go and get her. This Thursday, however, I wasn't feeling very well, so we did a whole lot of nothing until it was time to go get Big Sister.

Fun Fridays
Does this look the the face of somebody who is interested in having fun?
Yeah, I don't think so either.

This Friday, I thought that we would do something SUPER FUN and bust out the finger paints for the very first time ever! Sounds like lots of fun, right? Especially for a little boy who "finger paints" with yogurt, oatmeal, refried beans, and any other marginally spreadable foodstuff that is set before him. So finger painting with actual finger paints seemed like an obviously good idea.

Well. We got off to a good start.

But there was an unexpected snag, in that he didn't want to touch the fascinating orange blob on the paper. So I smeared it around for him and then encouraged him to try. Turns out, he didn't much care for the feel of the paint on his fingers, and immediately started trying to clean his hand off by wiping the paint off onto the table.

Then he pointed to the other tubes of finger paint, so I squeezed some green and blue onto the paper, thinking maybe he would like it better with the other colors... not very logical, but he's not-quite-2, so we don't see a lot of logic around here. He did experiment a bit more with the other colors

but he still didn't like getting his hands dirty.

I cleaned his hand off, got out a new sheet of paper, squeezed a blob of each color of paint onto it, and gave Nathanael a plastic fork, thinking that maybe he would enjoy painting if he didn't have to touch the paint. Again, looks like a great idea, yes?

This time he was bothered by how dirty the fork got, tried to wipe the paint off the fork with his fingers, and then got upset because his fingers were dirty again.

Finally we just gave up on finger paints, watched an episode of Blue's Clues, and spent some time playing games on sesamestreet.org. So it turned out to still be a fun Friday, but not the way I was expecting. I think I'll wait a couple of months before trying the finger paints again.