Friday, September 3, 2010
My dear little happy bundle of joy, you are developing beautifully and amazingly and I cannot believe you are already 4 months old!
Roly poly
Although I have to still witness an actual roll, you must be able to do it, because a couple of times now at night I’ve found you lying on your stomach next to me when I specifically lay you down on your back.
Shake it all up
Your hand co-ordination is amazing. You shake your rattle with purpose and even seem to be able to aim and smack something with your pudgy little fists when you concentrate on doing so.
Splish splash
You have now found the joy of splashing the water in the bath and you are having a blast of a time in the tub
Friday, September 3, 2010
Baking day
Miya baked lovely vanilla cupcakes and we decorated them with spring flowers and butterflies. This sounds like such a silly little exercise, but it has all the elements of learning:
- Reading - reading the recipe
- Following instructions – following the recipe from first to last
- Measuring and maths – calculating how much of each ingredient (weighing with a scale and for example 2 teaspoons make 10ml : 5ml + 5ml, 1 1/2 dozen = 18 etc)
- Art – decorating to your heart’s content, mixing icing colours
- Science – where do the ingredients come from? Which come from plants? What parts of the plants are used? (E.g. flour comes from wheat which is the milled SEEDS of a plant, vanilla comes from the SEED POD of a flower, margerine comes from the oil pressed from sunflowers and other plant SEEDS, icing sugar comes from the STEM SAP of the sugar cane)
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Seeing as we spent the whole of yesterday out in the garden and sunshine, today was the day to actually do the spring crafts I envisioned for spring day -
Princess of Spring
Made a crown of spring flowers from a paper plate and paraded around like a spring fairy 
Recap
Miya wanted to play the plant label game again,s o I loaded it for her and we went through everythign we had learned about plant parts so far.
My little garden
Miya’s little growing garden is still going beautifully – the beans are starting to sprout their leaves now, a very exciting time for Miya.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
It turned out to be a most splendid spring day – the weather was clear and warm and we spent the whole day in the garden – watering and playing outside. What a better way to celebrate plant growth and spring day than being in the fresh air amogst the plants and trees
Today’s homeschooling was all about just having fun and being a kid and enjoying the glorious sunshine.
Home growing
We’ve now got mustard seeds in an egg shell, a sweet potato, a couple of bean plants, a few carrot and parsnip tops as well as an onion growing on our little homeschool windowsil. Miya is so excited each day to see the progress of her growing plants and to water them.
A part of it all
We’ve been doing more worksheets on plant parts and Miya has loved finding out what plant parts we eat – spinach is a leaf, asparagus is a stem, carrots are roots etc. She’s got a good firm understanding about the major roles each plant part plays now.
Colour me
We did a fabulous experiment where you stick white carnations (we used chrysanthemums) into water with food colouring added to see how the plant stem sucks up water – the flowers turn the colour of the water to show how the water travels through the plant. The blue worked best and we could see a few of the yellow, green and orange coming through on their flowers, but the pink for some reason did not do anything. Miya was awestruck to see the colouring move up the stem into the flower petals. Such a neat experiment!
My spring flower
We did a pretty little craft where the outline of a daisy flower can be traced (writing practice) and then each hand at the base of the stem that is drawn from the flower (hands form the two leaves), all coloured in and a photo pasted in the “face” of the flower. This way I know that in spring 2010 that is how Miya looked and that is how big her little hands were. ;D
I was busy with some herbsonline work and was busy trying to finalise a few e-mails. Miya was playing happily by herself, had been most of the day. Presenty she came to me though and said that she wanted to do some school stuff. I told her that we could do some more things as soon as I was finished with my work quickly. She carried on and on and on and started moaning about doing something and I said again (this time a bit more angrily) that we’d get to it as soon as I was finished and that she must please learn to wait a bit. Her answer to this? A big, fat wail:
“But I WANT TO play homeschool now!” with an added thump on the table for emphasis, and when she saw I was looking at her crossly for whining and shouting, she added quickly and softly “Please can we play homeschool now, Mommy?”
As long as my child wants to PLAY homeschooling, I think my job is done 
Learning should always be fun. Always be something that a child wants to do. Play is learn is fun.
Having explained zero as a placeholder quite a while back, this was Miya’s last question to me for the day (as she was falling asleep in the bed):
“Mommy, if there were so many zeros, even a hundred zeros or maybe even a thousand zeros and there was still not a one at the front, would it still be zero?”
One of Miya’s favourite books has picture stories in it besides the normal reading stories. In one such story there is a picture of bears (sailors and fishermen) at the harbour. In each of the picture stories they give you certain things to look for and one is called “A naughty seagull” and sure enough there is a picture of a seagul just above a tray of fish being brought out from one of the fishing boats and the seagull has got a fish in its beak. The story, I think, as it is intended, is that the naughty seagull is stealing a fish from the tray that is being unloaded.
Miya has another take on it: “Mommy?”, she asked me “What if that seagull has actually gone there into the sea and it caught a fish and came flying all the way back here to the bears and it is going to give them that fish?”
Beautiful isn’t it? She’d rather see the seagull as helping the bears with their catch than the typical thought of the seagull stealing the fish from them.
My heart swelled with love and pride for my clever and non-mainstream-thinking child.
Today Leia cried inexplicably for the first time since she was born. Another mother will know what I mean when I say that sometimes your child cries inconsolably, but you know its okay, and then there are times, like this afternoon, when your child cries and you just know that something aint quite right. Well, I was busy preparing Miya a fruit salad while Leia sat gurgeling and smiling at me when she suddenly looked very scared and confused and just started howling. I first thought that she may have pinched her little fingers, but when the crying did not stop after I picked her up andwalked around for a bit, I started worrying that it was not just a pinch. I took her to the room and undressed her to see if there was not something in her clothes that was hurting her, or if I could possibly see an insect bite or something. Nothing – her little bare body perfect without a nudge of what could be bothering. The screaming and crying did not stop, so I half-dressed her, told Miya to come and jumped into the car to take her to ER. Halfway to the clinic, she had fallen asleep in the car, so I thought I’d wait it out and see what she does when she wakes up. No need to get her all worked up and prodded and poked if she was tired. I checked her colour and her breathing and her heartbeat and decided that it should be okay to see what happens. Well, after a good rest, she woke up full of smiles and loves and gurgles again. So, I still have no idea what caused the little outburst, but I can promise you that whatever it was, it really hurt her because I could hear it in her little tiny voice – this was a cry as I’ve never heard from her before. Well, all turned out well, so we ‘ll just keep an eye out for anything out of place the next few days. In the end I think it may have been a little pinched finger and she just took a while to get over it….
Miya had a fantabulous day at Lemon Rose Farm today. She just so loves playing there, especially with a friend. Today we met up with Michelle and Nicholas again and the two were off – playing to their heart’s content. After almost not seeing or hearing them for over two hours, there suddenly was a wail of note from the jumping castle and as we inspected, we found that the two had yet again (same thing happened yesterday) managed to bump into each other on the jumping castle and had head-on collisions. Shame, poor darlings, so sore for their little headies!
Anyway, after finally getting the bill paid and saying goodbye to all the friends that had come to meet with us, we were off home. On the way home, Miya asked to phone Michelle and then spoke to Nicky on the phone and this is part of the conversation:
Miya: “Nicky? Is your head okay?” (real serious concern in her voice) and after a while with what I can only assume was a big explanation from Nicky, she said “Ok. Nicky? I’m sorry we hit our heads. Next time we will be more careful, okay?”
OH SWEET! Shame man, she was really so worried about her little friend. What a caring angel I have!
