My Princess

Friday Morning.......

........Johnny and Jacob decided to get up at 4:30 and Myanna got up at 5:00. Here is everyone at 7:00:

3 cups of coffee later we went to Berean for storytime at 10:30. The boys laid on me the whole time. They perked up after lunch at McDonald's and didn't want to go home. :) It's now Sunday and I can't remember if we got a nap that day or not.

Summer Reading - Week 1

We headed over to the library on Tuesday after music class. I already had 2 books reserved for the boys and then I let them pick out 2 more each. Here's what we ended up with:




The boys and I love this book! They make choo choo noises while I read it. It's also good for learning colors and the names of the different types of train cars. I will be adding this to our home library.





I thought this would be a hit especially with Jacob since he loves dogs, but it was just okay.









Love it! Jacob grabbed this book because of the elephant. It's just a simple board book with photographs of different animals and their names. I was surprised at how many Johnny knew since it goes beyond the typical dog, cat, chicken and has a penguin, owl, and fox among others. When he got to the hen he called it a "cock-a-doo" which was cute. If we didn't already own several similar books this would be one to add to our library.







I didn't mean to, but I reserved this book from the library. We own two other Jesse Bear books that I really love (Better Not Get Wet, Jesse Bear! and Jesse Bear, What Will you Wear?). This book was cute, but I really like the way the other Jesse Bear books have unique internal rhyming schemes and they are just fun to read. Now this would be a good book to go along with learning about different family relationships or if you wanted to create a family tree with your child. `


I am so not a fan of Seuss. Jacob liked the zebra on the front of this book. I let them choose a few random books when we go to the library. I only put them back if I think they are offensive (like the one around Halloween time with the witch stirring the cauldron). But I think I'm going to have to skip the Seuss section from now on. This book is about the 20 or so letters of the alphabet beyond Z. It was hard to read, and the boys were so not interested either. Except for one page with a picture of about 20 nutches in nitches and Johnny pointed to each one and I had to say "nutch in a nitch".




The boy's both love this book. I'm not a fan of books with TV characters. Jacob picked out this book and Johnny immediately stole it from him. It's neat in that it goes through all the steps of getting ready for bed - brushing teeth, going potty, etc. What's funny is that it asks what song you sing at bedtime and Johnny answers with this song that I can't figure out. I'm not one to sing him to sleep. :)`

Tummy Worship

This past Sunday was the third week in a row that we made it to church (second service). Who knew that adding just one more little one to the mix would shake things up so much. :) Every time I've dropped Jacob off at the nursery I'm asked when do they get Myanna. I have total confidence that she would be well taken care of in there and that she would definitely be enjoyed. I mean who doesn't love to hold the cutest baby in the world? :) See I'm being a little selfish because I missed out on five weeks of tummy worship. During my pregnancies with Johnny and Jacob once they started kicking around in my tummy I loved feeling their reactions at church during worship. Both of them would dance up a storm and then settle down for the sermon. Now Myanna was different. She would sleep through worship and then as soon as Pastor Todd spoke she would start kicking. I was hoping that she would switch that around because I just loved that feeling of my babies rolling around while I was worshipping. Since she's our last baby and I really wasn't ready to not be pregnant any more when she was born, I will hold onto her in service for a little while longer.

Here she is in a 3-6 month dress that Aunt T gave her for Christmas. It's still alittle big, but she has a bunch of fancy dresses in this size that I just can't wait for her to start wearing.

.The shoes that go with the dress are sooooooo cute but sooooooo big. :)

Jakey loves his Myanna.

The boys weren't into picture taking this day.

Summer Reading

I signed all 3 kiddos up for the summer reading program at our library a few days ago. It's neat that it's online this year, but it is a little annoying that in order to keep track of the books we have read I have to log in using a different user name for each kiddo. They get a prize for every 6 books that I read to them. The prizes this year are:

Prize 1: 6-card ring of rhymes
Prize 2: Plush finger puppet & activity card
Prize 3: Plush ball & Phoenix Mercury game voucher
Prize 4: Book voucher & a completion certificate

I could have signed up Johnny for the kids reading level instead of babies, but I knew that if I did when it came time to collect prizes he and Jacob would fight over them.


I'm still undecided as to what to do with Johnny in regards to preschool this Fall. Up until Myanna was born I was planning on homeschooling starting with Sonlight's P3/4 Curriculum along with the Rod and Staff Preschool Activity Books. Now though my life is so busy just taking care of the princess that I can't see having enough time and/or energy for schooling him as well as taking everyone out of the house for social activities.

With that being said I'm going to try an experiment this summer. Sonlight's curriculum is bascially just a huge set of children's books along with some suggested activities. I always have a hard time picking out good books for the boys. I had a lot of luck with the books in Before Five in a Row - especially We're Going on a Bear Hunt and the Jesse Bear books. One of the books from Sonlight is an anthology called The 20th Century Children's Book Treasury. While I agree that it's a steal at $26.40 for 44 stories I don't like to read out of such a big book with the boys and the pictures are small. Also less than a third of the stories are appropriate for their ages. So I thought that I would check out from the library this summer the ones I think the boys will like and then we can always add them individually to our home library if we enjoy them. (I'll post a list on the sidebar later.)

I'm also going to order a second set of the Rod and Staff Preschool Activity Books. Johnny and I have already done a few pages in the first book and he surprised me with what he could do. The other day I decided to make two photocopies of one of the worksheets and let Jacob just color his while Johnny and I worked on it together. Then of course Johnny colored over his work too. :) It was just the right amount of time to keep both of their interests. I just hope that Jacob grows out of eating the crayons soon. I think we are over eating the play dough though. :)

Then today my friend Monica emailed me a link to a wonderful site called Totally Tots. There is so much good stuff on this site that I was a little overwhelmed and I'll have to keep going back to explore a little bit at a time. One of the gems that I found was their Now I Know my ABCs activities. So far they have a weekly craft and activity for the letters A-F. What's nice is that at the end we'll have a book made by the kids with the whole alphabet. It seems like a fun program for Johnny (and maybe Jacob too) to learn to recognize his letters. They also have extra activities and a suggested reading book for each week. So my plan is to gather all of the stuff for these first 6 letters into individual ziploc bags that I can pull out this summer. We probably won't do one each and every week. Some weeks we might do two - who knows? I'll also try and get the suggested books from the library. I'll be interested to see how much each kiddo gets it. It seems like Jacob is already saying and doing stuff that Johnny wasn't at his age.

Then we will also try to find as many cool places to go as possible this summer. It's sad that so many indoor places are now closed in Surprise - A Little Surprise, Soccer Tots, and Nutin' But Fun. So far we are have 3 more music classes through the city on Tuesdays. Then we will switch over to the storytime at the library. In June I'll be taking the boys to swim lessons for 2 weeks in Glendale. We are looking forward to going up to Vegas for a week in July to visit my sister and her family. There is always the Monday visits to Grammy's house - although she will be gone for about 3 weeks this summer. Then we have various outings with my Moms of Faith Group. I'm sure there will also be many trips to McDonald's for dessert and play time. We have a wonderful one only a couple of miles away with a musical toddler area.

So over the next month or so hopefully I'll have a better idea as to what to do with Johnny this fall. On one hand I really want to homeschool, but on the other it would be so nice to have a couple of mornings each week to run errands with only two kids or even take just Jacob and Myanna to some activities without their sometimes bossy big brother. Even if I decide to enroll him in preschool in the fall that doesn't mean that the door is closed on homeschooling forever or vice versa. We'll just wait and see what God has planned. :)

Sunday Best

So I'm feeding Myanna after church and I look over at Jacob and think "Hmmmmm those shorts are really long on him." Then I remembered how tight Johnny's shorts were when I put them on this morning. I checked the tags and sure enough Jacob was wearing 3T shorts and Johnny was wearing 2T. Ooops.

Johnny as "The Thinker"