Dad's Night Out

While I have been basically useless these past couple of weeks(other than telling people what to do ;) my husband and mom have had to look after L. Thankfully our new community has this great programme called Dad's Night Out! Every Tuesday night they have a free activity for dads and little ones to attend.
The first one L and Daddy went to was at the library where the librarian read them some books on monsters and then they made their own masks. When they got home L ran into the house and scared me with her mask.

This last Tuesday they made these neat tennis rackets and ball which was very timely since we've been watching the Australian Open religiously. Such a simple idea of putting knee high tights over a bent coat hanger and then taping the end. The dads put the balloon inside a stocking and then blew it up. They then set up a net between two chairs and the kids had a fantastic time running around trying to play tennis. They ended the night with yummy fruit smoothies.

Next week is free skating at the local skating rink. It's a win win situation as L and Daddy get to spend time together doing things they'd never usually do and I get a break! We are truly lucky to have moved to a community with so many wonderful free services for parents and children.

We splurged!

As anyone can tell by my cardboard creations we don't have a lot of money to spend. With only one of us working it is very seldom that L gets anything new. The boot fair was cancelled last weekend due to rain so we ended up going to ..... Toysrus!! That's right. Now this is not a place that we normally frequent but it does have something that I've been wanting to get for L for a while now. Just a few words about Toysrus before I continue. (I have to get my rant in). I've never seen such a great example of where society is going wrong. It's like Las Vegas for kids in my opinion. So much plastic and almost every toy is associated with a TV character. That being said they do have a tiny portion of one isle dedicated to Melissa and Doug toys. Yeah! So that's where we headed and picked up....

The Melissa and Doug tool kit. I've been wanting to get this for a while because I think L is ready to start working on her twisting movement and she also didn't have a hammer. Well you think this would have been enough for one kid but daddy had come along with us. (uh oh)
L still has her obsession with airplanes and daddy has been wanting to get a small airplane they can fly together. Well they just happened to be on sale. He looked at them and hummed and haa'd but we ended up just getting the tool kit. When we got to the car he was still talking about the plane so I said oh just get it. It can be an early birthday present. (ha ha) So he did. We had to get about a zillion batteries and charge them up and the we went out to test it.


This was such great fun and hilarious. We took it to an open space but there were still trees around and it was quite windy. It took daddy a while to figure out the controls and then the plane was off. It went higher and higher and then started drifting towards the trees. We were all yelling to try and bring it back but it ended up in some brambles. Luckily we could still see it. So hero daddy waded his way into the brambles with his stick Indiana Jones style and finally retrieved the plane. Serious entertainment!
Anyway I love both of these because they are things L and daddy can do together and he enjoys. She already knows the names for the spanner, hammer and screwdriver!

Color Matching

L loves her "lacing chopsticks" so much but she's really mastered putting them on and taking them off and also putting all one color on so I was looking for an extension activity. I spent some time with my new best friend (cardboard that is) and came up with this. I saw something similar on an old post from Chasing Cheerios.

The tubes are made of pasta and just painted and the posts are BBQ squewers. She was so excited to see it on her shelf and wanted to do it right away. I showed her how to try and match the colors. It's quite a difficult concept to understand that when you put one on it goes down to the bottom so you have to always work from the bottom up. She can do it if I point to the colors as she puts them on. I think I was a bit over zealous and should have started with blocks of color. I may make a couple sheets that can go on top of that one with different patterns.

We also started and extension of the color tablets. She can easily match all of the colors together in box 2 so we've moved on to matching hues. This is obviously much harder but I was surprised that some colors were easy for her while others were very difficult.

A new Montessori school has recently opened in the village we plan to move to in Canada and we are hoping L will be able to attend once we get there. I can't wait for her to be able to use real Montessori materials!

Playing blocks with daddy. This is very entertaining for me to watch because my husband really gets into it and loves to build intricate cities while L loves to knock them down!