A visit from GAS and GUS

The other day L's Great Auntie S and Great Uncle S came for a visit. We refer to them as GAS and GUS for short. Rather unfortunate acronym for my aunt but the rest of us think it's hilarious! L gets so excited when they come over and has a fabulous time showing them all of her activities and puzzles. We got out the continents mat and had a fun time putting all of her animals on their home countries. We also went out for a lovely walk and L got to ride on GUS's shoulders but she was really riding an elephant!

My aunt picked up this second hand fractions puzzle for L and she can't get enough of it. It's such a novelty because it's new but also because it's from her special GAS! (hee hee)

Birthday Pressies

Our week of birthday parties begins tomorrow and we finally finished all of the presents. I decided to make treasure bottles for the kiddos. They are all turning two and I know how much L loves her treasure bottle so I hope they go over well. I'm so happy with these because L got to make them herself.
From coloring the rice
to pouring it into the bottles (mommy way overloaded the measuring cup!)

to adding the treasures

and I got to test out my new laminator for the first time! Woo hoo!

Puzzled

L seems to have gotten herself into a routine in the mornings. After breakfast and before she gets dressed she gets out her animal and truck puzzles on her floor mat and does all 8 of them. She puts them around her mat and dances around them all! She then puts them away (singing the song) and gets out her African animal puzzles to do on her table.

There are five twelve piece puzzles and she can now do three of them all by herself and two with only some verbal help. That's 13 puzzles in a row every morning. Talk about really being into puzzles!!

I got out the shapes puzzles again and she now does them all at the same time. She has a bit of trouble with the triangles because they are homemade and not uniform.

I'm out looking for more puzzles now but it's really hard to find ones that don't have Disney characters or Dora the Explorer! Hopefully I'll find some at the next boot fair.

Birthday overload

L has been invited to four of her friends birthday parties all in the next week and a half! So we've been hard at work making cards and pressies for them all. Here are the cards.

I gave her each of the colors separately so it wouldn't turn into a brown mess. We used acrylic paint which I find easy to wash off of skin as long as it doesn't get on clothes.

Now for a little sponge painting to finish them off and

Viola! Four original L cards for her little friends!

Sticker book

Some people have been asking about the sticker book. I found it at TK Max for £3.99 but you can get it from the website http://www.priddybooks.com/ and it is called 1000 Stickers. Older kids can use the book as is but I'm sticking them all to cardboard to use for different activities.

Land, Water and Air

While looking for a new puzzle for L I found an AMAZING sticker book. Over 1000 stickers of everything you could possibly imagine. When I saw it my eyes glazed over thinking of all of the classification activities we could do!

This is the first one we started with. Land, water and air (sky). I put the stickers onto cardboard and then cut them out. I painted this scene onto some cardboard and put it into a wooden box that we had. L loves this activity and since yesterday has brought it out four times. I'm not sure why but she always wants to put the wombats into the tree! We've settled on them living at the bottom of the tree!

Once she gets tired of this one I'll introduce the basics of mammals, birds, insects and reptiles!

Happy birthday to me!!

Okay my birthday isn't really for another month and a bit but.... I found my birthday present already. Some women want shoes, some want jewelry, others want massages (well that would be nice) what do I want more than anything? A laminator!! That's right thanks to Montessori my priorities are a little different now! ha ha. The other day I was in the craft store and low and behold the laminators were on sale reduced from £57 to £19.99. I just couldn't pass that one up. My husband is happy because he doesn't have to worry about my birthday present now.

Of course now that I have this laminator I'm a bit like a kid in a candy shop. I can't decide what to laminate first. I don't want to use up all of my laminating pouches on just anything! I'm sure you'll be seeing it put to use in future posts. : )