bird snacks

We have bird feeders in various places in our yard.  We get a lot of birds because we have woods behind our house.  M always checks out the birds in the morning at the bird feeder outside our living room window.  We have some kind of Japanese(?) tree right outside and the birds seem to love it there. M loves filling the bird feeders with his Papa.  He also enjoys yelling at the squirrels.  

I This morning we were talking about the snow storm that's coming this weekend and how the birds would have trouble finding food under the snow.  I found this activity during a middle-of-the-night playtime feeding with G and I loved it.  A lot of times when I find an idea on a blog I'll then Google it because chances are it's on twenty other blogs and might have different variations.  Most of the first versions of this that I found called for using unflavored gelatin.  Call me weird but giving birds jello seemed odd.  We used honey and bird food.  Seems more natural to me.

We started with a bowl full of birdseed that M enjoyed playing with for a few minutes before we started (sensory).  I didn't measure anything so I can't really tell you how much we used.  I'd guess we had about two cups of birdseed.  I eyeballed adding in the honey.  I was really trying to get a sticky consistency like play-doh but I think we ended up with a bit too much honey.  Then we spread it out and used a cookie cutter....

Our mixture was a little too soggy so what ended up working best for us was filling the cookie cutter instead of actually cutting a shape.  One we did that it held its shape fine.  We put them on wax paper and use a wooden skewer to make holes for string (which are difficult to see here).  

They're currently freezing in the freezer.  Either this afternoon or tomorrow morning we will string them and hang them from our Japanese tree.  Photos to come...

animal handprint book

This pregnant mom has not been loving the 90 degree heatwave.  Even in a pool I'm not thrilled to be outside.  It makes me feel bad for M, who loves anything to do with being outdoors, so I've been trying to come up with some new and fun air conditioned indoor activities for us to try.

As I've said before, M loves art, especially painting.  This was a fun one for us because he got to paint in between making handprints and we got a fun book to read at the end.  While doing this I felt a little guilty pushing a "school activity" on him - this could really be seen as toddler writer's workshop.  However, he seemed to enjoy it so I'll make books with him while I can get away with it.

We started by doing about ten handprints of different colors.  Each one on it's own sheet of paper (we used small paper we had).  If you Google "handprint animals" you'll find plenty of ideas.  Once they dried we added googly eyes (M liked sticking them on then pulling them off then sticking them on) and I helped with a few details to make them into animals.  Then the writer's workshop part (guilty) - M came up with every sentence in this book.  I wrote them.

We ended up with an elephant, chicken, duck, giraffe, octopus, fish, monkey, alligator, pig, and horse.

M decorated the cover...

On another note, this is our 50th blog post on this blog.  Whether you check out every entry or are just visiting, thanks for reading.  We hope you've found something here that you've enjoyed doing as much as we have :)

simple birdfeeder

Yesterday we tried an idea I found in a parenting magazine (can't remember which one) while I was waiting at my OB's office.  The article was summer activity ideas for different age groups.  This was actually in the 3-5 year old column but M enjoyed it and was excited to put it outside for the birds yesterday.  M needed a lot of help with it but a child a little older than him could do it on their own.

It's pretty simple and fairly quick and easy.  You need a pipe cleaner (we used two) and Cheerios (which are always in our house).  You have to string the Cheerios onto the pipe cleaner then fasten it into a loop to hang it.  M put on a lot of Cheerios so we made our loop then attached a second pipe cleaner to hang it from.  It's fantastic for fine motor skills and I was actually surprised with how well M could get those Cheerios on if I held the pipe cleaner very still for him.  His only problem was wanting to put 5 or 6 on at once but we able to say that each Cheerio needed to "take it's turn" which another thing we need a lot of reminders for so it worked out.  There really isn't much more to it than that.  Here are a few pictures....

Finished product- we added the extra pipe cleaner through the little loop at the top to attach it to our deck:

Animal sounds

This is my first post from my iPhone. We'll see how it goes...

After we visited Davis Farmland M went through a cow phase. He moo'ed for a week and would wave to the cow on our milk delivery box in the driveway. This week he moved on from cows to sheep. He bahs instead of moos and likes finding sheep in his animal books. There are signs the sheep phase is almost ready to be replaced with a duck phase so this morning we made the most of sheep while we still like them.
This morning we made a sheep. I cut pieces out of black and white construction paper. The body looked like the cutout of a puffy white cloud. I covered it with a glue stick and showed M how to stick on cotton balls.

We had to stop to play with the cotton balls (he had never seen them before).  He did well sticking them on.  With the exception of the initial cotton ball that I put on, he put them all on.  Then I added the legs and head.  We added some googly eyes that we have been saving for a project we're going to try in a few weeks when we get home from our beach vacation.  He's not the fuzziest sheep but we like him.  

We hung him up and M likes pointing to him and bahing.  Maybe we've prolonged the sheep phase for a few days.