What we've been upto

Its been more than a week since my last update.  But we've been busy at home working away the week.  February is always a busy month for us with lots of celebrations since it has my birthday, valentines day and our wedding anniversary.  We've had a lot of fun this month!

I ordered the language materials from Montessori for everyone.  The quality of the materials is amazing and D has been enjoying the pink series work.  She can fairly breeze through all the pink word lists.  I also started to introduce some of the blue series sounds and she has been having a lot of fun with them too!

In math I bit the bullet and ordered some of the golden bead materials from Caliber Montessori.  This is my first time ordering from them and I need to wait and see how the quality of the materials are.  But D has been ready for a while to move on and having the materials on hand would be awesome.  We've been doing the odd/even work and the hundred boards too.

We've not worked much on the other areas as I haven't had the time to put out new materials.  I made a calendar, which has been a long pending item.  I will post pictures in another post.  We've been singing a lot of songs and reading a ton of books.

Practical life has been home life for D.  It amazes me how much she can do by herself if only I let her be!

Valentines Day Celebration

We had a simple valentine's day celebration at home.  We made pink indian ice-cream and froze it in a heart shaped tray.  It turned out delicious!  I forgot to take pictures, but you can find a variation here.  We did not make it as fancy, my recipe is quite simple.  Just one can of Sweetened Condensed milk and half a teaspoon of rose essence mixed with half a cup of whole milk.  I mixed everything in a blender with some cardamom seeds.  We then froze it and once done, gobbled it all up!

We read quite a few valentine themed books that we had.  A new but sweet one is "Snow Valentines".  This book was perfect with all the snow we had here!

Karen Tyler's Program Giveaway

Here is a great give away.  I've been meaning to take this course, winning this would be ideal.  While you are there, also check out her blog, it is awesome with so many great ideas!  

The dots connecting

I just listened to Steve Jobs's speech on the Stanford commencement ceremony linked from here.  It struck a chord with me when he talked about the dots connecting.

I used to work full time, leaving D to the care of well-meaning grandparents and nannies.  I was so torn on wanting to be with her and having to work full time for financial security.  I did this for close to 3 years.  It is not that we couldn't have lived comfortably in my husband's income, the fears were far more deeper.  Both my husband and I come from a middle class society in India.  Financial security and taking the safe route was embedded into our very beings by our parents as well as the society.  We chose professions that would provide the best financial stability and chose to excel in it.  No time to waste, no time to find our passions.  Things like passion are alien words in our society.

Then I had D.  My perspective on things started to change.  I was working full time during the day, then I used to come home and spend all the remaining free time with D because of the guilt of being away from her.  It was just too much for me.  I was earning pretty well and was in a career that I did not hate.  I started to question what is important to me in life.  After too many late night discussions with my husband I took the plunge.  Our families thought we were crazy to take such a step!  Think about all the extra money we would be losing, we got a lot of flak for it!  We decided to ignore their comments and just move ahead.  Now I don't regret one bit our decision for me to stay at home.  Yeah I miss being away from home and just having that time for myself, all the adult conversation and interaction that I was having at work, but my kids are small and they are not going to remain so forever, this is my time to be with them.  When I quit, we were not so sure how things were going to turn out.  We need to take chances and do what feels right in our gut sometimes.  Looking back at the past 18 months, being at home was so worth it.  M was born and that added to the joys of our family.  I missed D's babyhood, I get to enjoy M's.  I just love this age with D, her curiosity, cheerful play, inquisitiveness just fills my day with so much satisfaction.

The dots connected!

There was a young girl named D

Here is a story that D narrated and I wrote down word for word:

There was a young girl named "D".  D made her kitty cat sleep.  M made noise and woke the kitty cat up.  The kitty cat started crying.  D picked up the kitty cat and started nursing her.  D asked mommy to get her a breast pad from the kitchen counter.  The kitty cat fell asleep again.  D kissed M.  The end.

Now you know what happens everyday in our house! 

New February Works

As mentioned in my previous post due to my printer being down, I've only added a few works to D's shelves. Luckily D hasn't been bored and has been working with some of the old stuff too. Here are some of the new things in no particular order:

Arranging clothespins on the lid.  This is just an old watch box of mine and clothespins with some valentine stickers.



I did not take a picture of the valentine art basket I put together for D, this is the picture after she cut out the valentines and glued glitter on them.  We hung the valentines she made on our cherry blossom tree and it is decorating our foyer now!



Our open and close basket.  D enjoys these so much!



The blogosphere famous pipe cleaner - pony bead activity.  Another one that she loves.



Memory game with some simple CVC words.  We've been playing with these for the past couple of days and D is starting to recognize these words on sight as opposed to trying to blend every time.



Just a variation on the cards and counters.  D can count very well but this is just to re-iterate odd and even numbers.  Normally she is not much interested in counting activities, but this one has had a lot of use since I put it on the shelf.



Some pattern blocks with patterns that I drew and colored.



Once my printer is fixed, I will have some more work that I've already prepared but waiting to print out.

February Poetry

My printer stopped working suddenly, so I've had to hand write everything for D for this month!  So its been taking a long time to set up work.  Here is a look at this month's Poetry.  I wanted to keep this as simple as possible (less work)!



I have five small hearts cut out from foam to be used with the poem. D flips each one to show what is written based on which line we are reciting.