Instagram Monday! The little things I hope to never forget :)

The last few weeks my little princess has literally carried her sock monkey everywhere! It goes with her in the car,in stores, to bed,to play..everywhere! It's adorable. She even convinced her Nyanya to buy her another sock monkey hat from Cracker Barrel.

Tot School- Animals week

         

Paisley is 13 months old

This week Paisley was really into animals. So I decided to follow her lead and make our lessons this week on animals and the different sounds they make.

We started off with these little grow your own farm animals from the Dollar Tree. She had a blast watching them grow but they were actually a pretty bad idea. As soon as we picked them up they fell apart! That was pretty disappointing but the princess didn't mind. We still got to talk about all of the different animal sounds while we watched them grow.

                                 

I also brought out watercolors and we painted our very own bird. She had so much fun with this! I showed her how to do it with just water on the paintbrush and we practiced a few times and then she painted it. Afterwards we talked how birds live in birdhouses and we put ours in its very own cage. We also talked about the noises birds make and pretended to fly like birds for awhile.

 One of her favorite things to do this week was to play Animal Hide and Seek on my phone. It's a super cute (and free) app. We also watched a few Youtube videos of different animals and sang alot of Old McDonald. :)

 I made a doghouse for her puppy and we played with that all week long! She loved putting the dog in its house and telling it "nigh nigh".

                                         Our snacks this week had to be goldfish of course!

And we finished the week off by taking a trip to the zoo with daddy!

(She wanted to pet the tiger so bad!!)

Tool of the Week:

These were awesome! They were pulled out at least twice a day and Paisley learned the sounds for a bee,chicken,dog,cat, and monkey. She also learned to hop like a frog :)

Our very first week of Tot School!

                                                   Paisley is 13 months




We had our very first week of Tot School and it was a blast! I learned so much about Paisley! She really enjoyed the structured one on one learning time and was so excited to show her daddy what she did each day when he got home.

We focused on colors for our first week.

This was our sensory bin for the week. I wanted to keep it simple since it is our first one so we used rice, lids from her Buddy Fruit pouches, and a spoon. We still need work on using a spoon so digging in the rice was great practice!

 We also tried out sorting buttons. Mommy mostly sorted while Paisley took them out and put them in her jar. This wasn't the best activity because she wanted to put them in her mouth.

                                So...we put them in the jar and shook them to make music!!

                          I also used an old snack canister and cut a hole with an exacto knife so that she could drop some of her lids in there. We said the colors every time she dropped them in and she loved the clink the lids made when the hit the bottom. :) This game was a favorite all week.

 Then we sorted our lids. She didn't really understand but she did think it was fun once she saw them sorted.

We also read tons of different books about colors this week which was probably her favorite thing we did. This little girl loves to read!!

It's 5 o clock in the morning...

Welcome back pregnancy insomnia. After a week of dealing with a sick one year old who woke up 5 times a night, all I wanted was sleep. Apparently my body decided otherwise though. :(
So instead I'll update on our little gummy bear! We went to the doctor on Thursday and we got to hear the heartbeat. It was a solid 160 and the dr said it sounded like baby was already doing somersaults! I can't wait to start feeling those wonderful little kicks and somersaults. <3
I also recently started a new "diet". It's more that we were sick of the way we felt and decided to try to weed out the bad stuff. So for breakfast I have a bagel with low fat cream cheese and a cheese stick, lunch is 2 sandwiches, and dinner is a small mason jar salad. We are also BIG coke drinkers so we are trying to cut down on that and opt for sweet tea some days and more water throughout the day. And it's working! Even though I'm 13 weeks pregnant I lost 4 pounds this month! I feel a little better than I have in awhile and I feel a little better about my body. I'm so excited to keep going from here :)
I also started looking around yesterday for some new learning activities for the princess and I ran into a ton of great blogs about Tot School. So this weekend we will be setting up a little classroom for the princess and starting on some fun, daily learning activities. I'm super excited and hopefully this will keep me more on track with making sure she is actually learning something instead of just cuddling up to watch tv all day ;)
Well I think I'm going to try to get back to sleep. See you guys soon!

What does a stay at home mom do all day??

As a newbie mom I'm always looking for things to do with my 1 year old that are fun, age appropriate, and educational. Sometimes we fall into a rut where I'll just let her play with her usual toys but on our creative days we have a lot of fun together! So if you're stuck in a rut like I often get, here's our top 10 of activities we enjoy. :)

Top 10 Activities for children ages 9 months - 1 year

Dance Party

Shaving cream ( we put shaving cream on the wood floors and have a blast drawing in it)

Playing in her water table - (We are also getting ready to try different things other than water, such as corn starch, flour, and jello!)

Lego's- I build and she takes them apart :)

Drop In- I used an old coffee can and cut a slit in the lid so that she could drop in lids from her fruit pouches. She really enjoys this simple game!

Bubbles are always a hit
Coloring- I bought a simple scrapbook with the paper already in it and she colors with colored pencils or fat crayons
Cooking!- My little girl loves the kitchen! She loves to stir things so whenever I get the chance we are baking together. Yes its messy, but it's absolutely worth it! We also have a cabinet just for her in our kitchen and she gets to play with her own bowls and spoons and such while mommy does dishes.
Fabric Scrap Bin- I'm sure we all know how hard it is to fold laundry with a toddler in the house! You're folding while they unfold..well I made a little bin of my fabric scraps and let her play with them while I fold laundry. She's practicing folding while I'm actually getting something done!

Baby Obstacle Course- I sometimes set up a little obstacle course for the princess, it was really great when she was learning to crawl and stand up. I used diaper boxes, pillows,she would even try to crawl under our coffee table. It was fun for her and I had fun crawling around being silly with her :)

So..what are some of your favorite things to do with your toddlers?