How to calm children before bedtime….

Grace and Eli helped to dismantle a shelf we’re taking out of our playroom, as part of a reorganising and tidying up. It is amazing that it hasn’t even been a year and it feels like things need a spring clean….maybe it is just the excitement of getting things ready for the new baby.

Grace is getting more independent working with tools, and I’m looking forward to our next building project together

At least Eli wears eye protection

Friday’s are sports days for the Grade R’s. Matt takes them for an introduction to various sport, and they learn the rules of the game and have some fun playing it.

Last week Friday Donné had a good time watching them play soccer. The game was girls against boys, with the girls playing with a plan to move the ball forward and the boys just kicking it as hard as they could every time. Fortunately for the girls Kate was an excellent goalie and kept saving the shots for goals. On the other side the boys goalie started to cry when the girls scored a goal and was then rotated out onto the field. He then went on to try to score a goal and ended up poking Kate in the eye, which left her crying. It was an ongoing comedy (or would that be tragedy?), and the girls won the game 2-1 with much jubilation.

Grace is enjoying the sport and they all seem to have a lot of fun.

It is early (Grace’s birthday is in a month), but Grace had her birthday circle at school today. Penny – the head directress in Grace’s class – is pregnant and this is her last week before maternity leave. Grace really wanted her to be there, so we organised a very early birthday circle.

The birthday circle is centred around a big candle which represents the sun. The blocks with the names of the months are positioned all around the candle.

They then start by speaking about Grace when she was 0 and what she did and needed when she was 0. There are photos of her at each age, which she gets to show the class as they go along.

There is also a globe, and after discussing a particular age, Grace gets to walk around the sun (candle) with her globe as the rest of the class calls out the months of the year. When she gets all the way around, then the discussion of the next age begins.

Once she has gone around the sun once for each age, they all sing happy birthday.

Eli could fortunately join us. When we arrived the toddlers were in the playground, and he came over to us from his classmates. As we start to walk to Grace’s class he says, “Say bye to my people.”

Line up for some treats!

The awesome fruit owl that Donné made

Grace directed the fruit and muffin selection

18 weeks and I got to feel our little baby kicking! Donné has been feeling flutters for a while now, but the little one is big enough to start pushing, kicking and punching hard enough that we can feel it on the outside. Looking back we got to feel Eli at 18 weeks and Grace at 18.5 weeks.

Grace has developed a fascination with killer whales. It came about after Kate (in her class) told her that killer whales eat people, and that spawned a whole world of questions….and the questions just keep coming. To help Grace explore her curiosity (and for us all to learn a bit more about the Orca), Donné sat down with her today and spent some time preparing a poster to present for her news tomorrow.

Grace is very excited about her poster, and has even more questions. Watching a video of the Orca show at Sea World at least seemed to answer her questions about them eating people. Currently the last thing she does before going to bed is to ask a question about killer whales (and we have to shut that down before she asks more), and the first thing she does in the morning is ask a question about killer whales.

I’m looking forward to hearing how her poster presentation goes tomorrow.

Just being a bit crazy (and getting very wet) in the puddle after backwashing the pond

Eli had a sudden need to make pirate hats, and fortunately we could make a plan and figure what we had that could work.