A little bit of painting fun with mom

Grace has been working on getting the monkey bars right, and yesterday she managed to get across the ones at school all on her own….now just to conquer the ones at home. She can pretty much do them, it is just a matter of overcoming her fear of them being a bit higher than the ones at school.

Grace has been loving doing the new maths work she has been presented – addition. Yesterday morning I went in to see how it works.

First you get an addition card, in this case, 8434 + 1464. This is the basic addition, as there are no carries in the sum. Then you put the numbers out, thousands, hundreds, tens and units. Each is on a different coloured card, and sized so that they lie on top of each other. Then off to the shelf to collect the thousands cubes, hundreds squares, tens beads and unit beads.

Collect each number (one digit at a time) and lay them out next to each other.

Once you have the two numbers as a set, combine and count. Then put down a card for the thousands, hundreds, tens and units.

And that’s how you add up two numbers to get 9898.

Eli jumped for the first time today! He’s been bouncing on the trampoline for a while now, but finally got some air today.

Eli has always enjoyed the “Pound ‘n Roll”, and was having fun giving it a good whack today.

Spicey is awesome and gentle with Grace and Eli. Even when Eli literally lies on top of him (or dives on top of him), he just carries on and is happy when someone gives him some stokes. And he is always around, part of the action.

Fizzers and cuddles

Spicey catching up on some TV

Eli’s love for phones includes trying to take pictures of other people while saying, “Cheese”….or just saying “cheese” while Donné takes pictures of him.

Grace has Monkey, her well loved, well protected (by us) soft toy monkey. He is just the right size for cuddling while sleeping. He is also one of the very few reasons that Grace will wake up in the middle of the night calling, “Where’s monkey?!?” when she has misplaced him in her bed or dropped him out of it.

A long time ago, when we realised how important Monkey is to her, we went hunting for a backup. We didn’t find any more monkeys at that stage, but we did find a pink pig which we thought might work. Oinky the pig came home with us, but has never had the star power that Monkey does – at the end of the day, Grace wants to sleep with Monkey, only Monkey.

But don’t fear, Oinky’s tale has a happy ending – Oinky has found his place as Eli’s sleep companion.

Eli got hold of the glasses somewhere backstage at Vida, and the black mark on his arm is a Vida “tattoo” (stamp with directions to Vida)

If Grace does it, then Eli follows – Donné says he is one going on five. Like Lego, he is not content to play with the Duplo, no, he wants to play with the tiny Lego which his big sister builds with….even if he’s not quite strong enough to get it to go together.

Enjoying the little pieces, and the fun car that they make

And if she lies down on the jungle gym, well, look who is quick to follow