Plath’s Adventures

My laptop is currently dying a slow death, so my updates have been less frequent lately.  The past week it has taken over an hour to boot up.  Coupled with the fact that Jason is out of town (for 12 days!) and has very limited cell phone service where he’s at, we’re keeping super busy so we don’t wallow in our Daddy-missing-funk.  Normally we only schedule “outings” a few days a week, but we’ve managed to fit in play dates and lots of activities every day to keep us busy while he’s gone.

We’ve gone to the zoo, the roller rink, had a mini super bowl party (just the three of us with lots of fun snacky food), fed the birds at a local metro park, library story time, our homeschool prek circle group and have done lots of art and crafting. A few pictures to share:

The seed catalogs are pouring in and it’s time to start planning our garden for next year. I’m getting the itch to start a few lettuce seeds already, although it’s probably too early. However, we are growing onions in the kitchen!
Pinterest clued me in on this little tip… Did you know you can grow green onions from the grocery store after you use them up? Just throw your root ends in some water until they get going and then transplant them to soil.

Here they are the morning after I used them in our egg rolls:

Two days later, look how much they’ve grown!

Adelaide is not impressed… she just wants her milk.

Remember the cool dragon craft I mentioned on Monday?
We made him yesterday and think he turned out ferocious!

Enjoying lots of books this winter, even though it hasn’t felt very wintery. We finally got a bit of snow over the weekend, although this has still been a very mild winter snow-wise for us. We’ve been working our way homeschool-wise through Jan Brett’s The Hat and The Mitten, Snowy Day, Snow Music, penguins (including nap-time readings of Mr. Popper’s Penguins), and this week is dragons in honor of Chinese New Year today.
We made red lanterns:

and cool dragon masks

as well as a dragon puppet:

This art project is definitely on the agenda:

Check out my winter pinboard for more ideas and to see what else we have up our homeschooling sleeves.

We’ve also spent a lot of time baking in the kitchen. Everything from cookies to bread, pizza, bagels, pretzels. Eleanore is getting great at mixing dough.

and Adelaide is gobbling it all up

A lot of pretend baking and cooking has been happening, as well. We moved the girls’ play kitchen out into our dining room this past week and they’ve both had great fun baking cookies and rattling the pots and pans.

While we haven’t dragged the big boxes of Christmas decorations out of the garage yet, we have started a little bit of decorating, mostly for our advent countdown. Eleanore cut out and glued together her first paper chain. She also cut out her first paper snowflake. I couldn’t remember how to cut them out, and had to google…

Our nature table is slowly making its change over to winter. We had our first snowfall of the season last week, so we figured it was time. We’re also starting a new holiday tradition, or at least trying one out to see if we like it. I wrapped up 24 Christmas or Winter books from our collection, and Eleanore is opening a book every day. She loves matching up the number on the package to the number on the calendar after we have calendar time.

This printable I found on pinterest is also proving very fun. Eleanore loves glueing on the cotton ball every day to form Santa’s beard.

Remember last week, when I posted I was thankful for our first snow? Well, not even 5 minutes after I hit publish on that post, this happened.

A huge old oak tree fell across our driveway, blocking us in, and Jason was out of town, so wasn’t able to clean it up for us. With the help of my Mother in law a few hours later, we did manage to move the car out of the way so we could head to our homeschool science class the next day. It also didn’t stop us from enjoying the snowfall.

But a few hours later? The power went out. Then the electric pole started smoking. It caught on fire. A visit from the fire department and then the electric company made for a rather exciting day.

All is well, and Jason is now back home. The tree isn’t completely cleaned up yet, but he made a good start on it yesterday. Phew.