Puzzles

We got out the box of puzzles today because I was thinking of handing down some of her old ones and getting her some new, more age-appropriate and challenging ones. Of course, as is always the way with these things, as soon as I got them down it was as though she had new toys and she had to put each and every one of them together.

She was very speedy at it, though, so I do think new puzzles are still on the agenda.

Crescent Moon

Tonight the three of us stepped out for dinner, then stopped at a local park to "get the wiggles out" before bed. Bria loves the swings, so that is where she spent the majority of her time!

After a few minutes she got off the swing, and she and I were looking at the beautiful pink sky of the North Dakota sunset. She was pointing out the colors and the clouds, then I spotted the moon - but it wasn't moon like she expected it to be. A tiny sliver of crescent moon was just barely visible in the sky above the colorful clouds,  and she couldn't quite see it.

So Daddy drew her a picture in the bark of the playground floor of the moon she expected (a big, full circle), and explained how the moon always looks like that, but some days you can't see all of it because the rest is hiding. Then he scratched out all but the tiny crescent of moon and told her what it looked like tonight.

Bria looked back to the sky and saw it right away. And she was so pleased! I wish I had had a camera with me to see the look on her face as she discovered a phase of the moon she was unfamiliar with. It was a pretty amazing moment.

Then, of course, it was off to the slides.

Squishy Bag

We are big fans of Play At Home Mom, and often experiment with the fun activities they outline there. Yesterday Bria wanted to do a “project,” so we pulled up the website, and did this one...

…or at least our own variation on it. We didn’t have glitter, so we had to forego that piece, but the rest of it was great fun!

It ended up being a two day project for us. On the first day, Bria put the bits together and played happily with the bag, but there wasn’t much “writing” on it. 

Instead, she spent a lot of time squishing it – and loving that! She squished and molded and had all sorts of fun with her Ziploc bag of brightly colored gel.

We left it on the coffee table overnight, though, and the next day she was getting a bit more adventurous with it. 

At one point she decided to open it, which was a crazy mess just waiting to happen! So we took another piece of advice from the post and taped it to cardboard. 

In fact, Dad ended up taping all of the edges down with duct tape and creating a sort of board, which she promptly began practicing letters and shapes on. She loves it!

“This is a B, for me,” she announced, as she made a B in the gel with her finger.

Cooking - Pear Sauce

When the big, big, BIG box of pears arrived from Bountiful Baskets, it was a little bit overwhelming! What to do with it?

Then the ideas started rolling in.

Here is the first one. Thanks to our wonderful friend Erica McCauley and her great idea of making pear sauce, we had a fun afternoon!

We peeled and cut up a big batch of pears, then added honey and cinnamon and cooked them up in the crock pot. Bria had a great time putting all of the ingredients in the pot and mixing them up.