there are some scenes that a camera just can't capture.. though you know that i try ;-)
scene 1
first playdate at our house, lunch at our new little table. there are two chairs and one stool for three little girls. i set chloe's spot at the stool.
chloe: i want to sit in a chair!! this isn't where i sit!
mama: well, we have two chairs, so why don't we let our friend sit in one?
chloe: noooo! that's my chair!
mama: it's okay, you're just fine on the stool. when we have guests, we can let them use the chairs if they want to [and many other such ineffective persuasions]
enter lucy, bouncing in her hurry despite our best admonitions.
lucy: jie jie tan have my chair!! here you go, jie jie! you tan have dis one!
brought tears to my eyes =)
scene 2
we are riding bikes to the playground, which is becoming an afternoon ritual on days daddy works late. it's taken two months, but chloe now rides happily. there was no transition - one day she fought it no matter the enticement, the next time, she got on and off she went. she's even built up some speed, to where lucy is being left behind on her bigwheel trike.
chloe, from 20 feet ahead, looks back and jumps off her bike. pink helmet, cute brown skirt complete with self-styled grey rolled socks and pink velcro sneakers on the wrong feet. 'how come you guys are so slow?? you need to hurry up!' this from the girl who was formerly riding so slowly that lucy was passing her on foot. now that is slow ;-)
scene 3
the girls have their drum and instruments out (the neighbors haven't complained... yet). chloe gets my phone, scrolls through the music for an appropriate choice, scrutinizing what i'm not sure, but deliberately settles on the scriabin playlist. out pours a luscious waltz on sparkling keys. chloe dons the drum, we pick up our egg shakers and mini tambourine and begin our ceremonious march.. around the coffee table, left turn at daddy's office chair, right at the play area. not sure whether or not that qualifies as appreciation of classical music, but hey..
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
training up a child, part 2
during all my uncertainty last week about schooling (or not schooling), my wise friend laurie made a fantastic suggestion: why not pick a few things that you want to do with the girls each week, and assign them each a day? that way, i'd still be free to do them when and how i wanted, while having the reassurance that i'm accomplishing what i hope to with them.
introducing, our new 'calendar' =)
the four colored cards represent four types of activities: music, nature/science, chinese, and reading/writing. they're magnetic, so we can move them around from week to week. if you know chloe, you can imagine she's excited about this new nifty set of cards ;-)
this week, our music consisted of dusting off mommy's violin and daddy's viola, giving the girls a chance to compare the members of the string family (since we have 3 out of 4!), identifying the various parts, and letting chloe put bow to string (which she was surprisingly good at). no pictures, unfortunately, since mommy's hands were both occupied in keeping the aforementioned instruments intact ;-)
nature/science was covered by the apple picking previously documented.
for chinese, i found some printable flashcards, which i used to work on a few phrases. letting chloe glue the paper on to index cards, punch holes, and thread them on a binder ring definitely piqued her curiosity. another handy set ;-)
i try to point out the characters as we go along, but i don't necessarily expect her to recognize them just yet. they're more for me to remember what we've done. (video below)
for reading and writing, we started a handful of sight words: index cards with 'table', 'chair', 'oven', 'floor', etc. printed on them and placed on their respective objects.
chloe was doing fairly well redistributing them when we mixed them up, and i considered the lesson over. i started in on some much-needed ironing, and when i checked in on her, what was she doing?
i'm sure that as the weeks go on, it will get harder to think of creative ideas for our lessons, but for now, i feel pretty good about our system. yay for friends with good advice! =)
introducing, our new 'calendar' =)
this week, our music consisted of dusting off mommy's violin and daddy's viola, giving the girls a chance to compare the members of the string family (since we have 3 out of 4!), identifying the various parts, and letting chloe put bow to string (which she was surprisingly good at). no pictures, unfortunately, since mommy's hands were both occupied in keeping the aforementioned instruments intact ;-)
nature/science was covered by the apple picking previously documented.
for chinese, i found some printable flashcards, which i used to work on a few phrases. letting chloe glue the paper on to index cards, punch holes, and thread them on a binder ring definitely piqued her curiosity. another handy set ;-)
for reading and writing, we started a handful of sight words: index cards with 'table', 'chair', 'oven', 'floor', etc. printed on them and placed on their respective objects.
chloe was doing fairly well redistributing them when we mixed them up, and i considered the lesson over. i started in on some much-needed ironing, and when i checked in on her, what was she doing?
lest you should think we forgot our little lu lu, she was happily doing her 'reading' too:
i'm sure that as the weeks go on, it will get harder to think of creative ideas for our lessons, but for now, i feel pretty good about our system. yay for friends with good advice! =)
decisions and a few milestones
since the second week we got here, we've been waiting on a decision from NIH - would we be here one year or two? initially the second year was offered, but later the decision was postponed, leaving us in limbo with regard to the match, which opened at the end of july. with no other choice, ben submitted his application to 30+ programs, and we waited. that was almost two months ago, and the interview invitations started piling up. still nothing from NIH. last week, two days before he was scheduled to leave for his first interview, the word - ben was invited to stay for a second year! we took 24 hours to consider, then accepted. so, 20 cancelled interviews and 5 cancelled flights later, we are set to stay put next year.
whew! ben could give you career reasons - research that he's excited about that will span more than one year, getting the most out of the training here, future academic possibilities, etc.. but i'll just give you some of mine =)
in the last two weeks, we've
1) been invited to our first playdate and lunch in someone's home
2) returned the invitation in our home
3) been invited to lunch after church twice by families whose kids were playing on the playground with ours
4) gone to our first small group meeting (with some of the church families in #3)
5) made my first apple crisp to share (with #4) - a small thing, i know, but i love to cook for people
i think things are looking promising here =)
whew! ben could give you career reasons - research that he's excited about that will span more than one year, getting the most out of the training here, future academic possibilities, etc.. but i'll just give you some of mine =)
in the last two weeks, we've
1) been invited to our first playdate and lunch in someone's home
2) returned the invitation in our home
3) been invited to lunch after church twice by families whose kids were playing on the playground with ours
4) gone to our first small group meeting (with some of the church families in #3)
5) made my first apple crisp to share (with #4) - a small thing, i know, but i love to cook for people
i think things are looking promising here =)
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
homestead farm
fall is here, and fall means.. apple picking! we went with miss jamie to homestead farm yesterday. it totally reminded me of apple picking in ohio about this time last year, but maybe not for the reason you'd expect. i guess fall is the potty training season around here, and both times we had to make our acquaintance with port-o-potties =p but i digress...
we checked out the farm animals first. can you see the progression with our hypernose, aka chloe?
and on to the apples!
and what do you do with 16 1/4 pounds of apples - yes, 42 of them? lucy picked out a library book last time of dora making a pumpkin pie, so they've been clamoring for a pie. (they also had an amelia bedelia where she makes cream puffs but that might be a little out of my league ;-) ). so mama gave it a good college try, after a call to grandma for the family pie recipe:
judging by the fact that less than half of it remains since it came out of the oven last night, i'd call it a success =)
we checked out the farm animals first. can you see the progression with our hypernose, aka chloe?
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| stinky goats! |
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| a crack of a smile at the little cow |
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| we let go of our noses long enough to find the piglets quite cute |
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| maaaaaah! |
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| they don't get sweeter than off the tree! |
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| sometimes you have to grab a chick |
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| or two |
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| riding back in style |
and what do you do with 16 1/4 pounds of apples - yes, 42 of them? lucy picked out a library book last time of dora making a pumpkin pie, so they've been clamoring for a pie. (they also had an amelia bedelia where she makes cream puffs but that might be a little out of my league ;-) ). so mama gave it a good college try, after a call to grandma for the family pie recipe:
judging by the fact that less than half of it remains since it came out of the oven last night, i'd call it a success =)
Saturday, September 17, 2011
training up a child
when the girls and i go out, our interactions with strangers run fairly predictably:
#1: are they twins? no, 14 months apart <smile>
#2: to chloe: how old are you? <three fingers stuck up>
#3: do you go to school? no*
*lately, we have a variation on the answer to #3: i don't go to regular school, but i go to CHINESE school.
a seemingly harmless question and one we've certainly been asked before, but all of the sudden this month, i'm remembering those mommy friends a year or two ahead of us who bemoaned the need to justify their unschooled preschoolers. it might be my imagination, but after a chance acquaintance mentioned a preschool homeschooling curriculum she was using for a 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 year old, that familiar voice piped up - c'mon, everyone's doing it.
am i doing enough for chloe? do i need to be more intentional? more structured? am i letting her run wild? am i missing a critical window? questions, doubts, accusing, unsettling, somewhat paralyzing. after an afternoon spent reading reading reading about preschool curriculums, a friend of mine sent me a link to Ambleside Online, a free curriculum based on Charlotte Mason's philosophy (1). she has this to say about the years before formal schooling (2):
". . . the chief function of the child--his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life--is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses [...] Tommy should be free to do what he likes with his limbs and his mind through all the hours of the day when he is not sitting up nicely at meals. he should run and jump, leap and tumble, lie on his face watching a worm, or on his back watching the bees..."
"...Health, strength, and agility, bright eyes, and alert movements, come of a free life, out-of-doors, if it may be, and as for habits, there is no habit or power so useful to man or woman as that of personal initiative. The resourcefulness which will enable a family of children to invent their own games and occupations through the length of a summer's day is worth more in after life than a good deal of knowledge about cubes and hexagons, and this comes, not of continual intervention on the mother's part, but of much masterly inactivity."
aha! resourcefulness.. it's been fairly recently that i've felt the need to go out and look for things to do, mostly to expose them to some different things and of course, to provide the all-important occasions to run and jump and hop and bounce. we've always been pretty content homebodies, and i think it's because this resourcefulness is a strength of theirs. i have yet to meet two other toddlers who can happily (more or less) play by themselves for hours, literally. part of it, i'm sure, is the built-in playmate, but those two little brains come up with some pretty good stuff.
so i'll leave you with a few of these invented games and occupations through the length of a rainy week..
(1) an intro to Charlotte Mason from amblesideonline.org:
Charlotte Mason was a British educator who believed that education was about more than training for a job, passing an exam, or getting into the right college. She said education was an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life; it was about finding out who we were and how we fit into the world of human beings and into the universe God created. But this kind of thinking was pretty much eclipsed during the 20th century by demands for more exams and more workers. In 1987, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay wrote a book called For the Children's Sake, which reintroduced parents to Charlotte Mason's methods and philosophy, and it started to gain a foothold with a new generation of homeschoolers.
Charlotte Mason believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that they are not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information. She thought children should do the work of dealing with ideas and knowledge, rather than the teacher acting as a middle man, dispensing filtered knowledge. A Charlotte Mason education includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, and through art, music and poetry.
(2) excerpted on amblesideonline from Charlotte Mason (Volume 1, Home Education)
#1: are they twins? no, 14 months apart <smile>
#2: to chloe: how old are you? <three fingers stuck up>
#3: do you go to school? no*
*lately, we have a variation on the answer to #3: i don't go to regular school, but i go to CHINESE school.
a seemingly harmless question and one we've certainly been asked before, but all of the sudden this month, i'm remembering those mommy friends a year or two ahead of us who bemoaned the need to justify their unschooled preschoolers. it might be my imagination, but after a chance acquaintance mentioned a preschool homeschooling curriculum she was using for a 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 year old, that familiar voice piped up - c'mon, everyone's doing it.
am i doing enough for chloe? do i need to be more intentional? more structured? am i letting her run wild? am i missing a critical window? questions, doubts, accusing, unsettling, somewhat paralyzing. after an afternoon spent reading reading reading about preschool curriculums, a friend of mine sent me a link to Ambleside Online, a free curriculum based on Charlotte Mason's philosophy (1). she has this to say about the years before formal schooling (2):
". . . the chief function of the child--his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life--is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses [...] Tommy should be free to do what he likes with his limbs and his mind through all the hours of the day when he is not sitting up nicely at meals. he should run and jump, leap and tumble, lie on his face watching a worm, or on his back watching the bees..."
"...Health, strength, and agility, bright eyes, and alert movements, come of a free life, out-of-doors, if it may be, and as for habits, there is no habit or power so useful to man or woman as that of personal initiative. The resourcefulness which will enable a family of children to invent their own games and occupations through the length of a summer's day is worth more in after life than a good deal of knowledge about cubes and hexagons, and this comes, not of continual intervention on the mother's part, but of much masterly inactivity."
aha! resourcefulness.. it's been fairly recently that i've felt the need to go out and look for things to do, mostly to expose them to some different things and of course, to provide the all-important occasions to run and jump and hop and bounce. we've always been pretty content homebodies, and i think it's because this resourcefulness is a strength of theirs. i have yet to meet two other toddlers who can happily (more or less) play by themselves for hours, literally. part of it, i'm sure, is the built-in playmate, but those two little brains come up with some pretty good stuff.
so i'll leave you with a few of these invented games and occupations through the length of a rainy week..
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| it's the 'cover the stool with two blankets, wear your hat backwards, step down and kick the box' game, patent pending, c.nicholson |
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| we have daily variations of 'pay aweas' [play areas] |
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| woohoo, in the bucket! |
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| 'that's daddy!' |
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| hallways made for racing |
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| and windows made for.. climbing |
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| rainy day picnic |
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| the wheels on the laundry basket go round and round |
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| not sure why relocating a meal is always such a hit, but hey |
(1) an intro to Charlotte Mason from amblesideonline.org:
Charlotte Mason was a British educator who believed that education was about more than training for a job, passing an exam, or getting into the right college. She said education was an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life; it was about finding out who we were and how we fit into the world of human beings and into the universe God created. But this kind of thinking was pretty much eclipsed during the 20th century by demands for more exams and more workers. In 1987, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay wrote a book called For the Children's Sake, which reintroduced parents to Charlotte Mason's methods and philosophy, and it started to gain a foothold with a new generation of homeschoolers.
Charlotte Mason believed that children are able to deal with ideas and knowledge, that they are not blank slates or empty sacks to be filled with information. She thought children should do the work of dealing with ideas and knowledge, rather than the teacher acting as a middle man, dispensing filtered knowledge. A Charlotte Mason education includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, and through art, music and poetry.
(2) excerpted on amblesideonline from Charlotte Mason (Volume 1, Home Education)
Sunday, September 11, 2011
labor day visit
nai nai and ah gong hsu came to visit over labor day weekend. they stayed with my mom's friend miranda (whom you met in the paddleboat episode), and it was a 30+ year reunion. i thought that was pretty cool. trying to imagine meeting up with college classmates when i'm a grandmother..!
nothing like a free phone game to wow a few toddlers ;-)
we decided to head into DC and try the natural history museum, despite the prediction of rain all day. it was a bit too crowded for my taste, especially with the double stroller, but the kids' insect section and the butterfly house were neat. the bee exhibit had a clear pipe that opened to the outside, and you could see the bees coming in and out -
chloe begged to buy tickets for the butterfly house, but i was skeptical, given that she's more or less freaked out at other butterfly exhibits we've been to. i gave in though, and for those of you who know chloe, you'd agree that this is about 2 feet closer than i expected her to get to any butterflies -
it did start raining as we were heading back, so out came the maclaren rain cover. these girls travel in style ;-)
and back at home -
what are grandparents for, if not chutes and ladders and 'amelia bedelia'?
lunch on tuesday before they left. excuse the potty training bare bottom ;-)
and unlike her sister, this one is a carnivore ;-)
nothing like a free phone game to wow a few toddlers ;-)
we decided to head into DC and try the natural history museum, despite the prediction of rain all day. it was a bit too crowded for my taste, especially with the double stroller, but the kids' insect section and the butterfly house were neat. the bee exhibit had a clear pipe that opened to the outside, and you could see the bees coming in and out -
chloe begged to buy tickets for the butterfly house, but i was skeptical, given that she's more or less freaked out at other butterfly exhibits we've been to. i gave in though, and for those of you who know chloe, you'd agree that this is about 2 feet closer than i expected her to get to any butterflies -
it did start raining as we were heading back, so out came the maclaren rain cover. these girls travel in style ;-)
and back at home -
what are grandparents for, if not chutes and ladders and 'amelia bedelia'?
lunch on tuesday before they left. excuse the potty training bare bottom ;-)
and unlike her sister, this one is a carnivore ;-)
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
catch up: may
now that the summer is almost over, i've finally downloaded the rest of our pictures from may ;-)
little lucy turned 2 on may 15 - seems like ages ago, now that she's started potty training!
little lucy turned 2 on may 15 - seems like ages ago, now that she's started potty training!
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| thanks to joley for the pic! |
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| fun at gymboree |
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| candles all the way from grandma nicholson! |
as lucy would say, yots and yots of time spent with these two sweet ladies, laurie on the left and joley in the middle:
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| 'tornado' shelter aka bush ;-) |
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| veggie tales, always a fan favorite |
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| how many kiddos can you squeeze in a bob? |
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| rain showers on miss joley's birthday! |
and a few random ones:
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| treats after lucy's checkup |
Thursday, September 1, 2011
domestic diversions
today was a sweet day. we stayed in and played. kids being kids.
chloe laid out breakfast:
chloe has been begging to get paint for uncle andy's easel since they got it, almost two months ago. we finally did, and the girls love it! there's surprisingly little mess too, given that we're talking 6 bottles of paint, 2 bowls and 2 brushes. plus, we have a practically endless supply of packing paper to paint on. if anyone can think of a profitable use for toddler artwork, we're generating it at top speed here ;-)
have i mentioned that chloe has a memory like a steel trap? i picked up some water balloons in the dollar rack at target soon after we moved, but i kept telling her we'd play with them with daddy sometime, since i never felt like getting them out. naturally, she doesn't forget this sort of thing, so with summer winding down, i thought we'd give it a try today.
i know, i know, you're sick of jumping pictures, but i couldn't resist =) i love the golden evening light -
chloe laid out breakfast:
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| the house special: leaf and twig soup |
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| the view from chloe's side: her first picture-taking attempt |
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| multipurpose ;-) |
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| all done! |
have i mentioned that chloe has a memory like a steel trap? i picked up some water balloons in the dollar rack at target soon after we moved, but i kept telling her we'd play with them with daddy sometime, since i never felt like getting them out. naturally, she doesn't forget this sort of thing, so with summer winding down, i thought we'd give it a try today.
i know, i know, you're sick of jumping pictures, but i couldn't resist =) i love the golden evening light -
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