A day at home with lots to do

This morning L and I didn't get to have our alone time. J woke up crying at 7:30am, just as I was getting out of the shower. He recovered pretty quickly and was quite rambunctious too. We still had some prayer time but pretty constant interruption from J until I got him coloring. Some of the highlights of playtime were getting out Mr. Potato Head which J hadn't played with in a while. That really didn't last long. He wanted my help with getting his mustache and glasses on. We did some work with ABC's using these ABC panels I found at the dollar store. He asked for his numbers poster and we did some counting and naming of objects. (I'll put a lot more detail on this in my Sunday Tot School post.) Then I brought out his Teletubby puzzles and he worked on those for a bit. I got a good picture of him with a grumpy face while he was working on it. I think this was when he didn't want my help anymore.

I was doing something on the computer and J came over and wanted to watch. I decided to look on You Tube for some bible stories and found Jonah the Whale. This was super cute and J had me go back and replay the part of Jonah getting swallowed by the whale over and over.

Jonah and the Whale


J-likes to help me feed the birds and the feeders have been empty for a couple weeks now. The poor birds keep stopping by and there's no food. So we went out into the garage to get the seed ready. This is a good pouring activity for him. After we filled up the bird feeders, I checked out the garden again.







My (4) banana pepper plants are now producing and one is almost ready to pick. The cherry tomatoes are the only tomato plants producing out of 6 plants. This was such a weird gardening year for my little plot. When we came back into the garage, I was going to sweep up all the bird seed that spilled, but J really wanted to sweep. I got it started for him, then showed him how to push it out of the garage. It is great to see him eager to help with work! If only that will last. It was so beautiful outside (very low humidity) so we did some bubbles but I could tell J was getting tired. He didn't chase them around like he usually does, so he went for his nap.






We had a battle of the wills tonight at dinner. First it was J wanting to keep coloring when I called him to join us for dinner. Twice I had given him a heads up he'd have to stop coloring soon and he waited until I started the 5-4-3-2-1 count (I only had to say "5" and he came over). Then he ate maybe 3 bites of pasta and no meat and says he's all done. He's been doing this lately, only taking a couple or few bites and saying all done and refusing to eat. So I decided to try something to work with him on it. I set aside a few more bites saying if he ate that he'd be all done and we sat there.....and sat there....and sat there all the while he's crying and saying "all done" and me reading my book super calm telling him we needed to do just 3 bites. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore when he started to really cry and I wrapped it up. Maybe another time. Later, we all took a nice little walk around the neighborhood with J's car. It was a beautiful night. There is a hint of autumn in the air though.