Tooth Fairy Pillow

After many stops and starts, the pillow is finally complete! At first it was a struggle for Brother two sew even 10 stitches. It was enough resistance that I put the project away for a while, and then brought it out again later. Not too much had changed, so I put it away for awhile again. Finally the third time I brought it out, he was ready and the sewing became much easier for him. The material is felt and we used 3 strands of floss to sew it together. He stuffed it with a bit of wool roving.

It's a good thing the pillow is complete. Brother's first big boy tooth is part way in. The baby tooth isn't even wiggly yet though, so upon the dentists recommendation, I am helping him to wiggle it a few times a day. The same thing happened to me as a child.

Mother's Day Craft

Here are the Mother's Day gifts the boys made for Grandma. They are books marks or art pieces of dried flowers on a piece of wet on wet painting glued onto a piece of tag board and covered with clear contact paper. I think that some of the flowers might have been a bit thick, but they had fun, and Grandma was happy.

R's copywork

We participated in an Enki support phone call and it was brought to my attention that some of our "issues" were most likely due to eye tracking difficulties. Brother's eye tracking in not mature enough to allow him to look at the chalk board and then copy it down onto his paper. He can do it, but loses his place constantly. So he has to re-find his place on the board every time he looks away to write a letter. This takes a lot of effort, tiring him quickly so that he can't write much. A way to support him in his copy work is to put the copywork on a piece of paper beside him so that he doesn't have to look so far away. This is normal, and should resolve on it's own. If it hasn't by the time he is 8, then we can start looking into eye exercises. I put the copywork up on the chalk board as well knowing that someday he will use the board exclusively.

And the letter is!

The Waterfall Of White Hair

Mine



Brother's

Brother slipped into using lines again when he was drawing his picture. And using more symbols. It felt like a step back, and then I looked at my picture - which I am not at all happy with. I outlined as well - just with a different part of the crayon. This is my reminder that I need to practice the picture first so that I can bring it to Brother well. To be fair, our neighbor started cutting down trees during this letter, and I couldn't think. So, we spent a lot of time at parks to avoid the sound of chain saws.

Colored Eggs

In some ways we are late in coloring eggs, but, it feels right to us. Earthschooling lists egg coloring a science, which is a pretty neat concept to me. I'd never thought of it that way before.



Here is the chalk drawing I put up before coloring the eggs. We had eaten some rainbow chard and I saved the red stems to use for the dying. I wanted to remind the boys of which part of the plant we were using to dye with, and that we had eaten the food first. I probably wouldn't have done this if we had taken the chard from the garden, but it was store bought.



And here are our eggs. Since we're not dying them for Easter, we really aren't concerned with having a certain amount by a certain time, freeing us to really focus on the process. Good thing since it took us three days to get three eggs! When we took the eggs out of the dye the first time, there was a weird coating that rubbed right off. So, I rinsed off the eggs and we stuck them back in the dye.

The yellow/brown egg is from daffodils, the blue eggs is from purple cabbage, and the pinkish egg is from the rainbow chard. I don't think my husband has ever dyed eggs using this process before, so he was very surprised to see that the purple cabbage made a blue egg. I had read that purple is a difficult color to achieve, so I was already expecting blue. Brother discovered that although the pinkish egg's shell was unbroken, the dye had passed through the egg shell and colored the egg white. That's pretty neat!

Next we are going to put an egg in the red dye for a day or so and one in the purple cabbage at the same time. Then we'll switch them and see which one looks more purple!

N

Yes, it's an "N". It's hard to see in the picture. The "N" is a combination of the trunk and two branches. The nest is at the top of the "N". You can probably see it better in Brother's picture.



Mine



Brother's



Copy work.