Around Here in November

In November,

Collin, Reagan, and Katelyn played in their last soccer games of the season.

Kate slept in her crib for the last time.

I took it apart and Tyler brought it to Papa's house where he reassembled it with Papa for Hannah to use when she visits.

Kate has been sleeping in the trundle of Reagan's bed until their bunk beds arrive next weekend.

Reagan competed in the URI Fall Classic gymnastics meet and she placed fifth out of forty girls on bars.

 On November 11th, we celebrated Kelly's seventh birthday.

Reagan started basketball.  This is her first time ever playing and she is enjoying it.  I love this free throw, gymnast style basketball.

Collin made this notebook cover in art class.

This is our skeleton.  His name is Peach and he is a Halloween decoration, but Kate has been playing with him daily, so he's still hanging around.  Poor guy isn't doing so well, but Kate is trying to save him.

Reagan had her last orthopedic visit with Dr. Micheli in Boston.  He is an awesome doctor (he's the official doctor for the Boston Ballet), but I'm happy that we don't have to go back anytime soon.  She had to wear these silly shorts for her appointment so that he could see her legs and feet without pants in the way.

These kids worked with a bunch of others to put together bags of food and personal care items for the local families living in homeless shelters.  I really want to make a point of finding more service projects for us; I think it's important and definitely an area that I have not spent enough time pursuing with the kids.

Painting Bird Style

We enjoy books by Kevin Henkes, and Birds is one of our favorites.  We have borrowed it from the library many times.  After reading it recently, I laid out some paper, paint, and feathers taped to skewers to give Kate an opportunity to paint like a bird!  I was inspired by this page in the book:

Kate had a great time painting bird style!

Harold The Pink Elephant

As I mentioned in my previous post, while we were visiting The Eric Carle Museum, Reagan wrote and illustrated a book.  Here it is:

Valentine Craftiness

Kate painted on bubble wrap and pressed card stock down on top of the painted bubble wrap.

The result was some pretty unique hearts.

 I folded a paper plate in half and cut out the center and a heart shape to create a fun hat for Kate.  Thank you, Pinterest!

 Both girls made contact paper placemats.

One morning, there was a 90 minute snow delay.  Reagan used that extra time to loop all of these Valentine papers together to create a pretty chain decoration.

Love was the theme of the story hour at Barrington Books last week.  The kids made love bouquets!

I love all of the love!

Painting Snow

It seems like we went from having no snow at all to having snow every week, several days a week, in the blink of an eye.  I don't mind the snow, but some days it is just too cold to go out and play in it, so we bring it inside.

Kate and I worked together to create a masterpiece with watercolor paints and the snow as our canvas.

 We did some color mixing and made orange, green, and purple snow.

Beautiful, don't you think?

Here Comes Jack Frost

Here Comes Jack Frost by Kazuno Kohara has been a winter favorite since Collin and Reagan were little.  All of the illustrations are blue and white; it is very appealing visually and almost demands some kind of art project to follow the reading.  A few years ago, I did this same art project with Collin and Reagan.

I used pieces of masking tape on watercolor paper to create trees and then let Kate paint over the tape with blue watercolor paint.

After the paint dried, she tapped a paintbrush dipped in white paint to create snow in the air of  her tree scene.  There was paint everywhere, but Kate loved doing this.  Here is a tiny video (you can also see this video on my Vine page).

 Once all of the paint was dry, Kate peeled off the masking tape to reveal her finished winter scene.