This was such a fun project! On Wednesday, we decorated the treat bags (dangit, it just occurred to me that I forgot to take pics of the finished product!). On Thursday, we colored the gift tags while we waited for Grandma to get here, because we all know that Bev wasn't going into a major baking project without Grandma!

The kids had a blast and are really good at this baking thing! Colby is an ace at egg-cracking! We didn't even have to pick out any eggshells like Bev usually has to! (Colby did ask if I got a picture, but unfortunately, I was too busy trying to help him, which he didn't need anyways.) He's also very good at measuring, pouring, cleaning blueberries, filling muffin cups, and supervising.

Brooklyn poured milk, put all the liners in the muffin pan, turning the oven on, and did an excellent job filling muffin cups. By the way, let the record show that I let her turn the oven on, not the stove. That one got me into a bit of trouble with Colby and his mom, haha!!

Aiden is also very good at cleaning blueberries, measuring, pouring. He even measured out the sour cream!

Peyton and Hadyn made some lovely cloth muffins over in their corner. 

Brennin did a superb job of overseeing the whole operation from his carseat.

I suddenly remembered that my camera does take video, so I captured a couple minutes of Brooklyn working hard at filling a muffin cup, Aiden was also at that task, and Colby stepped into supervise (he also had a couple turns at filling the cups).

(Look for more pictures in the Photo Gallery)

Nice try...but I'm not telling here either! You Moms will find out your surprise in the morning! 

However, come back tomorrow and I'll show you pictures of all the fun we have had the last couple days making your surprise.

I received my Module 6 materials after I had already printed the May newsletter, so this is information not included there. Module 6 is all about Activities, so that will be our focus. I have decided that we will not have a theme this month, but instead will focus on finishing up with Right From the Start assignments and requirements. There are some blank days on the calendar, as I have not yet determined what we will be doing those days. We will either be catching up on the RFS activities or doing Book Breaks or something. I'll keep you posted here.

Anyways...we had a fantastic day. Today was all about our Friends. We talked about all the fun things we do with our friends, and made some Friend pages for our "Me" books. We also discussed how sometimes grown-ups go out to lunch with their friends, and so that's why we were going to Taco Bell today. I can turn almost anything into a teachable moment, lol! Of course, we had our first (with this group) knock down, yelling screaming, "you hit me in the eye" fight between a couple of our oldest friends in between things this morning (really, guys, on FRIENDS day?!?), but as you can see below all was well by lunchtime.

Your little angels were...well, all perfect angels! But you expected that, didn't you??

Welcome to our new friend, Brennin! He is three-months-old, and just joined our group today. The kids were very excited to have a baby with us again!

It is Week of the Young Child! It is time to celebrate all the wonderful things these little monsters bring to our lives!!

We are going to be doing a lot of fun things to celebrate the week. We will be talking about all the things that make us special. We will also have a movie day, a carnival day, and go OUT  to lunch with our friends to Taco Bell.

The Taco Bell outing was planned for Friday, but due to a rainy forecast, we may be changing it to earlier in the week. It's only a block away, but that's too far to walk in the rain with little ones.

Today was All About Me day. We made life-size "Me" posters:

I hope everyone had a great day! I'll get this week's stuff posted tomorrow...I hope...I got behind this weekend. I was out filling sandbags Friday and Saturday, and doing Easter stuff with my family the rest of the time.

I hate it when I'm already behind and the week hasn't even started!

We have Easter pails and eggs in the sandbox:

Easter gel clings on the light table:

Number-matching eggs at the Discovery Table:

Bunny ears and baskets of eggs to play "Easter Bunny":

A cardboard box covered with a sheet??

No, Silly! It's a Bunny Hutch!! (Shown with a couple volunteer bunnies.)

It's a sad, sad day in my world...my personal world, not my daycare world. My kids have heard hundreds of times the past 15 years, "hurry up and get to bed, ER's about to come on!"

Now I'm no fair-weather fan, mind you. I've never missed an episode. Had to tape a few and watch a couple in summer repeats, but I've seen them all. And while I've had times where I was disappointed or upset at storylines or characters leaving, I kept watching. I even made it through that ridiculously boring first half of last season. The writer's strike was a god-send for ER...they came back just as good, if not better, than ever.

And this season has been absolutely brilliant. The transplant episode a couple weeks ago - absolute genius! The only episode to produce more tears from me than when Dr. Pratt died this season was when Dr. Greene died. Ok, that's all before tonight...who knows what will happen?!?

So if you need to call me tonight...well, don't bother between 6:45 until after 10:00. I won't be available. Tracy has strict orders to take messages for me during that time and to be responsible for all kid, dog, and whatever other duties come up. My kids have strict orders that if they need anything during this 3-hour timeframe...ask Dad. Me and a kleenex box have a date on the couch!

My new light table is finished!! Yay!! Didn't Tracy and Chad do a great job?!?

Now, all's I hafta do is figure out how to take pictures while it is lit! The camera kept doing this weird focusing thing...and this is what I kept getting:

Fortunately, I have a couple people I can ask. My new friend, Annie, who takes great pictures of her kids and light table, and Nancy, who just plain takes great pictures.

Hope you had a great weekend!

Before today, that is! We did another Book Break today. We read "Olivia", and then discussed what we thought her favorite things might be (the color red because there is lots of red in the book, ballet because her favorite painting at the museum was of ballerinas). But we did find out that Olivia just doesn't "get" abstract paintings. And truthfully, we don't either. We also realized that Bev doesn't have an abstract paintings in her house, and nobody else thought they had any either. So, we made these that will hang in Bev's house for the next week or so, and then they can hang in your houses!

They were made by putting paint on the paper with spoon, and then running a comb through the paint. Of course, there was also a lot of spreading of the paint with the spoon!

Because I didn't exactly get a theme worked out for the week, I decided to do some Book Breaks that I have been wanting to do for awhile. Since "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" seems to be their all-time favorite book, we went with that one yesterday.

While reading it, I never actually said the words "coconut tree", I let them do that. I had made my own little tree for the magnetic board. As I pulled the letter magnets out of a bag one at time, they yelled out which one it was, and we added it to the board. They've been acting out the story on the board since then!

We then each made our own coconut tree craft. First, we had to sort out the foam letter stickers (Dollar Tree find), so that everyone had one of each.

Everyone then colored their coconut tree pattern and added their letters however they wanted.

This letter got a bit sticky on the fingers! This will also explains why some of their letters look like they fell out of the coconut tree!

The end results:

Peyton wanted to do some painting.

He even tried to hang up his apron.

The next time he went to the easel, I didn't bother with the apron. It distracted him too much from his painting, and I knew his mom wouldn't mind a little washable paint on the clothes.

So after Circle Time, where we had a discussion about rainbows and their colors and how the colors are in certain order, we set about making our own rainbow pictures. We used a rainbow pattern, paint and q-tips to paint the rainbow, a sun pattern, blue rice for the raindrops, and cottonballs for the clouds. They could make their picture however they wanted using whatever materials they wanted, although I did have a couple rainbow patterns available that I had colored for the older ones who would want to get the colors in the right order.

The finished products:

Note below Colby and Aiden's names. The first two C's in the corner was Colby trying to figure out how to write his name in the corner (his choice of location, by the way), so the two C's were his first two attempts. He then determined that there was not enough room to write it in that direction, so he chose to write it backwards...including the letters! Aiden then determined that this was the perfect solution, and followed suit.

The next day, we continued the rainbow theme. Since we had leftovers from yesterday's project, I  just added construction paper in the rainbow colors, and let them do whatever they wanted.

I also added some of my colored rainbow patterns by the easel. I also mentioned during storytime that each side of the easel had three colors from the rainbow. If you needed a color from the other side, you would have to ask nicely to trade colors with your friend painting on the other side. It was not only a lesson in manners and sharing, but cooperation and strategy as well, as they would also have to what color their friend needed or was done with, to determine which colors to trade. I said nothing about what to paint, just pointed out that these were colors from the rainbow.

So most of you know that Bev likes to do everything has cheaply has possible. I've paged through the supply catalogs and found neat racks for hanging wet paintings, for a ridiculous amount of money.

Problem solved! For $10, plus a $2 more for a bag of plastic clips:

Thanks, Shandah, for bringing this fabulous snack that fit perfectly into our St. Patrick Rainbow theme. I am so impressed...I do not the patience for that sort of thing.

In case you didn't get to meet her in person (or should I say "in chinchilla"), here is Misty...the latest critter to enter our lives. Shaila brought her home on March 3. The kids love her. Aiden did express some concern, however, and warned Shaila to not "let the dogs get Misty!"

So my computer problems have now been taken care of, and it's just a matter of me getting caught up again. I have added a bunch of pictures to the Photo Albums, and I have some fairly new ones to add to the Photo Gallery. I have started to work on the Tour Our Daycare pages, but don't expect too much there for the next couple weeks. I'm not going to devote too much time there until the new room arrangement is completed.

I'll let you know here when I have added new things. Also, there's a few pictures and things that I want to comment about on the blog from earlier in the month. So things may seem a bit out of order for awhile.