Sweet Repeats: Edition The Hershey's Kiss

When we started having babies, we magically appeared on mailing lists for all sorts of children's catalogs. Most of them went into the trash as soon as they came in the house. But there was one that I looked forward to receiving each season because their stuff was really cute and practical. When the fall edition arrived in the mail, it was full of Halloween costumes for babies and toddlers. There were some really cute ideas, but one stood out above all the rest. It was a Hershey's Kiss costume. The problem was it was twenty-five dollars. I thought that was ridiculous to spend on a costume that Andrew would wear only a few times on his first Halloween.

But the more I looked around, the more I thought about that costume. Nothing else I saw was even close to as cute as that Hershey's Kiss. I decided to go ahead and order it, rationalizing that if we had any more children, they too could wear it on their first Halloween and be super cute as well. As it turned out, that costume cost me about eight dollars for each yahoo. And we think the pictures and memories are priceless. So for this Sweet Repeat, here are the yahoo Hershey's Kisses in order of appearance.

Andrew had just learned to say, "Boo!" and was doing that when I snapped this first pic on our porch in Winston Salem.

He was very eager to crawl over to the other pumpkins and investigate them.

And that hat was just a little too big!



Coleman was tee-tiny on his very first Halloween in 2007, so he wore the Kiss outfit in 2008 at 14 months old. Here we are at the Children's Museum in Winston Salem for a Halloween parade and trick-or-treating.


And the hat was too big for this yahoo too!



Jon Jon wore the Kiss suit last year and was cute enough to eat!


And the hat didn't fit him either!

Morning in the Mountains

Friday night Brent declared that if he stayed in the house all day Saturday he would go stir crazy. So we made plans to avoid that. We decided to take the boys to the mountains for a picnic. God gave us a perfectly beautiful fall day for our outing.




Here we are at the entrance to the park. The last time Brent and I were here, I was pregnant with Andrew. We came from Birmingham to Dahlonega for our babymoon. We stayed at a little cottage and on Saturday morning we drove over to Amicalola Falls for a picnic. Needless to say, we didn't hike up the 400+ stairs that day. We didn't hike them this trip either, but we had fun remembering our last visit to the Falls and thinking about how much has changed since then.


Heading over to the top of the falls to take in the view.



Jonathan was fascinated by the water going over the edge. He kept saying, "Oh no! Oh no!"



We walked down a few of the stairs as a family, then Brent took Andrew and Coleman a little farther on while Jonathan and I went back up.


Brent also took the boys over to the head of the Appalachian Trail. Andrew enjoyed telling me that they hiked on the AT.

There were too many leaves to pass up.




We unpacked our picnic in a nice sunny spot. I had planned for Jon Jon to sit in his stroller, but he wanted to eat on the quilt with everyone else.


After lunch, we were treated to a little kung fu demonstration.

We were home in time for naps. Have I mentioned how much we love where we live? It was a super Saturday.

October Science Club

For Science Club this month, we drove out to an arboretum in Jackson County. Our topic was trees, and it was the most beautiful fall day! Once we divided up into our groups, Andrew and his friends started out doing some leaf rubbings.


And this picture is mainly for family members who have seen pics of my daddy as a little boy. If I changed it to black and white (and blocked out the GT cap), I think we might be hard pressed to tell if it was Andrew or Papack!

Then Ms. Angela did a little talk on photosynthesis.



Next we moved over to a patch of grass and they did a dramatic interpretation of how a tree works. It was awesome! And hilarious!



The little boy in the middle was the heartwood of the tree. He was supposed to say, "I am strong and straight!" Andrew and Calvin were pretending to be like the roots sucking water up through the trunk. They had to take the blue crepe paper and make slurping noises as they waved the paper up from the ground to their heads, acting like the water moving up the tree.



Eventually, every child was involved. Someone was walking around saying, "One cell thick!" pretending to be the growing layer of the tree. Others had green crepe paper and were moving the food down the tree from the leaves. The funniest though were the kids who were the bark. They had brown construction paper and had to stand on the outside of the group and bark. Like dogs. I wish I had videoed the performance. It was too funny!

Then Ms. Angela passed out our leaf identification charts and we headed off on our hike.




We hiked through the woods and they used their charts to identifiy leaves we found. Here is Ms. Angela talking about a tree cookie. The kids got to count the rings in a cookie and determine how old the tree was.


I think I was trying to get a picture of him with his tree cookie.

Identifying a leaf.


This was neat to see. A huge tree had fallen and we could look closely at the root system.


It was another great adventure!

Overheard: Edition Passing the Buck

This morning as I was getting dressed, I noticed that the house was very quiet. The kind of quiet that lets me know I should investigate immediately. So I walked across the house to find the boys. All three were sitting on Coleman's bed. Andrew was holding my Kindle and Jonathan and Coleman were watching him closely. The boys know they are not supposed to play with the Kindle without permission and adult supervision, so this was a big no-no.

I walked into the room and took the Kindle from Andrew. Then I asked him, "Andrew, who's is this?" He said, "Yours." I asked, "Are you supposed to be using it without my permission?" He said, "No ma'am. Jonathan had it and I just took it away from him."

I looked at Jonathan and he looked at me with his little face and quietly said, "Beeshoo beeshoo wookawooka is a Cu-man."

Translation: "I-don't-know-but-it-wasn't-me-it-was-Coleman."

September Recap

In retrospect, I did not do a good job of capturing The Academy's at home activities in pictures last month. I did get pics of our field trips and science club, but they received their own post. Here's a recap with the pictures I did take.

Our read alouds last month were James and The Giant Peach, and The Hundred Dresses. Andrew and Coleman both loved each book, and we will definitely be revisiting The Hundred Dresses as we get older. It has a great lesson that everyone needs to hear more than once while growing up. We studied antonyms, short vowels, sight words,number and color words, and finished the first set of BOB books.

Johnny Appleseed was born on September 26, 1774, so we celebrated him and learned about his life all week. We mapped his travels, read several biographies, played a Fact/Fiction game about him, and made apple crisp and these yummy apple dumplings.



In math, Andrew kept track of the number of seeds we found in apples over the course of a week. Then we made a graph of the results.


We also worked on story problems, addition fact families (the doubles and the +1s), and practiced measuring and weighing. Coleman was home sick the day we used the balance for the first time. He had a great time doing school with us that morning!






We also made some fallish art projects. Here they are painting a fall tree.

In history we studied the Middle Ages. There was much playing of knights and building of castles. Science brought us a study of various landforms and geographic areas. Our Tuesday afternoons saw the addition of our coop group, which we both love. I'll have a separate post about coop in a few weeks. It was a great month!