A Beautiful Butterfly

Today at Stroller Strides Liam, Reilly and Zane found a few caterpillars. While teaching class I was happy they were entertaining themselves and loving finding new things. After class I realized that Liam had used my Stroller Strides water bottle as his new caterpillars home.

Oh well boys will be boys, right. Little did I know that Caterpillar would go into hibernation in there. I went upstairs tonight, saw my water bottle, grabbed it and heard "it is going to be a beautiful butterfly, yeah! yeah!". I laughed and thought how am I going to explain to him there will be no butterfly. Then I looked inside the water bottle and low and behold a cocoon.

I immediately did what every parent would do and I googled "raising caterpillars" and found out we have a Wolly Bear Tiger Moth Caterpillar in our hands. It will hibernate now until Spring when we will need to relocate it to a new house and watch it turn into a butterfly.

Are you kidding me. I have to try and explain to the boys that the Caterpillar will not be a butterfly until March or April. Then I have to make sure I do not throw it out, kill it or loose it in the mean time. Yikes!

I love the excitement in their eyes and for my boys ~ we are now happy owners of one caterpillar.

Supernanny has nothing on me...

Okay so Jo never made it to our house. I guess we just were not "bad" enough for her or something. I decided to take it upon myself to roll out the reward charts and get this house under control (well with A LOT OF HELP FROM GOD, less control and more peace!)

Anyway, we put up our Supernanny Reward Charts (from her own website) and off we went. It only took Reilly a week to fill his up. Liam is half way there and loving all this reward stuff. Natalie has been up and down the chart twice so far but has never actually made it to "10". She is working hard though and I have seen so much improvement from her despite her 3yr old tantrums.

The best part is Reilly now gets to do something fun and he asked he basically told Liam he would do whatever Liam wanted to do. LOL!

Liam is almost to Book 18 on his reading chart which is HUGE and he is so excited because it is the halfway marker. I started high with him and told him he could get a DS game. It takes major motivation to move this kid and guess what in one week he has read most of these. Crazy!

Science is Messy and Fun!

Ode to Natalie

Never stops talking
Always eating
Terrible 3's
Adventurous
Loves her family
Is adorably funny
Experiences life

Arts & Crafts

It is great to see how creative our kids are. All three of the kids love to paint. 2 are very abstract and one is a perfectionist. I love to see how they create, think and experience art.

I read a little today about how art has evolved over the years. These boys remembered the "painted" rock in Yakima the Indians made and were able to associate that with cave paintings. I love it!

We learned all about Primary Colors and how these colors when blended can make other colors. We experimented with colors and made up our own. Liam won with Indian Brown. Reilly had Meteor Black and Natalie had Dinosaur Pee Green.

Now we are off to the library to explore the world through books, DVDs and our new favorite Books on CD for the car ride.