hide-n-(sensory)-seeking

I'm so egg-cited!! Thursday afternoon, my girls came bounding in from playing outside, yelping loudly, "Look! We found an egg!" Sure enough, they had indeed found the first egg laid by any of our hens! I was amused at the timing of this finding, on the coldest day of the year. Coldest, that is, until Friday. Which, much to my delight, was even colder, and on which Zak came bounding in near noon announcing another find. We got sure confirmation today that it's Butterball who finally started. Kit and I were outside playing around the time I figured our Golden Girl might drop another. Sure enough, she wasn't in the run with the other girls. After about ten minutes, I heard a thump in the hen house, and a second later Butterball popped her head into the run. We ran excitedly to open the egg door, and sitting in the nesting box was a beautiful little light tan egg!  Theoretically, the others are age-wise in the range to start laying for th...

Welcome to Fresh Brewed! Each week I will write about a topic that relates to families. Then, at the bottom of the post is a Linky Tool so that you can link up your posts related to the topic for the week. It doesn't have to be a new post from the past week, if you have written about it in a previous post, link it! The topics will be broad enough to encompass many avenues of thought, but do please only post related posts. Opinion posts are welcome, but not bashing ones please. Please keep it respectful. There may be posts with vastly different viewpoints, or addressing points on vastly different areas of the topic. That's fantastic as every family is different and struggles with different circumstances. If you are not a blogger, but you have an interesting article to share, or read something another blogger posted, please feel free to leave a link in the comments section of the weekly post and a short description of how it relates to the topic.  Fresh Brewed Weekly Link-...

So here is just a few books the big kids and I have been reading lately. This is a very partial list, the highlights mainly.  I got several books in the mail a couple of weeks ago from Amazon. The one below, is a fast moving, fun story about an average son of a superhero dad. Quin's dad is set on trying to "encourage" his sons powers to manifest themselves, while Quin is on a mission to survive adolescence and get his dad to accept him as he is. I read through it first and enjoyed it, now Zak is making his way through it and seems to be enjoying it as well. Zak made his way through a few more Amelia books recently. Both he and Grace really enjoy these.  They are both also big fans of the Dork Diaries series.  While I was out of town on retreat , I was able to dedicate some serious time to pleasure reading. In the evenings I enjoyed slowly reading out loud some of these. I love how he describes nature as a character in his poems. I a...

Last year Zak got some water beads in one of his science kits. And he played with them several times. Eventually, they got lost, swept up, left outside, etc. At the store the other day, I happened to notice several boxes of them on a shelf in the toy area. We bought two boxes, each containing three different colors, and totaling 1000 beads. The color sets we chose were: Pink, purple, clear and Red, yellow, green On Wednesday evening,  while Daddy and the big kids went to the fair, Kit and I soaked some water beads. She wanted "Pink!" Each color comes sealed in a small plastic bag of 150 beads. In the box there were three packets of purple, two of clear, and two pinks. We let the water run in the sink until it got warm, because I was guessing they might grow faster in warm water and patience is not Kit's most shining attribute. I filled a plastic container with about an inch of warm water. Snipped of the top of the bag with s...

Welcome to Fresh Brewed! Each week I will write about a topic that relates to families. Then, at the bottom of the post is a Linky Tool so that you can link up your posts related to the topic for the week. It doesn't have to be a new post from the past week, if you have written about it in a previous post, link it! The topics will be broad enough to encompass many avenues of thought, but do please only post related posts. Opinion posts are welcome, but not bashing ones please. Please keep it respectful. There may be posts with vastly different viewpoints, or addressing points on vastly different areas of the topic. That's fantastic as every family is different and struggles with different circumstances. If you are not a blogger, but you have an interesting article to share, or read something another blogger posted, please feel free to leave a link in the comments and a short description of how it relates to the topic.  Fresh Brewed Weekly Link-Up Guidelines 1. Plea...

I've decided to divide and conquer this week. This post will highlight some of the preschool books that we read over the past few weeks, while the next post will contain the favorites for young readers and myself. To start us off we have a family favorite that was so well loved it literally fell apart, and we finally replaced it, with the board book version. I am very pleased as it is the entire story and not a condensed version. We love Wooly! Kit said this was her favorite page, the one with all the Kitty Kisses! My personal fave is the the duck lullaby, the kids go crazy giggly when I belt out my quacky rendition. Fun times. I have to confess that I have never really been able to get into the How Do Dinosaurs series for reasons I can't exactly pinpoint. I think the artwork is great. I love that they write the names of each dino on the various pages. I think it a very clever way to help kids sort out their own feelings in a funny and non-accusing ...

Hair issues.  Seldom in the life of a girl are the firework fantastic hair days. But for a girl with sensory issues, those days are especially celebration worthy! The last year has had many hair raising moments, but I'm so excited that as time has gone on and we have worked with Kit on sensory diet activities and sensory integration therapy, her number of good hair days has increased substantially. Here is a photo overview of some of the ups and downs of a year of hair and Sensory Processing Disorder. Her typical 'do', wispy and a bit wild! This was the first time she wore and left in pig tails all the way through an outing! It was a very momentous event. Back to wispy and wild. This was a few weeks after we started doing reflex protocols and sensory integration work with Kit. She actually requested ''two pony tails" and picked out the colors she wanted and left them in all morning! Getting longer!  Another landmark day! T...