hide-n-(sensory)-seeking

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 Li...

Keeping Kit busy while the big kids are working on certain school projects can sometimes be a challenge. She loves to be involved in whatever they are doing, but she also loves to wreck it. They are not her biggest fans in those moments.  So Thursday, while Grace was building her aqueduct, I devised a way to keep Kit fully engaged and happy. We played Twister! Preschool Style. We spread out the mat, and then I had her go find her three favorite stuffed animals. While she brought them out one by one from her bed, I wrote their names on sticky notes and stuck them over the hands/feet on the spinner, including a sticky note for her. Then we were ready! Jeffrey the Pug, Thunder the Wonder Cat, and Sylvia - dutifully manning their posts. :) By modifying the game, she was able to follow the simple directions seeing as she doesn't understand the whole right/left concept yet. And she was moving her whole body moving her friends from one spot to the next...

The last several weeks have been short school weeks here. But productive ones. Zak sculpted a volcanic landscape out of Kinetic Sand. He said it was "from before any animals and humans, back when there was just tons of volcanoes everywhere." Despite the lack of scientific vocabulary, it was a very cool rendering. He even explained which ones were active, which were dormant, and which were still forming. I found a great idea on Pinterest for helping with handwriting skills. While the original idea was for younger children closer to preschool and kindergarten age, I immediately saw how it could be a great aid to Grace and her dysgraphia. We put salt in an upside-down lid, chosen because of it's shallow sides. I wrote the words she needed to practice in big letters on line-less paper. First, she was to use her finger or the eraser side of a pencil to trace the words in the salt, checking them off on the sheet as she went. By using the eraser side o...

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...