So Silly!

Grace and Jack are SO SILLY together! All they need to do is look at one another and the room is instantly filled with their squeals and giggles!

Sweet Summer Moments

Every Thursday after music group we go a beautiful park in Portland and spread a blanket under our special tree. Jack, Grace, and I enjoy everything beautiful summer has to offer here. After our lunch we love to walk around the pond, cross the footbridge, and feed the ducks. These are the days we will remember and cherish all winter long.

So Strong!

Jack is such a strong boy ~ he loves doing push-ups!

Fun With Animals

Jack loves animals and animal sounds! Jack is able to recognize several animals by reaching for the animal with his hands or through eye gaze. Jack is able to identify a cow, pig, horse, sheep, cat, dog, rooster, and zebra. Jack is also enjoying putting objects in and out of containers. I combined two of his favorite things by giving Jack bowls filled with animals this morning. Jack had a great time placing the animals in and out of the bowls. Later, we filled all of Jack's bowls with animals and Grace filled each one with water. We placed the animal bowls in the freezer for a fun and cool summer activity to be done later this week!

Summer Reading Program

Grace and Jack are participating in our library's Summer Reading Program. The theme of the program is "Be Creative At Your Library." Throughout the month of July and August there are several fun and artistic programs planned at our library. Grace and Jack each have a paper on a bulletin board with their name on it and for every book we read together they get a sticker on their sheet. Grace loves going to the library each week to put stickers on their sheets. Grace and Jack have two full sheets of stickers and need a third. We love books and our favorite time spent together is reading books!

Happy Beach Baby!

A Big Puff Of Clouds!

We have been waiting so long for a warm summer day so that Grace could have fun outside with "cloud paint" (shaving cream). Grace had the best time making "clouds" all over our deck. By the time Grace was finished with her clouds she was covered in shaving cream from head to toe! Grace has always loved this cloud activity and how I always love watching her! Grace is so creative and her creativity shines through during activities where she is free to explore and create - the sky's the limit!

Tremendous Trees!

We have been reading a wonderful book called The Tremendous Tree Book by Barbara Brenner & May Garelick. This book celebrates how marvelous trees are and it presents basic facts about trees, how they grow, and how much they benefit our world. We went on a leaf walk this morning to gather leaves from trees near our house. When we returned home we matched the leaves to a leaf matching page in our book to identify what type of tree the leaves came from. Grace made hammered leaf prints from several of the leaves we collected on our leaf walk. She placed leaves in between two sheets of paper and used a hammer to make the leaf prints appear on the paper! While Grace was making her leaf prints I set up a bin filled with water for Jack to explore. I placed several of the leaves we gathered from our walk into the bin. Jack had a great time splashing the leaf water, touching the wet leaves, and making the leaves sink and float using his hands.

We made a leaf poster from the four most common types of trees near our home - oak, maple, birch, and pine (pine needles are actually leaves). Grace is able to identify these four types trees simply by looking at the shape of their leaves!

A Glimpse Of Our Day At Pineland Farms

A Parade!!

We were on our way to visit a farm yesterday morning when we saw that traffic ahead was being redirected in the town of Buxton because of a parade. We realized Buxton was celebrating Heritage Days and they started their day of celebration with a parade followed by a large festival. We decided to change our plans for the day so we quickly parked our car and watched the parade. Grace and Jack LOVE parades so much and we were all very excited because we thought we had seen our last parade of the summer season on the 4th of July. We ended up spending the remainder of our day at this fun festival.

Making Music With Cousin Rose!

We were so delighted to have Cousin Rose, Memere & Pepere visit us on Thursday and join us for music group. We had the best time singing, dancing, and making music together! Grace and Jack were so excited to share their love of music with everyone. After music group Jack, Grace, and Rose all sat down together to play the keyboard -- the three cousins are absolutely adorable together! After music group we met Daddy for lunch and then spent our afternoon together at the Maine Wildlife Animal Park. Thank you Cousin Rose, Memere and Pepere for the fun day. The only thing missing was Cousin Kimberlee, Auntie Allison, and Uncle Steve but we hope to see them all soon.

Back To The Lake Beach

We are so excited to have a weekly forecast of warm and sunny weather after nearly two months of rain and cooler temperatures. We celebrated the first day of more summer-like weather by going to our lake beach. This is the first time we have been there since summer began! We enjoyed every minute of our time there and we all can't wait to go back this afternoon.

Middlebury's Festival On The Green

Every July we go to Middlebury to visit Maddy and Poppy the week of Middlebury's Festival On The Green. This is something we look forward to all year and it is our favorite week of the entire year! All last week we packed our lunch and attended the festival's "Brown Bag" concert series under the tent in Middlebury's beautiful green. We always arrived about an hour early to get the perfect seats and we had the added bonus of watching the performers warm up before their performance. We enjoyed all of the performances -- watching marionettes perform the classic fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, listening to world music, learning about musical instruments played around the world, watching a physical comedian, and listening to folk music. We are back in Maine now but we will be talking about all of the beautiful summer memories we made in Vermont for a very, very long time to come.

Making Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream With Maddy

Story Time At The Ilsley Public Library In Middlebury

7 Months Old!

Ahhh!

There is nothing like being seven months old today.

Our super sweet boy had his wellness visit with his pediatrician on Friday. Jack now weighs 22.95 pounds and is 28 3/4 inches long.

On Wednesday We...

...talked about the Middlebury Falls with Maddy...picked strawberries from Maddy's organic garden...cuddled with Uncle Adam...walked across the footbridge.

Look At All Of The Fun We Are Having In Beautiful Vermont

The Lazy Days Of Summer

After several more days of rain this week we took full advantage of some sunshine today. After music group this morning we headed to the park and enjoyed our afternoon there feeding the ducks, eating lunch, and simply loving every moment of being together on this beautiful sunny summer day.

Tomorrow morning we are leaving for Vermont. We are so very excited to visit Maddy, Poppy, Uncle Adam, Great Grandma & Pop-pop all next week!

Our Colorful World

We went on a scavenger hunt this morning to find items in nature that match the ones we painted in our egg carton. This was one of our all time favorite activities. I think the entire neighborhood heard Grace squeal with delight each time she found flowers, rocks, blades of grass, pine needles, raspberries, strawberries, acorn tops, and berries that matched the colors in our egg carton. Jack also giggled loudly each time a new color item was found and placed inside our egg carton. What a perfect way for Jack to learn about colors. Our favorite color find today was a ladybug!!! After much thought we decided to place the ladybug in the red color compartment. If you look closely in the picture above you can see that the ladybug had other ideas and she decided to climb into the light green color compartment instead! We all looked high and low for orange and blue color items but we were unable to locate any. These colors will be a fun challenge for us on our next "color walk." We will be going on a "color walk" each day because we had so much fun with this activity. It will be so interesting to see how the items on our "color walk" change as the seasons change.

The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst the lovely things. ~ Plato