3 months old and 4 months old

3 babies and their 3 month photos

I'd have you guess which kid is which but it's pretty obvious.

Lukas is a little more than 4 months old but here are his stats from his appointment last week. 16 lbs, 26 inches. He's 65% for weight but 90% for length. Joshua was 17 lbs at 4 months and I think Abigail was 12 lbs.  Besides a slightly funny shaped head and some dry skin, he is the picture of perfect health. Ok, that's not what the Doc said, those are my own words. What the Doc actually said was, "Wow! What are you feeding him? Well, he's sure not wasting away is he?"

The letter L

I skipped Lion. Boring. Well, maybe just not in the mood.

Our L game went like this, Weil ich Lukas liebe, schenke ich ihm einen Lego und einen Lutscher. Basically we try to use as many L words as possible at the end. "Because I love Lukas, I'm giving him a... (in this case a Lego and a Lollipop).

Our plan for an L snack was to actually eat lollipops - just a dum dum each, but after our L activity, I decided we (as in my children, not myself - still on my no sugar thing) had eaten plenty of sugar to last as a good long while. I introduced the L activity with a book a good friend gave us (and of which I forgot to take a picture) called "Kleiner Eisbaer, hilf mir fliegen" about a little polar bear who helps a puffin fly and get back home. Puffin in German is Papageientaucher. Nice that it fit in with our bird theme as well. In it the polar bear and puffin climb into a hot air ballon - Heissluftballoon. That was our activity, not to get into a Heissluftballoon, but to go to the Balloonfest as part of Springville Art City Days. (We focused on the Luftballoon part of Heissluftballoon, seeing as it starts with L.) Here are a gazillion pictures. It was soooo fun!

There were way more people there than I expected. It was 6:30 in the morning! And freezing!

One of the attractions: Free balloons for the kids

I think there were 8 or 9 balloons all together

Once a balloon took off, the people in the basket would throw out candy to the scrambling children below. One balloon threw out balls, some of which had numbers that corresponded to prizes at the prize table. We just enjoyed watching.

Besides being freezing, it was an absolutely beautiful morning. We started out in the shade of the mountains and eventually the sun crested over and warmed us up. It was so awesome.

 I like this photo because - even though I'm sure you can't see it on the blog - there are two tiny little balloons that some children had lost floating up their with the big one

Another attraction: Free donuts and hot chocolate. Abigail was finished with her donut before Joshua had even really begun - And then she dumped out all her hot chocolate. We did have to stand in a long line for the donuts, but the kids didn't mind.

And since it was so fun, Derek came with us this morning on an early morning walk to see the balloons again. We didn't think we'd actually get to see them this close though. (And since Derek missed out on the donuts from the day before, he took the liberty of heading to Reams early that morning and picking out, no, not 1 donut per person, but 8 huge sugary deliciously tempting donuts, some with sprinkles, some with chocolate, some glazed with raspberry filling, a bear claw, one with chocolate and a pecan coconut dollop on the top, just like a German chocolate cake. I did resist, although my mouth is watering now just thinking about them, but it didn't take long for all 8 to disappear. Really, people. (Derek said he would have bought 12, but he knew I wasn't going to have any. Yeah, we're that bad. It's kind of like all or nothing at our house.) Ok, a gazillion more photos.

It really wasn't as cold as the morning before, but I figure its better to be prepared.

We weren't quite sure this little piggy was going to clear the houses!

I'm glad the pig flew over to us because it was the kids' favorite. Abigail calls it her pink pig.

Ever heard of storm chasers? Yeah, we're like balloon chasers. We followed this one and another to a little side street where they landed right next to each other. One was giving the kids tethered rides, but we figured our kids were too little for that. Joshua was a little frightened by the loud flame every time it went off. I told them maybe next year (mostly because I want to do it!)

Song Birds

Our second week of Birds was less hands on, but much more musical, thanks to the fact that just about half of the German folk songs are all about birds. Ok, that is perhaps an exaggeration, but it seems like it. Here are the songs we learned:

Kuckuck, Kuckuck ruft aus dem Wald (Cuckoo, Cuckoo calls from the wood)
Es wollt' ein Vogel Hochzeit machen (A bird wanted to get married - very loose translation)
Kommt ein Vogel geflogen (A bird came flying)
Alle meine Entchen* (All my ducklings)
Der Kuckuck und der Esel+ (The Cuckoo and the donkey)
Wenn ich ein Voeglein waer'+ (If I were a birdie)
Fuchs, du hat die Gans gestohlen (Fox, you stole the goose)

*OK, we already knew this song
+"learned" should be applied loosely to these two songs, we sang them once or twice.

My favorite songs included lines such as "let us sing, dance, and hop" and "la la la, didi ra la la."
Joshua's favorite song included lines like these "Fox you stole the goose, give it back. Otherwise the hunter will get you with his gun," followed by references to die rote Tinte, or in other words, the fox's blood. Hey, it's way more mild than Grimm, so I'll let it slide.

We made some little bird feeders (pine cones, peanut butter, millet) to hang next to our bird house but I didn't realize that birds are busy eating worms and insects during the spring and summer and wont really be needing those seeds until winter comes around. Oh well. It's a good thing I'm not a paid teacher, because obviously I don't do my homework! They were fun to make anyway.

Can you see our bird house back there?

Here are some, but not all, of our favorite bird books. These were the less education books.

My favorite line from "Little Penguin's Tale" goes something like, "Now everybody knows that a little penguin can get into big trouble dancing with the gooney birds." Actually, I didn't know that. I suppose these books taught me something after all.

These were some of the education books - we did have some kid friendly books also, but I haven't bothered to take photos of them. They were helpful, however, in helping the kids and me identify lots of local birds. To add to our list, we have seen more robins, magpies, chickadees, a few finches, a hummingbird, chickens, and I saw a bird today with a red face, but I have no idea what it is.

I don't know what Joshua is pointed to, but I'm sure whatever it is, he called it a Fleischfresser Perregrine - Thanks to our Falcon show last week, any bird that is fast or is a meat eater is now a "Perregrine."

Joshua is still working on his lego birds. If you can guess what these two birds are supposed to be, kudos to you. I'll have to come up with something to mail you. (The second one is missing quite a few elaborate and large tail feathers, if that helps you out a bit.) Don't let the flowers on their heads fool you. Those are just for decoration.

I think we will go ahead and move on to Reptiles and such. We have a scheduled outing to the Tracy Aviary with some friends near the end of the month, and a scheduled reptile show with the scouts in a week or so, so I've decided to put birds on hold for the moment. I suppose birds and prehistoric large reptiles have quite a bit in common, and depending on who you talk to, are even related. We'll pretend we're not making such a big jump, and then just finish up with the Aviary as planned.

Pictures of Pictures

Lillie, this is for you :)

And this is for me. A new haircut. I'm still working on falling in love with it. :(

Now I feel a little better

Every now and then, I don't know, maybe once a month, I start to wonder if I am ruining my children by speaking German to them instead of English. This made me feel a little better. (Thanks, Jessica.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html?_r=2

And then Abigail said to me the other day "Ein Cup, dass ist auf Englisch" (A cup. that's in English.) And she laughed. It was the first time she verbalized to me that she knows she is speaking two languages.  A while ago she  started coming up to me with her Baby and a blanket and saying, in English "Wrap baby, please?" I respond always by, "Soll ich dein Baby umwickeln?" (Shall I wrap your baby?) and of course she answers back in German again.

"Wrap baby, please?" is something she learned in nursery at church and instead of trying to ask me in German, she just asked me in English like she does all her nursery teachers. So to see her make the distinction between the two languages is really fun for me to see, since now I know she knows.

On the walk home from church yesterday we were talking about Jesus and she started laughing and said, "JESUS auf Englisch" using the English pronunciation instead of the German. I don't mind her speaking in English at all. In fact, it's cute. It's like hearing her speak a foreign language, as weird as that is. She's like a turned around stereotypical American missionary returned home from Germany. Her foreign language skills are great, but mostly just in religious conversations.

Preschool is for the Birds: part 1

This is one of those topics that at first I think will be so boring and the kids wont get into it - nor will I. (Why do I even pick them then?) But then I start planning and looking into things and I realize how amazingly cool the world of birds actually is. I highly highly (not a typo, I double highly) recommend doing bird crafts, songs, activities, watching, etc. with your children. All you have to do is look out the window. However, it helps if you know the names of the common birds around and you can recognize them. That was my homework. I've got a long list of birds in German that I've been working on. I'm actually getting pretty good too. So this morning when we woke up and looked out the window, what did we see? Eine Elster, viele Wachteln, ein Paar Wanderdrossel, und ich bin nicht total sicher, aber ich denke wir haben auch eine amerikanische Meise gesehen. (One Magpie, many quail, a few robins, and I'm not totally sure but I think we also saw a chickadee.) Knowing the names of the birds really gets the kids attention. They aren't just birds anymore once we know their names. Think about it, a duck isn't just a bird, nor is a turkey or a chicken. They are more than just birds to the kids because the kids know what to call them, and all the sudden, they are fun to watch and find. So a sparrow and a jay can also be fun and exciting - and they are always around.

Ok, so here are birds Joshua has been making out of Legos. He's actually been perfecting his design over the last month or so.

Here are birds we made out of egg cartons. I got the idea from Kindersuppe.com.  You can find the site in English too - it's Kidssoup.com. The original is supposed to be a penguin with cute earmuffs but I like our birds too.

We built a bird house. And painted it. I'm getting a little better about letting my kids paint. I'm not too fond of the paint mess.

I like this photo mostly because in the back you can see Abigail getting away with Joshua's bike. If he hadn't been so focused on his work, we would have had a major screaming and crying battle.

We went to the Bean Museum and spent some time checking out some of their birds.

I told Joshua to get next to the duck and stand still. So instead, this is a photo of Joshua telling the duck to stand still right before Joshua ran away!

And then this morning - after we watched the little quail run around our driveway, we watched a falcon eat one!

that little red blotch is a quail leg the falcon ate out of the falconer's hand - feathers and all.

There is a falconer in our neighborhood and I asked him to come talk to our cub scouts and show off his bird. It was fascinating. This is a peregrine falcon and she (as in peregrines in general) is the fastest animal in the world. She can fly 475 miles an hour!! I was disappointed only two of our scouts made it, but at least I got to see it and that was awesome.

Joshua was a little scared, I could tell, because he was clinging to my leg and therefore didn't make it into this picture.

Stay tuned. More birds to come.