Week of August 30 - Construction

Monday

Clesse just about lost his mind when he saw me pull out some construction vehicle stickers after spending the morning at the park. It was really stinking adorable! I originally was going to make 3D versions of the road cones for names, but it was becoming quite cumbersome to glue and assemble them with Clesse on my lap with his own glue stick in hand 😂. So after making a couple of them, I wrote the kids names on and then went to the 2D cones. But they turned out super cute, and Clesse has been proudly carrying his around most of the day.

Afterwards I pulled out a couple of 3D models that I picked up in the dollar section at Target. We built a front loader and dump truck. Afterwards I got out some paint and Clesse added his own artistic touch to them (Sis ended up working on her own painting project).

Tuesday

The kids were ready to go go go this morning! They were dressed and had had breakfast by 8 am, which isn't impressive for some parents with early risers, but sometimes the big kids are not even out of bed until 8:30! So we went outside to enjoy the cool morning. The kids helped me blow up this easel I got on clearance at Michael's. Koko ended up being the most into painting on it even though I expected him to not care much for it at all.

While Koko napped, Clesse helped me put together these Mega bloks puzzles. It was soooo worth all the planning and having sis get mad about construction week being "boring" to see his face light up when we turned the Mega Bloks into puzzle. And eventually Charlotte came around after realizing that the stuff I had planned was fun!In the afternoon while I made dinner, Clesse painted a few different construction vehicles on these coloring pages while Charlotte practiced her lowercase letters by tracing the names of them. She's been struggling with putting a few letters backwards and I think this helped her retrain her hand to go the other direction.

Wednesday

Clesse was super pumped this morning to get back to his Mega Blok puzzles, which made my mama heart so happy! And Charlotte finally relented that they're cool and kept asking Clesse if she could have a turn doing the puzzle. But, she is getting pretty tired of the construction vehicle activities, so today I decided to focus more on the building aspect of construction. We started off downstairs making forts using our fort building kit, and then moved upstairs and did a very similar exercise using marshmallows and toothpicks.

After lunch, I got out some kinetic sand for Clesse so he could put his excavator, dump truck, etc. in and could scoop and dump the sand. I honestly think he could do this for hours.

Once Clesse was napping, Charlotte and I finished up the last two crafts in her mirror themed KiwiCo box. She made some mirror goggles that pair with some puzzles to provide a little extra challenge while trying to solve the puzzle. She was so cute and kept telling me, "the table is upside down!". I don't really know how the top of the table could look upside down to her, unless she just meant that she could see the reflection above her. Haha!

Thursday

I was a little burnt out today from a butt ton of chores that had to be done, so we just played with some letter/number builders and magnets for mama preschool. Other than that, we enjoyed some nice weather outside and played!

Friday

Kev is in Vegas for the weekend, so I'm trying hard to bring a little extra energy to our home so we don't all miss him too much!

We started off playing with some air dry clay. My secret motive was to get the kids to help me make some boulders and clumps of dirt for an activity we'll do tomorrow, but then we had fun with our own creations. Clesse had a blast loading the boulders and dirt clumps into his construction vehicles and driving them around and dumping them.

In the evening we went to play at the indoor playground at the mall. The kids haven't played there in over a year and a half and it was so nice to let Koko loose and not worry about him scraping his legs and hands while crawling.

Saturday

Charlotte woke up this morning and told me, "I wish we could go to the zoo and get Dippin' Dots." She's been so dang sweet the last few days with helping me that I 100% wanted to make her wish come true, so I hopped on the computer, grabbed some spots for 8:30 am (we got there at 9:05 heh) and we spent the morning at the zoo, which was really fun! We got to hear lions roar which was really something.

When we got home it was time to build! We used some soft foam blocks. Clesse made various hammers (i.e. he put together a stick and a larger piece and smacked it on the floor) and Charlotte got a little more creative and built a robot. I was super proud of both of their creations, but a little more impressed by one 😉.

One of the activities we did this week that was a huge hit with the boys was hammering these golf tees into egg cartons. I was amazing that Clesse had enough interest to hammer all 30 in. Sissy really enjoyed it too, but got frustrated when they weren't going in straight (but they were starting to slant because the tees were longer than the space they had to move in, once I explained this to her she calmed down but wasn't interested in joining us again). I got a multi-color pack so Clesse could practice his colors and Charlotte could potentially do some patterns with them. Clesse and I wrapped up construction week by playing a little alphabet game. I wrote all of the letters onto the dirt clumps and rocks we made yesterday and placed them on one side of the floor. Clesse and I loaded up the dump truck and placed some in front of the bulldozer and then raced them across the floor over to the alphabet worksheet I picked up from here. Then we matched the boulders onto the correct letters. He was adorable and after placing a letter would say, "There. That's PERFECT!"