An Assortment of Things

A number of things have kept me from the blogging world over the last few days. In fact, I have a number of things I have been meaning to blog about, so I'll just post them here in one place to update you on things going on in our household lately.

Sunday night Rebekah earned her last patch for her first year book in Cubbies. I am so proud of the way she has worked to memorize her verses and retained them. All the kids have done a really great job! They have one more week of Cubbies before they dismiss for the summer.

Monday morning Rebekah came to me with a stuffy nose. It sounded like she had come down with a possible cold, but it didn't seem to bother her too much, until around 2:00 when she began to complain that her left ear hurt. I had just gotten Joshua to bed for a nap, although he had not gone to sleep yet. I didn't want to cut his nap altogether, so I took the later appointment available so that Darrin would not have to take off much work and Joshua could stay in bed. We had to drive downtown since our regular pediatrician was booked. My hunch was correct: Rebekah had an ear infection, but it was caught early, so it should clear up quickly. She began the antibiotic that night and I put her on some cough syrup before bed.

The next morning she seemed like she was dragging, and I wondered if it might be best to keep her home from preschool. She really wanted to go, so we prepared for it, but a few minutes before it was time to leave Rebekah told me she wanted to stay home. I knew she had to be feeling pretty badly to make such a request. An hour later she vomited her medicine. After talking to the pharmacist I gave her another dosage of medicine along with some food. I figured she probably was coughing so much from the congestion that it caused her to vomit, and the pharmacist said that taking the medicine on an empty stomach could have made her feel sick as well. About two hours later she threw up again. Poor thing had some weird virus to give her a cold and a stomach bug.

Rebekah played a little bit off and on throughout the day, but she spent a lot of time just laying on the couch and watching TV. By this morning she was feeling quite a bit better, although her nose was still runny and she dealt with some cough. She did have a slight fever last night, but today it never flaired up, and I never treated it with Tylenol or Motrin because it was so low-grade, so it broke on its own. This evening I needed to run some errands, buying gifts for Rebekah's preschool teacher and to also get some things to make a gift for her. Rebekah really wanted to go, and I didn't want to leave her out of helping me since the gifts would be from her. Since she was feeling so much better by this afternoon Darrin and I decided she could help me. It took us a good while to pick up everything that I decided to take Rebekah out for dinner and skip choir practice since I was already going to be pretty late. We had a really nice time shopping and eating together, just the two of us. We went to Steak 'N' Shake, and Rebekah loved the kid things they gave her, especially the paper Mustang you fold together. It was just a really great time for us to hang together and for me to give her some undivided attention.

I never posted this, but we finally finished our unit for The Parable of the Lily. We learned some vocabulary words, reviewed the Easter story, discussed different feelings throughout the book, and read a couple of other books that went beautifully with the theme of seed planting: Zinnia's Garden and The Parable of the Sunflower.

Here are some pictures of Rebekah's lapbook.







Rebekah drew the basic story of Easter. The picture on the left is of Jesus on the cross, and the picture on the right is of the angel in front of the empty tomb with the stone rolled away.


Flower cards for playing Memory


We have now started a new unit for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I have not done much planning myself, but I've found a ton of ideas that I want to use. We will probably just play it by ear and spread it out over the summer. The great thing about this unit is that I can incorporate some things to include Joshua as well. He loves the book also, and this is a great way to introduce him to the letters. Not that he hasn't been introduced to them, but he can begin to learn them. Joshua knows the letter 'O' very well and has for quite some time. The other letter names he knows, but he misidentifies them, so he can learn while Rebekah does some other things with the letters.

For our first lesson I spread out the kids' beach towels on the floor and put a bucket of lowercase letters buried in sand in the middle of the towels. Rebekah dug for all the letters. Joshua lost interest pretty quickly, but he did want to play with the sand. Rebekah put all the letters in alphabetical order, counted them, and then we all sang the ABC song. Rebekah is familiar with Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, so she was able to answer some pre-questions about what the story would be about, but we talked a little bit about coconut palm trees, where they come from, and we found some locations on the globe where you would find such trees. I also pulled up some images of coconut palm trees on the internet, and I reminded her that palm branches were used to wave to Jesus when He came riding on the donkey. While reading the story I asked Rebekah some questions about what was happening and why, and then we sang the ABC song at the end. We finished our lesson with a craft recreating the first page in the book. Joshua wasn't as much into putting the glued pieces on the paper, and after a while he finally kept throwing his page on the floor, but I got him to help me finish his artwork. Rebekah got to be a little more creative and color her own images. She was quite creative with her colors.


I had planned to do some more activities today, but I let Rebekah make her teacher Ms. Amy a card instead since tomorrow is the last day of preschool. I also didn't have time to do the activities before Joshua's nap, and I want to include him as much as I can on this unit. I have some exciting ideas planned!