Small things are making me very happy at the moment.

Courtesy of my ever vigilant parents I was able to find suitable box shaped shelving for Little Miss. It’s currently plain pine as you can see below, but we will make a decision on the final look over the next week. So far I have been tossing up varnish, oil or a neutral cream paint finish. I’m still not 100% sure which way we will go.

The Pine Shelves

The other issue is where it will eventually live.  Currently, for convenience, it is sitting at the other end of the same wall that Miss O’s activity corner is on in the living room but may be better placed in her bedroom.  The only problem is – which bedroom.  She is currently in the smallest room in the house,  and we are debating what to do when Master Oh Waily moves from his spot at the bottom of our bed.  Will he inherit Miss O’s room?  It is closer and smaller, and therefore more suited to a small baby who doesn’t require space for Froggy, Thai, Lumpy, Leo, Patches, Piglet, Brown or Sneezy and drawers containing big girl clothes.  (I would provide a photograph of “the boys” as they are collectively known, but unfortunately only Leo and Sneezy are currently not having a nap with “the girl”.)

Or will he move into the larger room, further away from our bedroom?  The preference is to move Miss O into the current “guest bedroom” / office and give Master O her bedroom.  The difficulty this presents is one of computer logistics.  The internet connection is in the “office”.  Even though we have a wireless setup and therefore can put the computer anywhere in the house, we still need a secure space for the modem/router thingumybob.  Offering up something with flickering lights and antennae to a two-and-a-bit year old is like waving a red rag in front of a bull, or thumbing your nose at Fate.  Neither of which will result in smiles and pats on the back for the brainiac who thought it would be a good idea.

What to do, what to do, what to do.  The first small thing makes me happy but gives me cause for thought.

The next small thing was actually things – a set of little boxes that I found today, which are reasonable quality at a reasonable price.  I know.  I had almost given up on that possibility.  I will give them internal cardboard bases just to give them a bit of protection from the undoubted hard life they will suffer at the hands of one rough and ready little girl.  Now all I need is a few more and we will be well supplied for any and all toy or activity storage requirements.

The White Boxes

A practical small thing came from a quick trip to Warehouse Stationery (thank you Clare for the pointer) when a beautiful pair of apple green toddler scissors joined our household.  I really like these, they are a vast improvement over our small round-end scissors that I have been using with her.  The primary improvement is the fact that she can put all of her fingers in the bottom handle instead of only two or three.  Other things I like are the fact that these came with a sheath made out of rubber (supposedly an eraser – but who would use it?), they are ambidextrous so her penchant for cutting left-handed will not be hampered, the handles are that rubberised plastic stuff so they should be fairly forgiving on her hands while she’s learning the opening motion and, of course, the bright green is aesthetically appealing.

The Green Scissors

Then there is the stash of small goodies that I purchased a few weekends ago, but didn’t have the camera available to show you.  Just to refresh your memory, I wrote about the shopping expedition a little while ago.  The items that came home then were all small things, and they certainly made me very happy.
Here, finally, is a photograph of that little haul.

The Shopping Stash

Are there any small things in your life making you happy just now?

Courtesy of a friend, (thanks Marc), I have this link to share with you.

It sends you to another set of amazing cakes, this time with a theme.  They are steampunk inspired.

Oh, and this blog aptly called Cake Wrecks also provides a bit of a culinary laugh at the expense of cake decorators.
If you’ve ever had or seen a professional cake blooper, then this is the blog for you.
There are some amazingly bad cakes that someone, somewhere has thought they could charge for.

Holidays.
It’s fair to say that I could do with one.
Master Oh Waily has been an absolute gem in pretty much every way.  He’s got a great nature, like his big sister, and not much seems to phase him.  He is even courteous enough to sleep an hour at a time only during daytime hours, while through the night he has managed a minimum of 3 to 4 hours almost from the very first.  We are now lucky enough to enjoy anywhere up to seven hours of night time sleep.  This is great but still a little bit inconsistent.  And it still means waking up anywhere between 2am and 4am for an early morning food stop.

What all this sleep talk means is… I am over the lack of it.
With a toddler running rings around me during the day, an afternoon nanna nap is just not possible and if you know me, then you know I like my sleep – preferably nine hours a night if I can get it.
I am not getting anywhere near that, at least not in one long peaceful stretch.  So now I’m hanging out for a holiday.  Christmas will be the first stop on that journey, but since it is “the silly season” there is only a minimum chance of an actual extended rest.  Then there is the joy of being your own boss… sounds good until you’re the ones on call through Christmas and New Year.  “Silent Night“… maybe by Christmas, maybe not.  There will be no breath-holding by Ms Oh Waily on that score.

This all leads to the very nice conclusion that a holiday must and will be booked to take the misery out of next winter.  It has been done.  The Oh Wailys and grandparents (aka as babysitters) are booked for a holiday in June.  There are many reason why this is so.  Here are a few of them:

1. Doesn’t interfere with enjoying (fingers crossed) a lovely summer at home while Master OWW is still small.
2. Doesn’t interfere with our No.1 customer’s service schedule (don’t change it, please).
3. Master Oh Waily will be a good age to deal with the travel and enjoy the destination.
4. Master Oh Waily may be walking (if he follows in his sister’s footsteps) by then.
5. June can be totally miserable here and no one needs to live with SADs.
6. Fiji should be warm and inviting, but not frying and drying (hopefully).

So, here is my homage to our destination.  And a bit of a perk-me-up as I look forward to floating in the pool, eating out at nice restaurants, maybe even snorkeling again and possibly splashing out on a visit to either the Mandara Spa or the Heavenly Spa.
After all, “I’m worth it”.

Where I plan to float

Where I plan to lounge

Visit where we were married

Although frankly, the white picket fence does nothing for me, and I am so glad that it was much more “rustic” when we had our wedding here. A nice Fijian garden with local plants and a beautiful woven archway. Much nicer than the frou-frou white fence !! See if you agree…

An Oh Waily Wedding Snapshot

Ahhhh, just looking at those photographs and thinking about Fiji is making me feel all relaxed and goofy already.  Swim-up bars (which I may even be able to visit by June), warm weather, warm swimming pool, nothing “to do” but lie around and read a good book or two, a bit of retail therapy at the Port and maybe even an iced coffee at one of the new eateries. Oh I am looking forward to it, I REALLY REALLY am.

Now all I need is for the Commodore and our government to calm down a bit and play like nice children in the Oceanic sandpit.  Not that Suva is on our travel itinerary, and Nadi is only if you can be bothered, want cheaper souvenirs or a visit to the local open air food market.  Personally, after this many visits, I’m going for the peace and quiet and pool and to do nothing.  Oh I can’t wait to be back riding on the Bula Bus.

What’s next on the activity menu you may be asking yourself?

This activity came from a couple of different blogs that I follow, and can be themed as per this version by My Montessori Journey. My version is a plain one for introducing the skill, but come Christmas we may look to make a proper bead bracelet or necklace with seasonal beads.

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Beading

First you take a trip to your local Spotlight, craft store or anywhere you are likely to find beads and chenille sticks (aka pipe cleaners).  Then you find a container to put them all in or on and off you go.  You now have a fine motor control activity for your little one.  Miss O is now nearly 27 months old and she had no trouble with this, other than the clear beads that I cunningly purchased for their large holes turned out to be slightly less easy to see for a toddler.  It took a few goes, but in the end she was able to see the holes in the end.  In the photos that follow she is predominantly using the slightly smaller wooden beads that I also purchased at Spotlight.

The Starting Bowl

Beading In Action

More Beading

The natural hazards of this activity are: spillage and choking.
One teaches the life skill of tidying up after yourself.  The other requires first aid knowledge.  Introduce the activity when your risk profile suggests only the first hazard is likely.

Now, a bit of further musing on what the Oh Waily household is doing.

Courtesy of finding and reading The Wonder Years blog and this post, we have also had a snack cupboard operating for the past couple of months, mostly with great success.  I fill it with an appropriate amount of foodstuffs for between meals and Miss O can stop and eat whenever she wants.  Currently this means things like raisins, crackers, small sandwiches, some fruit (bananas are a favourite) and her drink bottles.  The only drawback so far has been Miss O requesting “Mummy put X in cupboard PLEASE” loudly and repeatedly, whenever she scoffs all of the favourite item of the day.  Conveniently she ignores the remaining good and available items.  Ah such cheek.  She’ll be fine on the assertiveness front.

I’m not officially participating in this year’s traditional NaBloPoMo month, but it seems that I am currently in possession of enough things to say that I am almost doing so by serendipity.  Most of what I have to say seems to revolve around Little Miss Oh Waily at the moment.  I imagine that this could be starting to bore you by now, so I do promise to diversify my ramblings away from No.1 child and into other areas.
In the meantime, however, here is another of my activity posts along with some general comments on this whole Montessori idea in our house.

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Language Skills: Magnetic letters

This was something I threw together using the magnetic letters Little Miss received for a birthday or Christmas past, the computer and a laminator.   It is really just a variation on her wooden alphabet puzzle, you know the sort of thing you can pick up at any toy store.  This version continues to encourage her to recognise the letter shapes and where in the order of the alphabet they come.  In addition to this and unlike the wooden puzzle, Miss O has to use much more fine motor control to line up the letters successfully without knocking over its neighbours.

The first time we did this Miss O struggled to find the letters on the printed sheet.  My guess is that she was finding the alteration of letter placement between this sheet and her wooden puzzle to be difficult to adjust to.  That didn’t last very long and within two more attempts she was more than happy finding the letters.

The Blank Sheet

Getting Under Way

A Bit Further On

All Done All Finished

Now the angle of the N and the O are really down to me.  Or rather, my choice of font.  The typeface N is considerably wider than the magnet N and so is the O.  I’m guessing that this is why Little Miss tends to do this with these letters.  Meaning I need to overhaul the font on the sheet so she stops thinking Ns lie on their sides.  Other than that, she does a pretty good job – even if she has to take drink breaks towards the end.

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Since this entry is so full of pictures, I will only briefly write about why I am interested in the idea of taking the Montessori route and why I am doing these activities.

Montessori appeals to me primarily because it aims to and claims to encourage independence and a love of learning, among other things.  I want my kids to have a love of learning, a love of reading, a love of the outdoors and to be physically competent.  A lot of what I have read, so far, suggests that following Maria Montessori’s ideas could promote most (or all) of these things.  What I am not sure of, is what sort of standards the local preschools and schools set.  I simply haven’t had the time to visit them to find out.  And, there isn’t that much choice as far as I can tell.   So in the meantime, while Little Miss is still under 3, I have decided to instigate some ideas that follow the spirit of what I have read and continue to read about.

As a starting point to doing this at home I cannot recommend Tim Seldin’s book How To Raise An Amazing Child the Montessori Way enough.  It has beautiful images and simple ideas that can be implemented in any home and at just about any budget.  You really don’t have to spend a fortune.  In fact, I’d say you could save yourself a fair amount of money not buying toys your kids only play with once or twice.  Or worse yet, sit gathering dust in a corner while the box it came in becomes the best and most favourite toy for the next month.  Personally, I’m over that waste of time and money.  Not that I have anything against the boxes, of course.
Oh, and I am all keen and happy to go with his idea that a beautiful and orderly home is a good thing to promote to your child.  Hence our new shoes in the corner rule, games / activities back on the shelf before starting a new one, and a little bit of good quality kiddie art in her activity corner (a cross-stitch bear my Mum made).

I could ramble on, but this post has already stretched itself out, so I will keep my long list of observations for more November non-participating NaBloPoMo Month blog posts so you don’t get completely fed up all at once.

We currently have my Mum’s camera on loan so I took advantage of that to snap some overdue photographs of Miss Oh Waily doing her activities.

The first of these is the cutting activity with scissors that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  In the intervening time I have managed to refine how we go about doing this.  We started off in my original effort by snipping the edges of a sheet of paper, with me holding the paper and Little Miss working the scissors.  Since that first effort, we have gained a bit more control over the scissors so today we moved on to snipping small strips of paper.  And more importantly the paper and scissors were both under Miss Oh Waily’s control.
This led to the occasional difficulty with holding the paper at the right angle for the scissors instead of turning the scissors in order to cut the wonky angled paper.  Still, with a bit of guidance we managed to get everything under control and here are the photographs to prove it.

On Your Marks

Get Set

Go

All Done All Finished

And as if that great show of skill and control wasn’t enough, I even managed to have Miss Oh Waily help pick up the small snipped paper and put it into the rubbish bin.  Will wonders never cease.
Maybe it is the beginning of the end of “Mummy do it” whenever I make requests for help cleaning up.
I know, dreams are free.

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did.

My verbal quirks when speaking to my two month old baby are apparently very odd.
At least, they are odd when you hear them reflected back at you through the mouth of a two year old toddler talking to her teddy bear.

It seems that one of my baby settling verbal quirks is “Ah, my boy” repeated ad nauseum in an attempt to bore him into becoming quiet.  It’s certainly an eye-opener having a little mimic in the house.  Not only am I getting to see what I say, but also what I do.  And my list of areas requiring self-improvement has suddenly grown in leaps and bounds.

Not only do children spot a hypocrite a mile off, they apparently are relentless in showing us our follies in other areas too.  I’m sure I will have to save them all up and write a post entitled “The Things My Toddler Taught Me About Myself”.

If anyone with a toddler or older is willing to share, I would love to know what your little one has taught you about yourself, so please feel free to leave a comment.

Last week in the Oh Waily household was an interesting one.
We discovered that young Master Oh Waily grows like a sprout and that he can waily waily in a loud voice when given the needle.  In addition you also know that Miss Oh Waily is learning some practical life skills in the form of cutting things.

This week will bring other new things to talk about.

Then there was the long weekend (Labour Weekend, for those non-Kiwis of you) of which the Oh Waily family made the most.  On Saturday morning, later than we would have liked, we made our first group outing to the zoo.  The young Master slept dutifully through most of this visit, which meant his sister was free to run and run and run and run all over the place.  She was most upset when she wasn’t allowed to follow Burma all the way around the zoo on her walk.  A pleasant outing had by all.
On Sunday Ms Oh Waily was let loose with some money in Spotlight and Payless Plastics.  Sans children and spouse, I went to town and wandered the aisles assessing potential edutainment values.
Yes, I know.  It is sad when a couple of hours spent in such cheap and cheerful surroundings brings this degree of enthusiasm out in me.  I know.  I need to get out more.
Anyway, on to the reason for said enthusiasm – other than free time, unencumbered by little folk.

Spotlight produced a small, eggshell blue box for storing Miss Oh Waily’s animal family cards and associated fridge magnets.  And it also produced chenille sticks and two sorts of beads.  Now, are you asking yourself – what are chenille sticks? – if so, you are not alone.  When I first spotted them, I thought to myself… “are these the pipe cleaners I’m looking for, or not?”
Turns out that they are.  If anyone knows when or where pipe cleaners suddenly became gentrified and turned into “chenille sticks”, enquiring minds would like to know.
The major let-down I had in Spotlight was the hope of finding reasonably priced, reasonable quality cane or woven baskets.  No such luck.
Payless, on the other hand, produced a floral vinyl tablecloth, 11 wooden (sort of) “Pub chips” bowls, 96 old-fashioned wooden clothes pegs and a bright red 15 litre plastic tub.  What a haul.  I’m just sorry that I can’t show you a photograph of my newly acquired stash of items.***

Here, briefly, is what all this will turn into – with photographs to follow at some undefined time in the future.
The chenille sticks/pipe cleaners and beads are for a threading activity (which Mr Oh Waily couldn’t wait to introduce… about 10 minutes after I got back with all the goodies); the little blue box is for storage on her shelf; the vinyl table cloth is for laying out under wet and/or dirty† activities and for acting as a general purpose “mat” for mat work; the “Pub chip” bowls are for the beginnings of learning about counting as are the 96 old-fashioned clothes pegs.  The bowls will no doubt do multiple duty in many other storage and activity-holding forms.  The bright red 15 litre plastic bin will be doing duty as a sensory box into which, at some future time, I will be allowing water and sand… not at the same time I hope… and anything else textural‡ that will need containment.

I promise to post photographs of these items in use as soon as I have a functioning camera and we actually sit down to do the activities.  I will also post a short list of blogs from which I have “stolen” these ideas, so you can see what other fun and educational things you can do with your children.

Finally on Monday, Mr Oh Waily took the Little Miss to the swimming pools for an afternoon of splashing, jumping, roly-polying and general good fun.  And Ms Oh Waily was again allowed quiet time to herself, at least partially.

And that is just the beginning of the week.  I’m sure I will find more to regale you with some time before the weekend, presuming I get my camera sorted.  (Can you tell I’m feeling a bit at a loss without it and am getting slightly obsessive about it’s need for a new battery?)

Anyway, putting my camera anxiety aside and moving on, does anyone have activities to share?  What do you do with your kids to edutain them?  I know Amanda recreates the Ice Age for her boys… and as a trained anthropologist I can reassure you Amanda that there was indeed a Toyotasaurus !!

I’d love to hear about all of your adventures in kiddie-land.  Feel free to leave a comment or a link to your blog or photos.

and grows and grows.

We went for our “6 week” check-up with the Plunket Nurse yesterday and got a bit of a surprise with Master Oh Waily’s latest vital statistics.

Did someone put something in his milk?

At two days over 7 weeks old Master Oh Waily’s vital statistics were…

Weight: 6.03 kg
Head: 41 cm
Length: 60 cm

You may be asking why a growing baby should be a surprise to his mother.  Well, cast your mind back to his measurements just two days shy of being 5 weeks old…

Weight: 5.12 kg
Head: 39.5 cm
Length: 57 cm

That means our little man has put on another 3 cm in length, 1.5 cm in head circumference and just a smidgen shy of 1 kilogram – all in 18 days !!   You know – less than a month – and only slightly more than two weeks !!

I guess this is the growth spurt that the baby books like to refer to.  It certainly is backed up by his eating and sleeping pattern over the past couple of weeks – why wait more than two hours to ask Mum for some more milk?  Eat some, lie and gaze at the world some, sleep an hour, eat some more and repeat.  Thankfully he was civilised enough to only do this during the daytime, and actually managed to sleep for two or three hours through the night before deciding to ask for something to fill his tummy again.

This all keeps his statistics at or above the 85th percentile.  If he keeps growing at this rate, he does stand a chance of making it as a loose forward for the All Blacks.  And if he does, then I’m guessing that his genetic make-up is coming from my father.  As anyone who knows Master Oh Waily’s parents in real life can tell you – neither of us is likely to fall into the 85th percentile of growth stats for either gender.

Yes it was that week.
This past Monday Master Oh Waily went for his six week immunisations.

Did he wail?
On both legs?
Oh yes !
Like a banshee.

Poor little soul.  Have you seen the length of the needles for the immunisations?
Have you seen the thickness of the chubby little thigh it has to go in to?

I could swear that babies wail not because of a stabbing sensation so much as because the needles go so deep that they could almost be collecting bone marrow !

Oh well, only another four lots to go before he’s school age.  What a thought.