Monday, August 15, 2011

Moon, Stars, Space, Oh My!

We have officially started our star-theme! Well stars, planets, the moon - pretty much everything in the night sky (even when it's not night and we can't see them :))

Not much of a closure to our ocean theme or much of a tada welcome to our space/night sky theme. but alas, life is often rushed, chaotic, and all over the place so it's fitting :) We did hang up A's posters of planets in the solar system, so I guess that is a good way we kicked it off. I got the posters many months ago planning to do something with a space theme, but we had not yet started monthly themes. I'm glad to finally have them up on the wall!

So still no pictures, but I will do a picture spam post soon!

another big reason I'm blogging tonight - tomorrow we have our ultrasound to find out whether Baby#2 (who sorely needs a nickname lol) is a boy or a girl. So it's kind of neat to post on the eve of finding out, even if I'm not rambling about Baby #2 :)

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Three months later!

So that was just a short break of three months haha
oh it has been a chaotic summer. To quickly sum up - I qualified in my department at the beginning of June. I'm now a "doctoral candidate" yay. That meant I had no life in May and my amazing husband took over almost all baby-care for that month.

In May, we also found out we are expecting our second baby. He/she is due January 18 :) We are *so* excited, but I find myself still not processing it as "real" quite yet. I think having a very full plate of things going on kind of makes it hard to really just sit, reflect, and let it sink in.

June, July, and this month have been filled with illness in our house. What a way to spend the summer! It started off as a cold for me. Then it turned into bronchitis, and my second ER trip said it was starting to turn into pneumonia. Antibiotics cleared most of it up, but I still had a lot of tightness in my chest and "fits" where I couldn't breathe well. At the end of July, I went back to the doctor and said I have asthma. Meanwhile, my husband got sick with walking pneumonia and then the baby got sick with focal pneumonia. Now she has a bad rash that the doctors don't seem to be able to explain (one said chickenpox, another said bugbites, then talked about allergic reactions to things like soap)

So we have been busy!

On the craft, arts, trips, exploring, educating, discovery front - we have also been busy. We enjoyed our "spring" theme so much that we decided to do a theme every month. It helps focus ideas for crafts, books, trips, etc. And it's encouraging us to see areas of San Diego we wouldn't normally go to. For May/June we did a "garden" theme, where we tried to visit all sorts of different gardens. We have our own vegetable garden on the balcony, so that was a really nice start. We saw several gardens at Balboa Park, including the Japanese Friendship garden, the rose garden, and smaller gardens they have between buildings. We read books about plants, vegetables, and the things that live in gardens (insects, caterpillars).

In July we moved onto our "Ocean" theme. Unfortunately, as you can see, we were quite busy being homebound and sick so not a lot of ocean-going. But we did crafts related to the ocean; read books about dolphins, the parts of fish, and about how seahorses and other ocean life carry their babies. Towards the end of the month, as we started to feel better, we were able to make a trip out to the tidepools and visit SeaWorld to see the sea lions. The month is over so we would be moving onto our next theme - stars and the sky - but there is so much more I would like for us to see and talk about in relation to the ocean.

For the other themes I have planned:
August - stars and the sky
September - farms
October - Halloween (of course!)
November - fall/Thanksgiving
December - Christmas

There are a lot more I'd like to do, like bugs, birds, deserts, forests, colors, reptiles, jungle, shapes, etc. Plus I want to revisit the garden, ocean, and star theme. So much to do!

So now that I have posted a very long text update, I will try to get pictures up in the near future :)

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Cranes and Zucchini

No they don't really go together :)

OshKosh sponsored a big donation event called Cranes for Kids. For four weeks, they would donate a piece of clothing to Japan for each paper crane that was brought in. So, I headed up to the OshKosh outlet store in Carlsbad with A and we attempted to fold our first paper cranes. It was much more difficult than I had anticipated, and A wound up eating her paper out of boredom. But we did succeed!



That night, we made more cranes with daddy to take pictures of and post to the OshKosh facebook page. Those cranes came out much better. A helped color on the paper before we folded the up :)



We have done other art projects, including coloring ducks and flowers. We finished up our month of Spring themed activities with one last big project - painting the frog we made from air dry clay. Okay, mostly I made it and A poked at it. She did all the painting though :)



Our next theme, for May, is gardens! So we are looking forward to seeing different types of gardens, working on our own garden, and doing lots of art and cooking related to gardens :)

We have also started some cooking adventures. A loves helping us cook, and I found a really cute book called Cook It in a Cup! It is a kid cookbook aimed at older kids, but I figured A would have a great time assisting with it :) To my happy surprise, the book came with six silicone muffin cups too! I also picked up a dozen at Michael's awhile ago using my 50% off coupon. So what a fun and delicious new activity to put them to use.

I used to make a ton of mini-meals for A using cupcake tins and cups, and would then freeze them for quick and easy snacks. Things like mini-shepherd's pie, pastas, mini-muffins, etc. But I fell out of practice, so this will also help motivate me to get back into that!

Tonight we made zucchini and corn melange. It's still in the oven so I can't comment on its taste quite yet, but it looks delicious! And although this wasn't done on purpose, it also happens to fit in with our garden theme :) One of A's favorite plants that we have going in our balcony garden happens to be zucchini!


Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Spring and Butterflies!

Very picture-intensive post!

I've been trying to do an art project of some sort with A each week for the past few months. In February, the month we started, we wound up doing things along a Valentine's theme - so hearts. In March, we wound up doing a rainbow and it kind of inspired the thought of doing a Spring theme for the next month or so. We have now completed several projects related to spring :) My next thought is to go with a garden type theme and do projects and trips related to that. So visiting different types of gardens in the SD area.

Here are some pictures of our spring themed art so far

The rainbow that started it - a background colored with crayons. And I cut up paper into little squares for the rainbow, then A helped us glue them on. She finally added her little frog sticker. When it didn't come off, she was a bit sad, so we will have to do sticker art another day :)


After the rainbow, we did a cloud and umbrella. Daddy did both of these with A. He drew an umbrella and they painted it with watercolors. The cloud was cotton balls, spread apart and glued down.




Next we made raindrops! I cut out raindrops and A painted some and colored some. I also painted some :)


Of course, A always helps me clean up after a project :)


The theme wall :)


After that, we started on flowers and butterflies. For the flowers, I cut out petals and we glued them together, A was more interested in carrying the gluestick :)



I had a conference in New Orleans in early April, and A came with me to visit our family in Mississippi. There, we went to an Insectarium and saw a butterfly garden. It was so amazing! A loved it, and I really wanted to visit another one with daddy. Turned out that there is one that goes on at the SD Safari Park (formerly the Wild Animal Park) but for only one month a year - April :) So we went to visit that last weekend, and it was just wonderful. It was much more crowded than New Orleans, but still so awesome to watch the butterflies.


In New Orleans,






At the Safari Park, they have a children's discovery area with puzzles, toys, plushies, books, and coloring pages. It is all themed and this month it was insects and butterflies, of course :) So A got to color a page there, and then we went to go visit the butterfly garden :)








Just beautiful! I hope to find some permanent ones around here that we might be able to see more than once a year, but I'm finding they're pretty rare!

Of course, to go along with our butterfly art and trips, we have also been reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar with A, who is a huge fan of Eric Carle :)

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Intro

So after many hours of trying to figure out the "right" name, this one kind of stumbled upon me as I was texting my husband ideas for him to vote upon. My mind always blanks when I try to think of creative titles, names, etc. But I think this one fits for what I hope this blog to be.

I'm a graduate student who (attempts to) work at home while also taking care of my 18 month old daughter. My husband is also a student, though is about to graduate as an RN. We are both incredibly blessed to have the ability to spend significant time with our daughter, even if it does involve mass chaos as we try to balance everything. So we try to do a lot with her, whether it be dancing to music, playing outside, watching ants, watering our plants, crocheting a hat, or doing arts and crafts. We are also fortunate in where we live - San Diego, which has a plethora of things to do and see :)

So here's my attempt to share these journeys with others. At the very least, it will help capture moments when life seems to just fly by.

Why River Weaving? Because rivers are a great representation of life - flowing, finding unexpected things around each turn, full of life, being changed by and changing the world around them. Weaving because weaving helps eternalize memories, events, symbols. It captures the ephemeral moments and makes them material. And it too is a process, a story in its own making.

Of course, there is also the fact that you can't weave a river, just as you can't grasp water. You can only weave representations of it, only hold the idea of it.

And here we are :) Here I will have the happenings of our lives.