Lionden Landing

I have talked before about my food issues and my struggles to keep from passing them on to Froggy. It is a hard battle. With very very rare exception, Froggy will not tell me she is hungry or ask for food. I offer her food on a regular basis and I try hard to keep the maximum time between offers to 2hrs. However lots of those offers get declined. This leads to child who melts down into hysterics because she is so hungry she just can't keep it together. A little bit of food and the transformation is amazing. So my problem becomes hw to encourage her to eat without pushing her and how to handle the food offer during the meltdown. It is very very very important to me not to use food as a mood enhancer. I don't want to teach Froggy that eating will help you not feel sad yet I need to feed her when she is so sad and I need to teach her that the feelings that got her to the meltdown are calls for food. I am seriously stuck in how to keep them separate. The best I have

Our poor nestling is no more. We had a young boy over visiting and he knocked the nest over accidentally, spilling and breaking the egg. Even though I did not expect the egg to survive to be a baby and it was probably not viable long before being broken, it was still heart wrenching to see the smattered egg on the patio. A lot of inappropriate comments went through my mind at that moment though none came out thank goodness. Still I am ashamed for even thinking such inappropriate thoughts. I did have a discussion with the boy on nature and being careful about all living things not just people.

We have a bird nest on our patio. There is one lone little egg in the nest. We discovered the nest when we first came out to enjoy the yard during this unseasonably warm weather about a week ago. No one has touched the nest or the egg and yet I have not seen any birds visiting the nest at all. I am worried about the little egg. I don't suspect there is anything I can do about it at this point regardless. Although I would love for Froggy to be able to see a new hatchling I doubt it will happen

Froggy's new favorite game is to show you where all the members of her extended family live. We have a large US map up on the wall in our family room. We recently put thumbtacks in designating each family unit. So now she wants to show you where she lives. She climbs up onto the sofa and then needs help to stand on the back of the sofa to reach her pin. At first her response was "Mommy and Froggy live there" and the question "Where does Daddy live?" was met with a blank look. He has now joined us in living there and she tells him in the most emphatic voice "You live there" She is pretty consistent on being able to answer where she lives with "[city], Virgina" Then we go and touch each pin and talk about who lives at that pin and the name of the city and state and where it is in relation to her and what is like there or when she was there. We only play this game at her request which is plenty often. It is games like this that show

Our theme this past week was Groundhog Day. It went really well. We are getting the hang of this theme idea and I can see it working. We read lots of stories which is our primary means of introducing ideas. I don't know if it is her age, her personality, my teaching style, or some combination there of but concepts stick more when they start in books. We made a ground hog puppet and made its shadow dance on the wall. We went out on of the few sunny days we had recently and found our shadows and played with them. Our park day got rained out so we were not able to do the larger group activities outside I had planned to do with the other children. On Saturday, we woke up and immediately went outside to look for shadows and make our predictions. The themes are working. I can tell. Froggy told me this week "he [the groundhog] needs to make his prediction". She also saw her shadow while we were out one day and told me "thats my shadow"