Sorenson Family Reunion 2012: Swimming and Water Balloons!
Leave a reply
Category Archives: Playtime
Trip to the Zoo!
At the end of June, we went to the zoo with a friend!
We saw the Dolphin Show.
Paul pretended he was a zookeeper.
Paul and Meredith had a fun time!
(Caroline slept in her carseat most of the day!)
Rooty the Carrot and a Mammal Hunt
Our library’s summer reading program has a theme of “Reading is So Delicious!” Going along with that, we had the chance to check out a carrot named Rooty to take with us on our adventures.
Last week, we took Rooty with us as we went on a “mammal hunt.” Paul has been learning about mammals (versus everything else) so our trip to the Barnyard Zoo and then our Trip to the EIEIO exhibit at the Discovery Center Museum was a fun time to talk practically about which animals were mammals and which were not. We visited the Discovery Center Museum on two different days.
Digging for Fossils at the Discovery Center Museum
Caroline had fun too. (This is our toy from home.)
At the Barnyard Zoo
At the Discovery Center Museum Again
Pirate’s Cove
Paul and I went to a kiddie amusement park, Pirate’s Cove. It is geared toward 1-8 year olds, mostly 4-6 year olds, and it was simply perfect for Paul’s age. I was too big, and Caroline was too little, so it was a day for Paul!
He wrote up his thoughts on his new webpage. He will be tracking his homeschool projects on that site, and I’m encouraging him to write and type his own posts. I am adding some previous posts that I wrote, but from here on out, it will be his!
Anyway, back to Pirate’s Cove.
Apparently, Caroline was happy to just be in her carseat, smiling at people.
A Family Trip to Palmyra
We’ve been wanting to do something special as a family. With the Memorial Day weekend, we especially searched for the right thing. Ryan felt inspired to take our family on a trip to Kirtland and Palmyra so off we went on Thursday afternoon.We came back Monday.
It was a whirlwind of a trip. Paul and Caroline did great on the way East but I’m sure no one would be surprised to learn that the long drive back Sunday night and Monday was long. Caroline spent most of the trip through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois on Monday screaming because she was mad to still be in the car. We took lots of breaks and she still was pretty mad. I didn’t put her in the carseat again until Wednesday afternoon but as soon as I did she started screaming again! I think she’s calmed down for now, because she’s been okay since then. Paul did well but got pretty tired of that car!
Our visit in Kirtland and Palmyra was a perfect amount of time. Paul was very excited to see the Sacred Grove. The week before we went, he told everyone. (This provided some interesting missionary moments for me. How great that a family vacation lets me explain to people what Mormonism is, and why we find it so important that the heaven are open to prophets in this era, just as in the past!)
Paul did tire of the old houses and lengthy sister missionary tours, so we did not see everything in Kirtland or Palmyra. We did see the Kirtland Temple with a Community of Christ tour and the N.K. Whitney store and house in Kirtland, and in Palmyra we saw Joseph Smith’s log home, the frame house, the Sacred Grove, the Grandin print building where The Book of Mormon was first published, and the Hill Cumorah statue. (I dropped my camera at the Hill Cumorah, breaking the lens, so the only pictures we have from that are those Paul took.)
The trip was just what we needed to create memories as a family. I think Paul now has a frame of reference. Although not everything will remain memorable, I suspect he will not forget that he has seen where Joseph Smith prayed.
Awesome Flickr Gallery Error - Gallery ID 2 has been either deleted or not configured.
Here are some of the pictures Paul took. He played with the camera as we drove, so he had tons of pictures of Caroline (who was right next to him). My favorite is the ultimate bored look in the second picture of my baby.
Awesome Flickr Gallery Error - Gallery ID 3 has been either deleted or not configured.
April and Australia
Caroline is busy being adorable. Here are some pictures from April 21, 2012, the day before she was two months old.
One of these days I’ll get a good picture of her gorgeous smile. It’s so adorable! I treasure her little coo’s and goo’s!
Paul learned about his birth country, Australia, this month. Here’s the giant Australia cookie we made at the beginning of the project.
Beyond making a giant cookie, we didn’t do much other than reading lots of picture books about Australia. Are we There Yet? by Alison Lester was a child’s perspective of a month-long road trip around Australia. Paul enjoyed learning about the various landmarks and it was fun to show him the family picture in the Victorian mountains and a picture of himself with me by The Twelve Apostles when he was about six months old.
A number of books were about the animals of Australia. Koala Lou by Mem Fox, Wombat Stew by Marcia Vaughan, Snap! by Marcia Vaughan, Possum Magic by Mem Fox, and My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch by Graeme Base. I wanted to do more with the learning about animals, but Paul did not have much interest beyond reading the picture books. We did watch a brief documentary about the Great Barrier Reef and then we enjoyed watching Finding Nemo and making a Finding Nemo game based on the Great Barrier Reef facts he remembered. (He is already forgetting these facts, but it was fun making the game anyway! He will remember what a “predator” is at least.)
I also tried to give him a very basic introduction to Aborigines and culture, but it didn’t go over so well. We liked Big Rain Coming by Katrina Germein, which had Aborigine style artwork. We looked at the boomerangs we purchased when we lived in Australia and we talked about how the art of dots and lines created symbols. He didn’t much care, so we’ll have to return to that sometime! And we read a very silly folktale called Whale’s Canoe (by Joanna Troughton) which is supposedly based on a Dreamtime tradition.
And then he summarized all he learned in this video.
(Yes, Caroline is crying in the background. Ryan was holding her, so it wasn’t like I was just abandoning her. But my, it sounds pretty bad watching the video and hearing her crying!!)
It was fun! He wants to move on to Asia now, although I must admit, I’m not sure which direction to go in first as “Asia” is a huge continent!
One Month Old
All day long I’ve been close to tears: my baby is already one month old! I cannot believe how quickly that time passed by. I pick up Caroline and she is heavy (comparatively). Her tummy is chubby and her face is squishy. Today, I saw her eyes have tears for the first time when she cries. She is smiling more regularly at me and staying awake — happily — more frequently. Her going-home-from-the-hospital outfit is almost too snug for her. She’s almost no longer a newborn!
I just want to sit and cuddle her a long while. I can’t believe I’m losing the newborn baby stage so quickly! I miss her little crooked legs and her newborn innocence already.
Spring has sprung this week in Chicagoland. It’s been in the 70s and 80s all week, so Paul, Caroline, and I have tried to get out a little bit each day to enjoy it! Here Paul is telling about the city he drew on the driveway.
I know this is new Mommy emotion, but I’m choked up as I type this, thinking about how big my little girl already is getting. On to month two for her, despite my desire to cling to the newly newborn baby!
This weekend Grandma Peggy and Papa Paul and more family are coming to celebrate Caroline’s recieving a name and a blessing in church on Sunday. We’re so grateful that Daddy honors the priesthood and can give her that special blessing.
The Earth Game
Paul and I have not done much “school” since I posted at the beginning of February about our “school at home” progress. Obviously, this was due to the fact that I was in the uncomfortable last stages of pregnancy and then actually having a baby and taking care of a newborn.
Never the less, we have read through a book about the Earth from a fabulous Early Bird Early Learners series by Lerner Publications (this particular book). It’s written for slightly older kids, but by reading together, one chapter at a time, Paul and I enjoyed learning how the Earth’s crust moves, what volcanoes and earthquakes are, and what all of that means for us.
Since neither of us have been in the mood for worksheets lately, I was trying to think of a way to make remembering and reviewing these details fun. We weren’t interested in sitting in the school room, but Paul always wants to play board games with me!
Voila! We turned Earth’s Crust into a game!
I found a mostly blank game board online. Paul found pictures in the book that he liked and I found similar ones online as well as a few clip art images to illustrate the game board. Then we added squares to correlate with the images: each of these squares gives or takes away an earth “token.” So, landing on a volcanic eruption may cost you two tokens, and the squares before and after it are labeled “volcanic ash” and may cost you one token. A “sleeping volcano” gets you a token.
And then we made questions, Paul reading me sentences he liked from the book and me rewording them as a question or as a true/false sentence. When we land on a blank space on the board, we have to answer a question. Right answers get us more tokens. Whoever has the most tokens when we’re done playing the game wins!
Paul and I have played this every day for two weeks now. He loves it! For the first days, he’d have to read the book to find the answer; sometimes I had to help him by finding the page or picture that correlated to the question. But now he knows the answers without having to look for them. How many four-year-olds care about magma (the name of a new imaginary friend, apparently) and lava and the plates of the Earth’s crust, which are moving? It’s quite fun to see him get excited about these things.
Caroline is usually on my team. She usually sleeps through our turn. Sometimes Paul wants her to play by herself. She sleeps through that, too, and Paul takes her turn. He loves to include her, though.
All pictures on this post taken March 8, 2012. Caroline, age 2 weeks, 1 day old.
An Early Spring
It has been an incredibly mild winter here in Chicagoland. Here it is, the middle of March, and it’s been in the 70s and 80s. Paul has enjoyed playing outside this week.
Three-week old Caroline has been outside with us too, of course. I’m a bit concerned about her being out in the sun, so we’ve been going out in the later afternoon. She usually stays under wraps in her carrier in the shade.
She is wearing a boyish outfit from Paul’s infancy. Most of Caroline’s newborn clothes are pink outfits, long sleeved and footed. I thought it would be cold this time of year! Silly me. So when it’s warm, out come the short-sleeved blue outfits. Again, who’d have thought that it would be so warm already?! Not that I’m complaining.
Ryan and Paul were sick with colds this week. Paul was still in good spirits for the most part, although he did have a day or two of temper tantrums and unpleasantness. Ryan was out with a flu-like cold for two days of not feeling well. So I tried to keep everyone else away from Caroline, which resulted in me be exhausted. I felt like I was in a daze all week.
And then, of course, I got sick too. So now I feel pretty icky. Caroline and I stayed home from church this morning and took naps.
Better this week than next, however! This week, Grandma Peggy and Papa Paul are coming. Next Sunday, Caroline will receive a name and a blessing during our Sacrament meeting! What a special day it will be.
I think it looks like she is smiling in the second picture here. It is said that babies don’t smile with meaning until six weeks or older. But, as happened when Paul was newborn, I am certain she has smiled at me because I am me. She sees me and smiles. It feels great to be recognized. She is so beautiful!
All pictures on this post taken March 14, 2012.
Caroline’s First Week
My Brother and Me
Daddy and Daughter!
First Bath
Pretty as a Princess
Caroline has proven to be a very eager eater and a voracious pooper. Way to go, new baby!
She still has to learn that night time is for sleeping four hours at a time, while day time should be when we wake up every hour or two. But, she’s only a week and a half old, so I suppose I should give her a little longer to figure that out. *Yawn*