C for Cooper

 I recently started working with Cooper to help him learn the alphabet. A few months ago I emailed my friend Kendra who is a reading recovery teacher for some ideas and advice on where to start and things to do. She gave me some great information and where to begin. She told me it's best to teach the letters of their name first. So I would try to make sure to point out letters where we saw them and we worked on spelling his name out loud (which was hilarious to listen to by the way). 

While skyping with my sister-in-law and nephew she shared with us that they had just started doing letter of the week. I thought it sounded like a great idea! She shared with me what they were doing and basically a lesson plan for us to go by for our first week. For those of you who don't know Aimee my sister-in-law, first of all you're missing out because she is wonderful (I could go on and on about her) but secondly she is a teacher by trade. From her emails of ideas of things to do, eat, places to go, and people to see or call I can tell she is some kind of a teacher and I know her students were blessed to have her. She's been such a help and inspiration for this project! Check out her new blog where she is giving detailed steps and info on how to do what she's doing @ TeachLoveGrow . 

So to start off our week of C's I drew a big C on the dry erase board, then hid post it notes around the house so Coop could find them and drew a big C on paper and let him color, glue cotton balls on, and stick car stickers on. These were fun and easy to do. Then came the hide and seek bag. It had cows, caterpillar, car, C's, and a cotton ball hidden in veggie curly noodles for color. He enjoyed this activity but also enjoyed the noodles or doodles as he calls them. We also kept our things on the blanket like Aimee did the towel for Trip. This made for easier clean up. However Coop got lucky and got to dump the bag too. I had to change the gift bag to a short brown bag because his arms were too short to dig in. 

We also made cloud dough. Such and easy thing to do but what a fun substance to play with. All it takes is flour and baby oil and you have a silky dough to mush, ball up, crumble and simply make a mess with!

Coop got to "cook" with mommy. Yes I know baking muffins isn't cooking but it was something easy for him to help with and he enjoyed it. 

We went shopping for Cfood, not to be confused with seafood! We found fun things like crackers, cookies and carrots. He had cucumbers from the garden also. We tried to have a Cfood at lunch everyday.

We talked about and prayed for people who's names start with C. Such as Aunt Courtney and Callie and Coby. 

He also enjoyed playing follow the leader and doing C motions and movements : crawl, clap, crouch, crash, act crazy. Speaking of crazy you may notice Coop's crazy hair in his coloring photos so we also counted that as a C word for the day! 

We had cashew chicken to end our C week. All in all it was a good week and gave us something to do and we are already having fun with O and he's caught on to what the letter is already.

I hope I didn't bore you with all the details. I won't tell you as much for O week but I wanted to give you an idea of what we had going on.
Next week P week maybe a little busy because Gram, PawPaw and GiGi will be here from Florida. Hope they are ready for some P fun!

Hope you're having a great week. Go do something fun and messy and tell us all about it!

Bonus picture:
Coop sat down to play in the sun the was shining on the kitchen floor. I thought it was cute so wanted to share.

Gone Fishing

A few weekends ago Dad, Erin and I took Coop to Fellows Lake to do a little fishing. We headed to Walmart for a spiderman pole and fishing license then off to the lake we went.

Coop got to feed the fish. They were HUGE by the marina.

They were very ready for a treat. I'm sure they were starving judging from their tiny frames. HA!

Coop trying his hand at holding the pole alone. (prior to getting kicked out of the area we were in. We didn't read the sign NO FISHING within 200 feet of the dock.)

Yep fishing ON the dock. NOT ALLOWED!! Oopsie!

He enjoyed throwing the rocks in as well.  The water looked so inviting but that wasn't allowed either. Fellows Lake is Springfield's drinking water therefore no swimming.

So he may have sat on the edge. We are rule breakers.

Got a BIG one! He caught this fish a few times in a row. As well as the other fish that he caught, they went back in the water before we took the hook out. He was quite the fisherman.

We tried to get him to touch it. We only got one touch in.

Kiss the fish.

Reeling in a big one.

Serious concentration on bringing this one in.

We had a good day at the lake. Thanks Bapa and Granny for a fun time!

Yet Another Trip To The Zoo!

We finally got a few days of relief from the dog days of summer so Cooper and I took the opportunity to head to the zoo for the morning. He's getting a little more brave and actually fed the goats. He usually wants to see them but hides his face in the stroller when they look at him. This time we got to feed 3 pieces before he was done. That's progress in my book!

Bite? 

The Bear was even out because of the cooler temperatures and came to say hello. 

 The last time I tried to get him to sit on this tiger for a picture he was terrified of it! This time he was so excited. He's growing up too fast!

I took the animal pictures so Coop would have pictures on my phone that he wanted to see and so I decided to post them for my wee readers. 

Hope you've had a good summer! We are back to warmer temperatures but hoping for a cooler day tomorrow.

Our God is Greater

Typically while riding in the car we have our radio on christian music. Cooper is learning some of the songs and sings along with the radio. He sometimes sings these songs without the radio as well. I was able to get him singing with it a little bit last night on our way to dinner.

I pray even small seeds are being planted in Cooper's life and that he's learning that our God is truly greater!

Evil Canival

Cooper has been riding his little 4wheeler inside a lot lately and has been better about actually steering it around. He can ride it around the table and not get too stuck. Yesterday he started doing tricks. He's our little Evil Canival.

Hope you're having a silly day too!

Block Party

Over the weekend Gary and I headed to St. Louis with a group from church to help with a block party for one of Second's sister churches. We had a great turn out. After a morning of handing out flyers and word of mouth to invite the neighborhood and nearby apartment complex we were ready to get the party started! With steamy temperatures and several bottles of water later we set up a great block party complete with bounce house, several games such as bean bag toss, football toss, ring toss, crafts, popcorn, hotdogs, snow cones (Gary's station) and face painting (where Megan and I worked). I'm pretty sure we painted every single child that came and several of them a few times. We had high humidity and oily paints so it smeared easily. Gary and Nathan were so busy with the snow cones as could be expected, they had to go to the store for more supplies several times!
We stayed to join them for church Sunday morning. We filled half of their sanctuary with our group! We enjoyed the service but were so glad we were there for their children's dance ministry. I took a short video clip of their dance. Take a look. I especially enjoyed seeing the little guy dancing with the girls. He was really good and made me miss being with Cooper that much more.

Please add New Beginning Fellowship to your prayer list that they can continue to reach out to their community and continue to grow their family.

Cashew Chicken

Cooper has a book that Uncle Kirk and Aunt Aimee gave him that he has been particularly interested in recently. It is a simple book that I think is supposed to go out to eat with him. It has pictures of animals faces and says, "Cow is hungry, can you feed the cow?" I usually ask him what he's feeding them and his typical response is turkey or chicken. However this time was a little different….
See for your self!   (sorry the video is so dark)

He's infatuated with eating cashew chicken lately. Last week Dad and I were in town with him and asked him what he wanted to eat for lunch and he answered cashew chicken. So that's what we had!
Have you had your cashew chicken lately? Have a great day and stay out of the heat!