Fun Times

We stay busy around here trying to do fun things and go do fun activities. Here's several pictures of what's been going on around here. 

Coop and I joined several Marshfield people at a football game to cheer on a friend that is head coaching at a near by town. We enjoyed fresh baked chocolate chip cookies that they had at the game.

While skyping with Gram last week Coop had a good time showing off his milk mustache. He really likes mustaches these days. He wants to draw them so when he knows he has one he runs to the bathroom too look in the mirror. 

A few weeks ago we went to town shopping at the mall, while there Gary let Cooper ride the little .50 rides at the food court where of course he wanted to ride again but we had other things to do so he later got to ride the escalator as his second ride. He was all smiles! 

Parents as Teachers had a field trip to a local pumpkin patch and a friend and I took the kiddos. Coop had fun playing in the pool filled with corn and also got to pet a calf they had there.

 He got to pick out a pumpkin.

Posing with his pick.

Cooper and Hollis with their pumpkins. 

Both years that we've taken him he's felt the need to sit on a pumpkin. 

Hollis and Coop practicing being old men playing tic-tac-toe. 

After we left the pumpkin patch we headed back to Joni's where he got to sit on their horse. He liked it until it shifted it's weight and he was "all done!"

The horse followed us out of the pasture. It was funny it wanted to be in the action. 

He also got to collect eggs out of the chicken coop.

 I think he's making sure they weren't coming in to get him. 

He only wanted to collect one but she sent the 4 home with us that they had. 

We've been enjoying our fall days hope you have been as well!

More Letters

 Apparently I'm slacking in the blogging department! I let the week pass and also pass on a post so I'm going to play catch up. I'll let you know what we've done in the letter world and just some fun things happening around here.

To finish up C-O-O-P-E-R  we did E elephant sandwiches. We had a couple of these. The other one had a jelly covered ear and banana legs. He liked it. 

 

 R we painted a rainbow in tub using colored shaving cream. This was a HUGE hit. Just put a few drops of food coloring in shaving cream, mix it up and you're ready to have a good time painting in the tub. It didn't stain the wall either in case you were wondering!

After we finish up his name letters we moved on to F. We had a lot of fun with F week. We had football sandwiches, 

We went on a ride on the mule to look for Farm Animals. We stopped to see these cute babies because he wanted to kiss them everyday we drove by them. He didn't kiss them but he enjoyed watching them.

 A few houses down were these horses that we stopped and watched. 

We had a good time looking for farm animals around the countryside!

Funny faces were fun to do! He had a good time making them. I knew he'd like them since he's been interested in mustaches and eyebrows. The other day I let him open the mail, he tore a little piece and thought it looked like an eyebrow. He put it on a picture that was on the mail. It was funny!

We also had a few apple frogs. Of course they were fun since they had marshmallow and chocolate chip eyes. 

Then we moved onto B. 

Here he's covering a B with beans. He did well doing this. He sprinkled them on and liked seeing which ones stuck and which ones bounced off.

Pancakes serve as a great tool for the letter weeks. So we had Bear pancakes with Blueberry eyes. 

I got him this blowfish bubble blower when Gary and I went to Iowa for a sponsor event for Hallowed Ground. Anytime we have bubbles out turns into a good time. 

I'll do another post of just fun stuff that we've been doing around here to make this post not 10 years long. 

Hope you're enjoying the beautiful fall days!

P Week

 P week was crazy busy!! We had a house full of people. Gram, PawPaw and GiGi were here from Florida. We tried to keep up with activities as much as we could. 

He painted a P. It didn't stay this neat though. He began painting with his hands and them somehow ended up getting it in his hair. He had blue bangs until his bath. 

P for Pancake was fun. He ate several pancakes that morning. 

He had a picnic with PawPaw and Gram. Complete with P food. Peanut butter and Jelly, Pizza and Pickles. Yes it's quite the variety of food but that's what it took to get him to eat was to keep offering him things off our plates (the pizza and pickles). 

The hide and seek was fun this week. I put it in a plastic pumpkin and found all the P objects I could, pony, pasta, pig, pink, P's. Gram and Gigi helped with this. 

One fun thing that we got to do was open a package from Uncle Kirk, Aunt Aimee and Trip. It had so many fun things in it! It was a package what will continue to be fun. He also got a few post cards in the mail. 

Over the weekend after the fam left Gary and I went to Iowa for a sponsor event for Hallowed Ground Outdoors so Coop got to stay with Papaw and Mamaw. He had a great time as usual. They said he ate them out of house and home. I don't have any pictures from this past weekend of him with them but they shared some from their last trip to the zoo. It was fun that he stayed with them during P week since it was Papaw and Parker was there too. 

Hope you're having a great week. Go paint something and get messy!

Bonus pictures I had to share:

 Look closely… he was playing with my eyeshadow! At least he didn't put it on his eyes. He was playing with the little brush so it was soft on his face. I'll keep telling myself that at least. 

O Week

It's been busy in the Hamilton house so I'll split the last two weeks into 2 different posts so I don't overwhelm you. 

For O week we did some fun things. 

We went to the library for Cooper's first story hour. He did very well. He didn't want to sit on his carpet square for long, he sat on my lap. But we had fun regardless. We checked out his first books, that happened to have an O theme. They were both really cute books about Oceans and a fun squid.

The story hour books were about sheep so we made sheep ears during craft time.

After doing our shopping for some O food we decorated an O. I did splurge more for O food than I normally would but it was fun. We decorated the O with fruity Cheerios.  As you can see he enjoyed eating them. He kept saying "I eat it? Tastes like candy!" 

Working hard on decorating the O.

O food was fun! I made this owl out of bread and peanut butter, bananas, raisins, pineapple, the treats were the chocolate chip centers in the eyes and it's nose was half of an oreo. 

He had a good time dissecting the owl as he ate it. 

He got to paint with Oranges. Orange prints were fun and a little messy but he had a good time. Anytime the paint comes out he enjoys it!

I didn't do the hide and seek bag this week because I didn't have a lot of O objects to hide but honestly he picked up O quicker than any letter that we've done thus far so the lack of time and lack of O objects didn't effect him too much. We also fit in a trip to Orschlen with Bapa. AKA the chicken store, so it could have fit in last week as well but the wrong C sound for this activity so far.  I didn't take pictures of everything that we did but you get the idea and can see that he's having a great time with the letters!

Hope you're having a great week!

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.