My Nanny Diaries

I love the family I babysit for. They are one of my favorite families I have ever met, with so much love and goodness that it just oozes. It is super important to me that their children (9 and 6) really enjoy their time with me every day. We hide-and-seek and hop from pillow to pillow in don't-touch-the-floor tag. We make up silly nick names and play Uno and Pictureka (my new favorite board game!). We paint, use goofy accents, and race obstacles courses on playgrounds. I love my time with them, and I want them to feel that.
Something new I have started doing with the six year old, who really wishes she had homework in Kindergarten, is retelling picture books. Now that she is a reader, she video tapes herself reading stories and we watch it.We talk a lot of about the books and practice retelling the stories with various voices and sometimes watch YouTube videos of the books being narrated. Its a lot of fun and she is super proud of herself when she watches it.
We added something new this time. We drew some of the illustrations in chalk outside and included them in the video she recorded. This is a page from my nanny diary that I am dog-earing for sure.

I mint to say thanks.

I wanted to give Z-man's teachers something cutesy for an end-of-the-year gift. The dollar bin at target inspired me!
I found these tins and filled them with different kinds of mints.

The tag reads "You mint so much to us this year." And nothing is truer than that. His teachers have been awesome!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all the women who support me, to all the women in our families, to all the moms of the kids I love, and to all my mom-spirations! Most of all, Happy Mother's Day to my mom, who is simply the best, every day, all the time!
There were lots of Mother's Day crafts and projects in my basement and classroom the last few weeks.

Z-man's dad's family has this beautiful tradition where the whole family gets together to celebrate the day and the mamas in the family all give each other little gifts. I attended a Mother's Day gathering before I was a mom in the family and I remember loving it and thinking how connected it made all of them. A We're In This Together mentality. Beautiful. This year, I sent fancy soap, tagged with "We 'soap' you have a great Mother's Day!"

The kids in my class made gifts that took several days for their mothers. They used shoe box lids to frame egg carton flowers that they painted and decorated with Easter grass, pompoms, and tissue paper. We attached gift tags on paper that WE MADE! (I'll save that for another post.)

My mom stressed how much she didn't want her kids buying her things for Mother's Day, just spending time with her. We spent the day with her and Z-man made her this homemade view finder, made of a toilet paper tube and a picture of him and I in the middle. His card said "Thanks for always looking out for us."

And for the newest mom that I love on (who is close enough to do this for), I made this with her baby's foot prints, like someone did for me on my first Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there. Nothing is more challenging, more exhausting, more rewarding and more fulfilling than being a mom!

Wiggly Worms

I am not a fan of bugs. Or really crawly things of any kind. But I cannot keep a class plant alive for anything and am pretty sure that fish or hamsters would suffer the same fate at my hands.
I got the idea to do a worm farm from Z-man. He loves looking for worms in our front yard. We flip over the bricks around our dogwood tree and hope to see something wiggling down a whole. I put on my big girl britches and try to grab them and hold them so he can see them squirming around. We talk about how we have to be gentle with worms and all God's creatures. I love the experience, even though I hate the buggers.
But worms seem relatively fool proof and I was pretty sure I couldn't mess them up, so I ordered this worm farm off of Amazon. The kids in my class read the booklet that came with the farm and we started bringing shovels and buckets to the playground to dig for worms as the season changed from winter to spring.

The conversations about hibernation, temperatures, burrowing, taking care of nature, composting...cool stuff. Eventually as the weather warmed up, we found a handful of worms and were able to start our worm farm.

Now, about every two weeks, we dump the worm farm out (gently). We collect new dirt from the playground and put the old dirt in the garden outside the school. We talk about how the worms break down the soil and poop fertilizer (cue the four year-old giggles) which is so good for plants. The kids love sifting the dirt to find the worms.  The last time we did this, we found worm eggs! We had read about the life cycle of worms in Wiggling Worms at Work and so the kids immediately recognized that the small, hard yellowish balls were worm eggs. I'm super excited to see if there are less eggs and more worms the next time we dump it. And you know what? The little buggers are growing on me.

Mama Puts on the Hard Hat

For Z-man's second birthday, I turned this...

Into this!

 






A forgotten-about side garden + a dump truck of gravel and mulch (which was a dream come true to have pull up at our house!) + a wheel barrow + shovels + lots of trash bags + some neighborhood teens + tons of help from my awesome parents and uncle = Z-man has an amazing new play space!

Now I just need to come up with some ideas on how to get him to come inside without a fight!

ROAD TRIP!!!

Spring break for us was a road trip down to NC to visit my brother and then on to SC for a dear friend's wedding. Z-man is a great traveler. We travel to NY to visit his family almost every month on the train. At this point, we are train riding professionals. But car rides, not so much.
Over 1000 miles total. This is no small feat for a turning-two-next-week-year-old. Or for a motion-sick-mama. Or for Z's dad who had to put up with both of us and drive.
I tweaked a tradition the bride shared from her childhood. Her family has four kids and trekked often from NJ to SC. That's a road trip. Her parents packed each one a shoebox with games and goodies that they got halfway through the ride. Well the Mother-of-the-Bride is among those mamas I admire most, so I knew it was worth a try. 

A dollar store trip, left over valentine tissue paper, and a new favorite word "present" and the trip was relatively painless (minus traffic). Every time Z-man would get frustrated, bored, or a little grumpy, I passed a present his way. I tried to limit the presents to one an hour. It was so successful on the way down that we made a dollar store run before the trip back.

Among the best and most entertaining gifts were a slinky, pipe cleaners and pony beads (and I now have a fabulous new blue bracelet), books, a glow stick (reserved for when it started to get dark), a small car, and window clings. I have some left overs from the way back that I'm saving to use on our next trip!

*I'm so proud of this thrifty idea that I have to share it. When some of the presents failed me, I resorted to Dinosaur train, hung up by a sweat headband. Who needs a fancy mount for the ipad? Not this mama!

Bunches of Lunches

Making lunches is like laundry. You can never really cross it off the to-do list because as soon as you do, its time to make another. Or clean another Tupperware with tiny crevices. Or go shopping for more food to put in said lunches.
I actually do enjoy making Z-man's lunch, especially when it comes back near-empty and I can tell he liked what I packed (or he threw it on the floor, but I'm choosing to believe he loved it.) However, I really value my ME time once Z goes to bed. After almost a year and half, I've finally found a routine that simplifies the bunches of lunches us parents make.
These amazing Tupperware are the perfect size to fit in his lunch box and have compartments, which my slightly-OCD self finds comfort in. I found silicon cupcake liners in the dollar bin at target. They clean easily and are great for dividing the biggest compartment. I make at least two lunches at a time, which makes every other night super easy. (Unzip. Empty. Fill. Zip). 

I put in veggies, usually baby cucumbers or petite pickles-minimal prep, fruit (berries, small grapes, or tangerines just get rinsed and thrown in), some kind of meat (mini pepperonis, dino nuggets, or cut up hot dog), and some carb (usually veggie straws or goldfish). I throw fruit snacks, Z-man's ultimate favorite, and a squeezable fruit/veggie sauce and call it a day. X2. Or x3. Or on day's I get to love on my niece, x4. 

I still wish I was this mom or this mom sometimes. But for now, I'm totally ok being the mom I am (and having a little extra ME time).