I am Alive!

Wow! I can't believe it has been so long since I blogged.  I have not given up!  There is still so much I want to share.  So, sorry for the months of quiet from me but I am back and ready to jump back in.

Since it has been so long I am going to update on life and then get back into preschool crafts later.

Since I last blogged both of my sons have been in and out of the doctor with colds, ear infections and snot galor.  I think this is one of the reasons I felt so busy!  The good news is it's finally spring and I am hoping it will start calming down in that department.  When you are in any kind of childcare environment it makes the cold and flu season that much harder because there are so many people (big and small) carrying around their germs, fun!
 All I have to say is those germs are tough because I have been a Clorox wipe carrying Lysol spraying fool for a while.
In January I started my "official" preschool and the months leading up to were full of tons of work making a handbook, taking classes, creating an official curriculum, making a schedule, working things out with existent parents and so on.  But I added a Mother's Day Out program for those moms who don't need full time childcare and I found out that I love it!  There was a few weeks of balancing life with my full time kids and my own family life but God knew exactly what I could handle and worked it out for me.  As of right now I am down to my original friends that have been with us a year or less and one MDO child and it works.  Next year I will be starting my oldest in kindergarten through homeschooling so I have now made the decision to only take on MDO in the fall.  And right now our official last day of this year is May 27, then summer break yay!  Everything has worked out for all those involved and everybody here at Busy Bee Mama Z Preschool seems to be thriving.  The kids took some time to get used to the structure of the daily life but seem to enjoy it now.  We read bout 25 books a week and are learning tons of fun things on top of letters and numbers.  I never realized how fun it is to learn from hands on experience and reading books.

As for me personally (not as a mom or a preschool teacher), I realized that I have 3 main struggles in life. 1. Clutter 2. procrastination and 3. my weight going up and down
I was daydreaming of what it would be like to just get all of these issues wiped away, thinking if hynosis would really work.  As much as I would love this all to just dissapear right away it's not!  It's like being a Christian and being born anew.  You are not going to completely change overnight, it's a gradual difference as you walk with Christ.  So I decided to stop beating myself up for my faults and try and do something about them.   The only way to get any better at the clutter is to clean up and stay clean!  I am by nature a lazy person and tend to let things pile up.  I am working hard on putting things away in their place immediatley and not letting them pile up.  That and I have decided to take on a couple rooms at a time over the weekends and fully clean them out throwing away stuff and giving way things that other people could use, fun!  As for number 2, well I'm not sure how to change that.  The one thing I do try is to get things prepared the night before for school or fieldtrips. Do you have any tips?

  Number 3 is my main battle.  I grew up as a pretty slim kid and VERY active!  I was heavily involved in basketball for most of my life, yes I know I'm short, but I was that awesome point guard with a wicked 3 point shot :)  Then when puberty hit I realized that weight starting adding up on me, not to where I was overweight but things definitely changed, thank you hormones.  Then once I was a junior in high school and not as active in the sports but more in working and Student Council, I saw that my bad eating habits were making me thick.  I remember my mom starting the Adkin's diet back then and I gave it a shot.  I probably lost 5 pounds or so, I really didn't have much to lose back then, but I felt good about it!  But before I knew it I was back to my horrible eating habits of being a junk food junkie.  After high school I met my wonderful husband and we literally put on I think about 35 pounds our first year together because we were so in love!  Those were the days, we would work come home sleep, play, sleep some more and eat .  That was is.  And not to mention I tried to keep up with his eating habits.  Listen up young girls who might happen to read this...never ever try to keep up with a young in shape dude that has an amazing metabolism.  The only thing that will happen is Weight!  My mom always said "weight happens" but I never really understood until then!  While my amazing soon to be husband regularly told me that I was beautiful any size I knew I wasn't healthy.  So I researched and guess what? You guessed it I started a new diet this time the South Beach Diet.  Now if you have never heard of this diet I totally recommend it because it gives it to you in phases and wants to you ultimately live with the new lifestyle and not diet.  I went and did the diet to a T and began running again and in no time at all I was shrinking and this time I got smaller then I had been in high school and it felt GREAT!!!  For the first time in my life I wore a 2 piece bathing suit to our honeymoon and I loved it!  I bet you know what happened next, like most great stories I found out I was pregnant.  While that's a whole other story in my actual feelings at first, as you can imagine I heard all of the good old wives tales; don't worry you are eating for 2 now, if the baby is hungry then eat it, blah blah blah!  I slowly went from a skinny chick to a mooing cow with the gain of 50 pounds! Yup you heard it right, I put on 50 pounds with my first pregnancy. I can remember I gave into every single craving (curly fries and nachos) and my doctor even encouraged me to eat ice cream to get my calcium.  So when I had baby #1 I had a massive amount of weight hanging on and a big uphill battle to get skinny again.  Fortunately I nursed and had the right mind and new I wanted to lose it so I was walking right away and the weight started falling again, yippee!!!  Then just when I thought it was great, I started eating whatever I wanted because of the constant nursing and just as soon as he stopped nursing the weight slowly crept back up, joy!  Of course I kicked it into gear and started walking hard, even running by this point and I tried cleanses and all the fun stuff.  It wasn't until I realized something wasn't right because with all that work I couldn't seem to lose a pound.  What was I doing wrong?  I noticed my temper was a little short and my boobs were hurting...mystery solved I was pregnant again!  If you have ever heard of those women who can get pregnant just by thinking about it, yeah that's me.  So this time I still had an extra 20 pounds that I hadn't lost from the first pregnancy and I was determined to not gain 50 again.  I watched what I ate and successfully gained about 28 pounds!  Ok do the math and after I had #2 I still had about 45-50 pounds to lose, whoo!  Just when it seemed like I couldn't lose it, my great friend Crystal introduced me to a new diet, this one I'm sure you know, Weight Watchers.  While it did help me drop a total of 63 pounds there are things that I don't agree with in the diet.  I did great and kept it off for a total of I don't know, 1 year?  Then guess what happened?  The reason most diets don't work, I started going back to my bad habits of eating tons of sweets, salty Mexican food and I had stashes of chocolate all over the house! While this only lead me to gain about 15 pounds the point is I saw a trend.  My weight fluctuates so much and I can't take it anymore.  Which brings me to today.  About 3 weeks ago I thought I would give South Beach another stab because it seems healthy and like I could lose the weight.  So that's what I did and in the first week I lost 6 pounds, yay!  Then Spring Break happened and along came Aunt Flow who makes all intabitions while on a diet go out the window.  In just 4 days I gained back 3 pounds mostly in water weight that makes me bloat but still.  Over that window my wonderful 2nd dad or father in law G started doing some research on the way we eat.  This is so what he does, and he is in the same boat as me in wanting to lose weight and keep it off.  He started talking about this way of eating that takes out all processed sugars and grains.  Then he starts saying how animal fat is really good for you and we shouldn't deprive ourselves from it. I said, wow that sounds like Paleo a friend of mine was telling me about it a few months ago.  So we do more digging and find out all about it and last Tuesday I decided I was done with the crappy food and the constant sluggishness that I was feeling so I went for it! I am proud to say that today is day 8 and I am changing inside and out.  I have lost 8 pounds and 1to 2 inches all over and am feeling great!  Now if you do your research on Paleo you find out fast that there's not much to it, basically if you can hunt and kill it, or pick it then you can eat it.  Simple enough and it seems pretty self explanatory to me.  Going back to the last 12 years of my life every time I start to gain weight it's because of the influx of complex crap I am eating and the lack of fruits and veggies.    To me it seems simple, if God made it then it's good to eat.  So if you are reading and happen to wonder about what this means basically it's ok to eat: meat, fish, poultry of any kind fruits, vegetables and nuts.  It's not ok to eat: corn prodcuts, dairy products, man made sugar products, breads, starches and all the likes.  If you go shopping at the grocery store you should be shopping on the outer ring of the store and stay away from the shelves in the middle, all of that stuff is packaged sugar in some way shape of form.  So the reason I am choosing to blog about this is because I want to have some accountability this time.  I want to know that it's really not ok to slip back into my bad habits.  If you are reading this and think that I am crazy for doing something so extreme, that's fine.  But I challenge you to look at your life and how much sugar you are eating and what that sugar is doing to your body. And sugar is just one of the evil culprits.  Or better yet your children's lives!  If not anything else I am so doing this for my children that way they have a mom who actually practices what she preaches and eats all the foods that she is trying to give them.  Call me old fashion but I think that kids should grow up eating tons of fruits and veggies, watching minimal amounts of television, absolutely no video games and have good old fashion fun playing outside or with their imaginations. And if there is a child that is young and obese I believe it's very much the parents fault. 
So if you are reading this, thank you for taking the time to hear my story. I am lucky to have friends and family in my life who always support me.  This time I am going to make a change for the better and I will  update weekly on my progress with this new lifestyle.  If you are interested in anything I have said please feel free to comment:)

Tonight I will pick up my post in the preschool world again!

Mmmmmm

Oh wow how time flies when you are having fun!  It sure has been a while since I made time to sit and blog, sorry for that. 

On another note, have you ever realized how many words start with M?  A bunch and for that reason I took a whole week to focus on that letter and we still didn't get to everything I planned!  Here we go:

* I cut out huge M's from HEB paper bags and let the kids glue on different colors and sizes of paper to Make a Mozaic M.  This one took them and while and they really enjoyed it.

* I let the kids cut out shapes from Magazines. I told them to find pictures they liked and to cut them out, this was fun practice on with scissors.  The goal was to Make Magazine flowers but I realized that was more for older children.  But I did end up Making a few on My own.

* I drew a Maze on a paper and explained to them how to get out and they had fun trying to figure it out.

* The kids glued on Maccaroni to a piece of paper spelling out MOM. 

* The next day I decided to step up the Maze a notch and Made a Maze for them to gide a Marble through.  This was easy I just took a box and cut a side off and taped on colorful straws.  Each child took turns tilting the cardboard and getting the Marble to the end.

* Going along with the Marble theme we Made a few different Marble paintings.  The first one was achieved by putting shaving cream onto a cookie sheet, spreading it out evenly, adding drops of different food colorings, swirling it around with a stick, then placing a piece of card stock on top and pushing down to get the imprint of the Marbled creation.  You put it out to dry and it even turns out to be soft and good smelling :)

                The second method was to tape a piece of paper into a box and let the colored Marbles roll around and design a look.  I took left over yogurt cups and put a little bit of paint into each one with different colors, dropped a few marbles in each color and let the kids take turns on grabbing the Marbles with plastic spoons and dropping them into the box and watching where it went with the paint flying everywhere.  This was fun!

* The kids Made Maccaroni necklaces!  I gave each child a string of yarn and a handful of maccaroni and let them lace it on.  To wear the necklaces easier I attached a safety pin to the ends of them.  My son gave me his.

* On the final day we focused on Music!  We Made what we called Music Makers.  To do this you give your child a toilet paper tube and tell them to decorate it anyway they want.  Then cap on end using paper ( I used 2 layers of tissue paper) and then add a handful of rice to the inside and cap the second end.  There you have it your very own Maracas or what we called them, Music Makers!

We listened to different types of music and talked about the instuments that are used to make music in those songs that we heard.  And finally we played Musical chairs!

* As an ending to the week I let them watch a Movie, just so happened How to Train Your Dragon came out and they got to watch it.

L is for Lion, hear me roar!

As some of you may know my youngest son's name is very unique and very based upon a lion, so L happened to be one of my favorite Letters!  It also happens to be the only letter my 3 year old still has a hard time saying, so we love to practice it.  And we also have another girl blessed with an L name also, so she loved it. 

When I think of L I think of laughing and that is what I tried to keep my kiddos doing.  It was easy for the kids to get used to writing the Letter L and coming up with L words so we had fun.  We also made sure and worked on walking in a Line, trying to color inside the Lines, the difference between Large and Little and also how something can be Long.  Along with all that we managed to take our time learning the letter L and doing many fun activities including:

*We made Lion masks.  To achieve this you cut out the hole in the center of a paper plate, have strips of construction paper cute out in brown, yellow and orange, let the kiddos curl the paper using a pencil then glue the strips on.  You can also take this as a teaching moment with patterns and have them stick to a particular color pattern. As we worked on our Lion masks I told them some fun facts of Lions and how they are the King of the jungle.  As an added bonus since they had been so good I allowed them to watch LION KING!  Talk about a roaring good time :)

* We made hand print Lillies.  I took this from a pattern in a parents magazine, it was complicated but fun and the kids enjoyed seeing their hand print used to make something.  You cut out leaves from card stock that you will hole punch in the middle.  Then trace the kids right hand and cut it out.  Now curl them all with a pencil and attach to a green straw with tape.  And to top it all off you can cut a yellow pipe cleaner in half and stick it through the straw to stick up like the pollen.  These were pretty Lillies that they all took home to Mommy :)

* We made Love Ladybugs.  This was another fun template I borrowed from the web.  You cut out all the pieces for the kids before hand and let them count and glue them all together.  You need to cut out a Big Heart, a small heart ( in red), 2 small black hearts, 6 big legs that are L's, 2 small L legs and 2 antenna that are in the shapes of 6's.  This shows there are 6 legs to a ladybug.  I then drew on eyes and along the way we talked about how a lady bug grows and other interesting facts.  Like did you know that when they flap their wings they go at 84 times a second?!  And of course the hearts represent LOVE.  So there you have it, our Love Ladybug!

K is for Kid!

When you get right down to it there are not that many words that really come to mind that start with K that are in our day to day vocabularies.  So I decided to keep it simple and stick to the things that Kids love most, animals!
I learned from the kids that K is a letter that can be a bit tricky to write, but with enough practice they started to get the hang of it.  And don't even get me started on the fact that some K words sound like they could start with the letter C.  In my mind they are still 3 and just getting them to learn the sound that it makes and how to write it is plenty for now.  So when we were working on those basics we:

* Made a Kangaroo puppet.  I used a template from a website and cut out arms, ears, a nose, eyes, a tongue, a pouch and a baby kangaroo to go in the pouch.  The kids then glued on all of the body parts on to a paper bag and had a blast making their Kangaroos hop with their hands.

* We colored a Koala and talked all about them.


* We made Kites on a page and colored a picture where the Kite was flying.  You will notice I cut out a colored kite from construction paper and glued it on the page along with a piece of yearn to show it was flying in the sky.  The Kids loved using their imaginations to show where the Kite was flying.  I wanted to show them an actual Kite in the sky but we just didn't have the wind for it.

Crafty mama moments

Lately my husband and I have been having the argument of whether or not I am spoiling my children or just being creative and fun. Well OBVIOUSLY I am just being creative and fun, duh! ;-) Well in their lunches lately I have found it to be so fun to make their sandwiches into fun shapes....

Who doesn't love a little bit of LOVE with their lunch?

And you know those lunch ables that kids love but you hate to buy because one they are packed full of sodium and two they are super expensive? Well here's my solution to that:

Healthy nitrate free turkey, mozzarella cheese and organic crackers :)

So what's your vote? Spoiled or crafty and fun?

The best part of it is that you can make them according to whatever your kid happens to be into that day because we all know they change their minds so fastly! And if you are focusing on a particular letter or theme for a day you can pick a cookie cutter that coordinates with that. I stick with it's just fun for the kids and fun for me...so FUN all around.

I and J!

Well I bet you thought I wasn't coming back?! Nah, just have had a lot of stuff going on in life right now that has taken my focus away from the blog. I did still manage to do a couple of letters with some fun activities. If you didn't know my youngest son had to be seen by a GI last week and he went through some tests and a scan so we can figure out what is going on. A week later and we still don't have many answers, but it doesn't look like he will need surgery anytime soon, which is a blessing for sure! Then this week he caught a nasty virus and well I know he will bounce back soon! And not to mention this WONDERFUL weather! Who wants to stay inside when we have weather that allows us to open all the windows and just play outside ALL day?! Anyway onto the preschool where the learning still must go on :)

I have to admit, I didn't have much for I so we worked on it for 1 day. In that one day we did practice writing the letter and came up with words that start with I. As far as activities go:

*We colored an Elmo coloring sheet with the letter I for Igloo on it.

* We made an Ice cream cone and worked on shapes at the same time. I cut out triangles for the cone and circles for the ice cream and had them identify which shape was which and then they glued it onto a Popsicle stick. They had a blast pretending to eat it.

* Oh and we can't forget we colored Iron man pages ( my son's favorite)

As for J:

* one of my kid's names' starts with J and this happened to be on the first day of awesome weather and GI appointment so we decided to work on his name and we ended up making name plates the kids rooms. I wrote their names in block letters and let them color them however they wanted to and then I drew their favorite character on them. I can't post the pics because I can't tell their names but trust me they were super cute! And boy art sure is stress relieving for me :) We also took a moment to talk about Jesus and who He is and that He loves us!

* The next day we made Jack-O-Lantern masks. I drew orange lines down white paper plates, then let the kids color them orange and pick the shapes they wanted the eyes and mouth to be and then I cut them out. Lastly I punched holes on each side, attached some yarn and we had masks!

* I made Jello! Who doesn't love Jello? I tried to make them into little J's with my cookie cutter but it didn't work out so much so we just settled for eating it and saying Jello over and over.

* Our last activity was my favorite just because it came out so cool! We made jellyfish! I gave the kids all a piece of plastic wrap and instructed them to scrunch it up a bit and we glued it down to the paper. Then we glued on pieces of tissue paper strings that were blue as the tentacles. The kids enjoyed talking about jellyfish which was fun as well.

Fall times!

The crisp feeling of fall is finally in the air! I love when the seasons change it always gives such inspiration for change in life. As a mom I have found that while there are many things that change so fast like the boys growing up and what super hero they are into, I want to hold on to some things and let them be the same. This is where I feel family traditions start. Each family may do things around certain Holidays that they call traditions. Me I find myself loving the fact that a couple of years ago I started traditions when I didn't even realize it. I wanted to share one major tradition with you all in case you might like to try doing the same with your family. That is going to Crowe's Nest Farm. Two years ago I was lucky enough to be invited with a play group down to this cute farm and my oldest son who was about 15 months old at the time absolutely fell in love with the animals especially the cow!

He was obsessed with cows and mooing for many months after that. Then last year I realized that you can go to this farm with out a group once a year during their Fall Festival ( it may not be called that but that's what I refer to it as). I suggest taking your little ones down to Manor on one of the weekends they offer it this year in October. It is so refreshing to take a step out of city or even suburban life for a few hours and enjoy the farm animals. It's pretty cheap to get in and you can take your own lunch if you'd like, although they do serve up some food of their own. Oh and there is a perfect opportunity for those cute pumpkin patch pictures. Or you can be like me and get a picture with your favorite animal :)

http://www.crowesnestfarm.org/

There is also the Fall Festival at The Elgin Tree Farm which seems to be nice but we have never tried it out. We may go check it out this year because it seems to have tons of fun activites for the kids!

http://pages.suddenlink.net/jrf/ectf/dd2.htm

Hope you are enjoying this cool breeze in the air as much as I am!