Exciting news!

Their first portrait as a family of three...

For all those of you who haven't heard, we're going to be grandparents. This is the first baby for our daughter and her husband. They surprised us with a visit, and flashed the ultrasound picture. There was crazy screaming, and then more screaming, and really, it lasted too long, but... hey, we can be forgiven! We've been waiting and longing for this particular piece of news! And to clarify, it was only the females in the house screaming. The males were happy, but felt no need to scream.

Recently, I've been interested in Montessori, and even though I haven't researched it at all, I have learned that they like children to learn life skills with child-size tools, and this makes sense to me right now.  We encouraged our first group of children to do whatever they could, if they could make it work, and even if the tools (broom and dustpan, for example) were too big for them to handle, we'd let them try to do it (within reason, of course!)  They tried any jobs they wanted, and they grew so fast, that of course, it wasn't long before they really were big enough to handle the job, and the tools.

The new kids, however, don't grow as fast, and are about two years behind, size-wise, and also spend more time devopmentally, learning new tasks, and mastering life skills, so child size tools sound very sensible to me.  I looked at a catalog, and they advertised a tea set, with which children can learn the skills of pouring, and handling breakable items, so I went to the thrift store and found china cups and cream pitchers, and now we're learning the skills of pouring, and handling breakable items!

I colored the water blue, so it would be easier to see for pouring, and some people were annoyed that it didn't taste like Gatorade. Then they decided it was fine, because it was fun to pour. Everyone liked to pour from pitcher to cup, but no one wanted to pour the other direction, and they would call for Mom to refill their pitchers for them, even after I showed them that the water could go back the other way... Maybe next time! It was messy, but no one broke anything.