I've been volunteering to do little things for the toddler classes at my son's school. They're not hard, in fact they're pretty easy, but they're not exciting either. But today, I got to fulfill a life-long dream as a result.
First, I punched cards for sewing. Apparently the toddlers sew with needle and thread. I've seen pictures. They're real needles and they're sewing through little card stock cards I punched with S-shaped or V-shaped patterns. They also do punching. I marked cards with sharpies shapes like rectangles, triangles, circles in dots for the children to follow as a template to punch with a puncher.
For the next task, I cut out nouns. Lots of nouns. Nouns of all sorts of things from magazines that will be sorted into the twenty-six letter sounds of the alphabet. Then each letter sound will be used as the sound of the week. The children are learning how to glue now, and once they can glue they'll glue the nouns to paper and practice saying the words.
Next, I saw in the basked of, "things we need help with," two books of birds. Two of the exact same book of birds. I cut up two entire books because the picture of the bird on the left matches the description of the bird on the right. But if you take the description of the bird on the right, you lose out on the picture of the bird on the next page (because it's on the back of the description page.) So you need two books.
The process goes like this: cut pages out, collate pages and do not mix up bird picture X with bird description Y because if you do—and I did—you have to do a lot of reading to figure out which bird goes with which description.
Eleventy-twelve bird/description pages later, I had a large stack that needed to be trimmed evenly and glue-sticked onto quarter sheets of card stock. I called in for reinforcements because while some people go batty, I was going birdy. My mother helped me glue the final birds down and next I was off to the office on my special, reward mission... I was going to become a Laminatrix.
That's right, I was going to get to use the big, industrial lamination machine at the school's office to laminate my towering stack of bird cards. It was always my dream in school to use one of those cool machines. Lightning and rain? Not a problem, I held my head high and headed across the school yard towards the administration building.
Alas, the lamination project and my term as "The Laminatrix" ended all too soon. Now, I'm back at home cutting up the results into shiny, laminated bird cards. But I'm not too sad, I hear there are noun cards that need preparing and laminating next.
The Big Boy Update: Meltdown. He did well at school today. He was happy in the car coming home, he was glad to see daddy and his sister. Then, he realized he was hungry and all hell broke lose. He wouldn't eat anything because he was too upset to eat. He didn't want to eat anything you offered to him, unless you gave the piece of banana, or strawberry, or raisin he refused, to his sister. Then it was the only thing he wanted to eat, unless you offered it to him again, and then he screamed at you and threw it on the floor. It was a power play, and it was fueled by hunger and tiredness. We were reasonable but firm. Neither my husband nor I are going to let a toddler run our house. When it was clear he wasn't going to settle down and eat, he got to have an early nap. He's still napping. Maybe the food will be more appealing after he wakes up and is less-tired.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Bye Bye. Oh she has so got bye bye now. In just the past three days, she's started saying, "bye bye." Today she's figured out the situational reason for saying it and she's doing the delayed reaction thing where after you've left the room, she says bye bye to you. Only it's well after you've left that she says it. If you open the door and tell her to say bye bye again to daddy, she'll just look at you, because hey, she's a baby, and we all know babys never perform on queue.
Someone Once Said: A “labor-saving device” often isn’t.
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