Friday recap

From Ms. Christine -

This morning, we headed out on the later side.  As they were finishing up breakfast, Sofia was wondering which names were on the post-it. I was working with her on sounding out the names to figure it out, but she ended up losing her patience, got really whiney and then got really upset at me.  I told her I needed her to calm herself down before we could talk and suggested some things she could do to help herself do that.  She decided to get a book and we read it together to calm down.  We went back to the kitchen and talked about what had happened, why she was upset, and what we could do next time.  I'm thinking that I should have also suggested taking a break and coming back to it.  She pulled herself together and we sat down together and worked on sounding out the names again.

We ended up going out around 10:30, but I didn't anticipate Holland falling asleep on the way to the park, which he did soon after we got going.  So, I thought I'd just lay a blanket out and he could sleep on the grass while Sofia played.  While I was carrying him and walking though, he woke up (about a 20 minute nap), so he didn't go back to sleep until about 1:45, after lunch.  I wanted to explore the park near Central Market and see what it had to offer.  We brought a couple pieces of bread to feed ducks just in case there were any (I had noticed a bridge last time I was at the playground), but the kids ate most of the bread before we saw anything to feed them to.  Sofia saw a building while we took our break, that she said had "grass" growing on it.  We got to inspect it closer on our way back to the car and saw branches and big leaves covering the walls.  We did end up seeing a lot of turtles and tadpole-looking things and some kind strangers let us have some of their crackers to feed the animals too.  We found this really cool oak tree that the kids could climb on and around that we spent a lot of time at.  Sofia and I tried to see who could balance the longest on the branches right along the ground.  Sofia climbed onto some of the branches, and so did Holland eventually.  They were interested in the acorns that they found and Sofia was interested in sticking small sticks into the holes she found along the tree.  Holland fell a bunch of times while he was walking and playing, so he has little scuffs on his knees and his hands and a small cut at the top of his lip - nothing where he complained more than a few seconds (I'm thinking he was still kind of tired and didn't have all his balance), but none were major and we washed them when we got home.  We got the playground and Holland kind of wandered around, playing a little with some steering wheels while Sofia had a blast with a new-found friend.  She has such an easy time making friends!