Cooper's Preschool

Cooper started his preschool group with four other two-year-olds. Since they are still quite young, the structure of this group is different than Jaxton's preschool group. Each mom has a part in the preschool class, such as Welcome/weather/introduce the topic for the day, singing time, story time, movement time, craft time, and snack time. So we each have to prepare our part for each preschool day and we just rotate through each part for a complete class that takes about 1 hour. The kiddos love it. Cooper looks forward to it every week. We meet just twice a month and its very low key, more of a social group for the two-year-olds as well as for us mommies! These pictures are at our first day of preschool where we learned about the color orange and the shape of circles...How appropriate, a pumpkin is both a circle and orange and it is the Halloween season!!

Daddy's Newest Toy

We have 5 acres of land on our property, and a lot of grass. Right now its mostly weeds because we have not planted grass seed yet, but the weeds are up to the boys' shoulders. We have some woods behind our house that Nate has been dying to clear out and make some pathways in it. We have a super long driveway that will be a pain to plow in the wintertime. So, Nate decided it was time to get a real tractor. This was no toy tractor, this was a heavy duty boy toy!! It came with a mower and a scooper that Nate can use to move dirt and trees and snow with. Jaxton and Cooper were in heaven. And so was Nate! Nate takes the boys on tractor rides all the time and they love it!

Here is a few weeks later, Nate has been hard at work on his tractor between alarm appointments or after dinner some days. You can see the pathways he cleared out of the woods. We envision putting mulch along the pathways to define them, maybe a swingset someday, a treehouse up in one of the big trees, maybe a bench or two to sit and read on in the peaceful wooded setting. The possibilities are endless!!

Family Trip to the Zoo

Some of our friends gave us some extra zoo passes that they were not going to use, so we took advantage of them and took a family trip to the zoo. It was a super nice day and we all had a great time. We took the log ride, which the boys have never done before, and they loved it. We saw lots of animals, but the boys' favorite was probably the penguins like from the movie Madagascar.

Aquarium
Dairy Queen Ice Cream cones-
What cute boys!

Love the beards!!

Fun family day trip!!

Grandpa's Visit

Grandpa Hutchinson came to visit!!! He had a business trip in Cincinnatti, which is 4 hours away from Fort Wayne. But a 4 hour drive from Cincinnatti is much shorter than a 24 hour drive from Salt Lake City. So he drove out and spent an entire day with us!! The boys were so excited to see him. They were looking forward to his arrival. We spent the day at the park, had a picnic, rode our bikes, played at the playground, and watched squirrels run up and down the trees. After naps, we went to dinner with Nate at Chili's for some yummy food. It was such an unexpected entertaining trip!! Hopefully, Grandpa will have more business trips out to the midwest!

Tireswing...

They each got to take turns pushing Grandpa on the tireswing. It helped prove how strong their superhero muscles are!

The ground was covered in acorns. Every step we would take would crunch tons of acorns under our shoes. The boys were finding acorns with hats on them and gathering them in their frisbees. We saw some baby squirrels running up and down a couple of giant trees. They didn't seem afraid of the boys, and would come down real close to our feet. The boys put out piles of acorns at the bottom of the trees for the squirrels to eat. Jaxton came back a little bit later to the tree that he thought he had put the pile of acorns. It happened to be a different tree that looked similar in the same area, but he thought the acorns were all gone. He was sure the squirrels had come down to eat them all. And he was so proud that he could help feed them! What a cutie!!

Gathering Acorns

Reading books

Painting pictures from Grandma Hutchinson's package that she sent in Grandpa's suitcase. Thanks Grandma!!

What a fun visit! Thanks for taking the time to come see us, Grandpa!! We love you very much!!!

Preschool: Dinosaurs

On Wednesday for preschool, we were still learning about the letter D, so we did a Dinosaur Theme. We talked all about dinosaurs, the different kinds, what they eat, how big they were, etc. We talked about how big their teeth were. Then I sent the kids on a dinosaur tooth hunt to find huge dinosaur teeth all over the house. They brought them back to this giant mouth and we taped them on to make a giant dinosaur mouth. Then all the kids sat inside the mouth as if the dinosaur was eating them!!

We talked about how dinosaurs are extinct and that they all died. Their bodies decayed, but their bones were still in the ground. We read some books about how people will "excavate," or dig in the ground to find their bones, and put them together to make dinosaur skeletons. So next, we ventured to become paleontologists and excavated for dinosaur bones outside in the dirt. (I put chicken bones in the dirt for them to find). They loved it!

Gabe found a dinosaur bone!!

Kye found a dinosaur bone!!

Since we had excavated outside, we then came inside and excavated chocolate chips and M&Ms with toothpicks out of our cookies for snack.

I dug up the shape of a dinosaur footprint in our dirt outside and told them that a dinosaur had come through our city. They were so excited!! They were not sure if it was real or not, but it looked real, and they were just amazed! So they each got a "daddy shoe" and we measured the footprint to see how many daddy's shoes it would take to make a dinosaur footprint. We figured out that it took exactly 6 daddy's shoes.

I put tape down on the patio and said that this is how tall a dinosaur is (hypothetically). I had them all lay down head to toe to find out how many kids it would take to be as tall as a dinosaur. We figured out that it took exactly 8 kids to be as tall. They were really interested in this and stayed put on the ground until we had found the number of kids. It was a lot of fun!

Our Chart to show how many kids it took to be as tall as a dinosaur, and how many shoes it took to be as long as a dinosaur footprint.

Preschool: Doctors & Dentists

Jaxton is in a coop preschool again this year where 5 moms rotate teaching. Today, was my turn to teach the letter D. I chose to teach a theme on doctors and dentists on Monday, and Dinosaurs on Wednesday. We had a lot of fun!! We started out tracing the letter D and talking about things that start with D. This group of kids is truly a smart group!! Afterward, we started Dancing to music to get our wiggles out, when I "fell down" and "hurt my arm." I asked the kids if they could be my doctor to fix my hurts. They were so concerned and interested, it really got their attention. From there we talked about all the things doctors do and what they carry in their bag. We talked about how doctors help us to be healthy. From there, I let them use all the doctor tools I could find and they played doctor with each other. I anticipated this part to last just a little while, but they were so into it that I let them keep going. They were taking turns being the patient, wrapping booboos, putting bandaids on each other, and getting each other small drinks of water to help them feel better. It was so fun to watch and they were so good, that I actually was able to get some fun pics!!

After we talked about doctors, we had a healthy snack, the kind of snack a doctor would want you to have to keep your body healthy. Next we talked about dentists. We read a story about a trip to the dentist and talked about how fun the dentist can be. After our snack, we talked about how we need to keep our teeth healthy too. How do we do that? We brush our teeth. So we all got a chance to brush our teeth! They loved it!!

And then we all practiced flossing...

What a fun preschool day. Even I was enjoying myself. Preschool didn't seem to burdensome when we were all having fun!

Halloween Haunted Forest

A friend of ours invited us to a Haunted Forest. A family that lives out in the country puts on a Haunted Forest Halloween kick off party every year, and they go all out! They have a huge forest which they decorate with orange lights, lanterns along the trail, and spooky scarecrows and things here and there throughout the forest. It was not a scary, frightening forest and nothing popped out at you. It was just to walk through for fun and the boys absolutely loved it! Cooper started hitting the scarecrows and skeletons he found along the path because he said they were "bad guys." He is going to be Spiderman for Halloween, so I suppose he was taking on his character. Jaxton was a little bit more reserved as he was looking at all the skeletons and scarecrows. It was not horribly scary, but still I don't think he really has seen or remembers seeing any Halloween skeletons and such. So he was a little quiet, but still enjoyed the walk through the forest.

This sign says: "Enter if you Dare"

They had a gigantic bonfire going in their backyard area. It was humongous! I was afraid the trees would catch on fire!! But they never did. They boys loved the fire. It was a freezing night and you could really feel the heat. They had music playing, so the boys took the opportunity to dance for the crowd.

Cooper & Mom

They had a "bull" that they created out of a barrel on ropes. Some of the older kids were really getting into it. Kids would pull and push on the ropes and the person on the bull would go flying if they let go. Cooper wanted to give it a try, so here he is on the bull.

This is one of Jaxton's favorite babysitters, Marissa. She is one of my wonderful beehives. When he saw here there, he wanted to hold her hand and hang out with her the entire time! He had a lot of fun with her!

Here they are on a big makeshift swing. If you are not careful, you can fall over!! Here is Jaxton, Alena, and Marissa.

What a fun start to Autumn and Halloween!