About 2 months ago I posted on Izzy's big boy room makeover (which is still my favorite room in the house by the way) and today it is finally time to post about Sydney's nursery. With two and a half weeks until she gets here, I finally put the finishing touches on it today and it is all ready to go for when she gets here (minus the fact that my nesting instincts will probably require me to clean it one more time between now and then). Decorating a nursery is way different than decorating a big boy room as she doesn't need all the fancy schmancy storage solutions that Izzy uses. All we needed for her was a crib, a changing table, a rocking chair, and a bookshelf with some things added in the mix to make it all cute and such. The hardest thing about her nursery for me was that I am not at all into pink and purple which makes up at least half of the baby girl bedding market. However, that problem was solved for me one night as I was browsing through the local baby's r us store and came across this cute owl pattern: After I had this bedding, everything else just had to fall in place to match. I was able to find these cute owl printables on Etsy for cheap that just happened to go with the owl theme perfectly. I also found the cute stuffed owl that sits on top of her bookshelf on Amazon to complete the owl theme. You can kind of see that here: The last couple of things I was set on for her room was a cute monogram and a small rug to put under the rocking chair footstool that could add a pop of color. I think the rocking chair area of her room turned out really cute. And since she is a baby, of course you can't forget the changing table area of her room. Hopefully when she finally gets here, she will like it just as much as we do and hopefully she will actually learn to sleep as well as her brother in here too :)
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We had two activities on our summer bucket list focused around art. This was our second one of the summer. Our first was edible bath paint which you can read about here. Between the two, I think Izzy enjoyed this one more. We started out by dividing up a can of sweetened condensed milk into the individual wells of an ice cube tray. Then I let Izzy watch me dye the milk into each color of the rainbow and we talked about colors and how they can mix together to make other colors. After our paint was all ready to go, we got to work. We both painted our own pictures so I could let Izzy watch me color mine and get a better idea of what to do for his. Although he did get some paint on his paper, most of it ended up on him. Luckily I laid out some towels for us to sit on while painting otherwise a lot more of it would have gotten our floors. After a while things were getting a little too messy to be safe to play in the kitchen anymore, so we finished up in the bath tub and gave him a quick rinse off after we were done. While sweetened condensed milk is super sticky and therefore harder to clean up than our edible bath paint was, it still wasn't too bad and we were done with cleanup within a matter of minutes. And we got these beautiful paintings out of the deal. Not too shabby :) Cost: $1
Skills learned: Creativity, colors, fine motor skills Age: 12m+ Rating (out of 4 stars): 3 I kind of skipped July's weekly activities but the majority of them were toy oriented rather than activity oriented so that partially explains why. The fact that Izzy and I are trying our hardest to finish up our summer bucket list before baby sister could be another part of the reason. However, we are getting back to our weekly activities for the month before baby sister does come and I take my activity maternity leave... seriously, its written down in my planner :) So on to this month's activities... Our first activity of the week is the slam dunk game. A couple of weeks ago I was looking over some milestone charts and feeling pretty good about Izzy's abilities, until we got to the part about ball skills. To help Izzy develop more of an interest in playing with balls, we decided to get a ball and a bucket and see what would happen. I was hoping he would try rolling the ball into the bucket but so far that hasn't happened. Instead, the majority of his time with this activity has been spent running around with the bucket on his head. He has dropped the ball in the bucket a few times though so we will count that as progress on the ball skill front. Cost: Free Skills learned: Gross motor/ball skills Age: 15m+ Our second activity of the week is beads in a paint palette. This is just another basic fine motor skill activity that you can use for colors and counting. The purpose was for Izzy to put one bead in each hole of a paint palette. Pretty basic but he has actually been pretty excited over this activity, probably because the beads we got brightly colored beads with fun textures. However, since beads are pretty small, I would not recommend doing this activity unless you can trust your little one not to swallow the beads and you are willing to supervise very closely. Cost: $4 Skills learned: Fine motor skills, counting, colors Age: 18m+ Our last activity of the week is a smaller version of the treasure baskets we used to do. Although we stopped doing treasure baskets when he was 18 months old since the most beneficial age to do them is 6-18 months, we decided to make a little toddler busy bag that was reminiscent of one of our old treasure baskets. We decided to focus this busy bag on talking about textures so we included a variety of textures as you can see here: We included a soft duck, a hard paint palette, a pokey play tree, a rubbery measuring cup, a squishy pencil thing, a bristly paint brush, and a rough piece of glittery paper. Izzy has enjoyed going through his bag and experiencing the different textures. He especially likes giving the duck kisses and popping the measuring cup in and out. You could tailor your busy bag to include items centered around any theme you wanted but we thought that textures would be a fun place to start. Cost: Free (we used items we already had)
Skills learned: Textures, creativity Age: 18m+ |
AuthorHi! My name is Cassity and I am the mom to a little 2 year old boy named Izzy and a baby girl named Sydney. I am lucky enough to get to be a stay-at-home mom to them and we have fun thinking of new activities to do together in the afternoons. We created this blog as an opportunity to share those activities with you. Archives
March 2015
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