A Canada Day Craft

With Canada Day this weekend marking the unofficial start of summer, the boy thought it would be fun to do something "Canadaish"(his word) for a craft today. I decided we'd make our own Canada Flag. It's an easy (and quick) craft to do.

We've made this craft before, and since you use your child's hand print as the maple leaf, it would be a nice indication of how big they've grown if you made one each year.

All you need is some red & white construction paper (or white paper & red paint), scissors, glue & crayons or markers. Use your white paper as the base, cut your red paper into 3 even strips. Glue 2 of the red strips on the sides of the white paper, leaving you with a band of white in the middle.

There`s a couple of choices to make the maple leaf. You can then either trace your child's hand on the white & colour it in (that was what the boy wanted to do), or you could trace it on the last piece of red paper & cut it out & glue it in the middle of the white. (Or if you wanted, you could paint their hand red and get them to make a hand print on the page - we've done this in the past, and it looks very cute too.)

Serious concentration going on here colouring in his hand

Easy, quick, and not too messy - my kind of craft! Plus the boy has something he`s pretty proud of, and will be waving on Canada Day!

Canadian and proud!

Cats and Dogs

We were shopping for new PJ's the other day (he's had another growth spurt!) and he decided he wanted kitty cat jammies (he's really into cats lately). That was fine, and so we started hunting for them. Dogs, dinos, diggers, bugs, spaceships, and lots of other designs filled the boys section of PJ's, but no cats. The cats were all in the girls section. So we ended up with a very cute pair of pink & purple kitty cat jammies, and one very happy boy.

But why are cats inherently feminine and dogs seem to be masculine? Who decided that? I have enough problems with the huge gender divides on clothes (why can't a girl like blue & monster trucks, or a boy like fairies & pink) and now even animals are decidedly girly or just for boys?

So far the boy hasn't shown any concern for what other people tell him to wear (he once told a boy who questioned why he was wearing a dress that 'he could wear what he wanted and it didn't matter') so I'll continue to let him help pick his own clothes and shop in whatever gendered section of the store he wants.

It helps that he looks good in pink!

Ancient Times

The boy has recently become exceptionally interested in the Romans lately. I've dug into all my old history books, we've gotten books from the library, and we've looked at pictures on line. We also created our own Roman 'costume'  with a centurion 'helemt' and his binoculars slung across his chest as his 'sword'

The roman soldier reading a book on Rome from the library

In doing our 'research' the boy has found some of his favourite new facts:

• Romans didn't have toilet paper
• Romans used oil to clean themselves and then scraped it off with all the dirt
• Romans liked stinky fish sauce (Garum) on everything 

These get told to lots of people, especially if we're out and he's wearing his 'helmet'

Today's Roman activity was fort building with our blocks

Our 'fort'

But, like all good creations, it needed to be destroyed. I'm not sure what the Roman equivalent of Godzilla is but he appeared to finish off the fort.

Crushing the for!

Keeping cool

With this mini heatwave we're having, the boy has figured out his favourite way to stay cool (and it keeps my plants well watered!)

One spray on the plants, then one on me,

Radishes!

Check out what the boy picked from his garden today!

They were delicious & peppery, just perfect!

Breakfast in bed

Recently the boy has gotten very keen on making breakfast for hubby and myself. Of course since he can't reach too much in the fridge this rather limits what he 'makes' for us. Some days it's cereal & milk (light on the milk, heavy on the cereal), and some days it's just dry cereal.

Today I got dry cereal, but in a nice touch, he put it on a tray to carry up to me. I really can't wait until he's old enough to start using the stove on his own - I'll be putting in requests for eggs, pancakes, french toast & bacon!

Presentation is (almost) everything

Contraptions

The boy loves to build, and loves contraptions. So when he got a giant marble run for his birthday recently, it was a match made in heaven.

He's been 'drawing' plans up for all the different ways we need to build it, and then when we put it together he acts as the 'supervisor' telling me what pieces I need and where to put them. However his favourite part is dropping the marbles and watching them roll down the ramps. So once it's all built he spends a lot of time finding all the marbles, rolling them down, and starting all over again. It's fun to watch his excitement as he follows the marbles back and forth. Until he decides that we need to start all over again and follow a new plan. Looks like engineering might be a career choice for him (or demolition, since he likes tearing them apart too!)

I'm pretty proud of this one - it's almost as tall as the boy!

Birdwatching

We live in a well established part of suburbia, with nice mature trees all around. This means that we have a fair amount of birds that visit us. Nothing too exotic, just a collection of cardinals, blue jays, sparrows, robins, chickadees, doves and starlings. 

We have a bird feeder and bird bath in our back yard, and provided the dogs don't see the birds they can eat fairly undisturbed. Today the boy & I were outside playing when two doves landed in the garden. The boy was about to go down his slide, so he just sat at the top, absolutely transfixed by watching the doves eat. He kept up a running commentary the whole time they were there. Apparently the birds in my neighbourhood are used to the sound of his voice, because it didn't phase them at all.

What amazed me most was how still he kept. After I reminded him that it would frighten them if he moved, I saw barely a fidget from him. This happened about 4 or 5 times this afternoon as different birds came down to eat at the feeder, and each time he sat so still so as not to disturb them.

Apparently I need to take birds with me whenever I go places that I want him to sit still.

At least this means he can sit still when he wants to.