feathers, fins, tails, and shells

The idea was a pet theme - I realize we strayed a bit with the birds and fish.  You wouldn't actually fish for your pet fish or have a nest with your pet bird...  

Anyway, we had fun with each of the different animals.  We had friends over for some of the days, like bird day.  The kids enjoyed their Oreo cookie dirt, pudding, and gummy worms.  I made some chocolate pretzel nests with peanut M&M's for them too.  Savannah has several birds in her room that chirp when you squeeze them.  They played with those for a little bit.  

We had one friend over for cat and dog days.  We played a Lotto game (a memory game), and they played hide and seek with the pink cat.

Dog Bingo was fun, although Savannah just ate a goldfish every time I called a new picture on the board.  You can see that her board is empty!  We read tons of dog books, because we found so many at the library and already had about 7 dog books of our own.  "My Father the Dog" by Elizabeth Bluemle was a really cute book. It compares the things that dads do to things dogs do, such as scratching their tummies, getting the newspaper, or running towards noises in the middle of the night.  

Our dog got some extra attention on dog day, of course.  Kai loves licking Weston all over his mouth, and Weston seems to like it too.  I think it's pretty gross!  They have a funny relationship.
 

 Goldfish was a hit for our fish themed snack!  The painted striped fish turned out pretty good, although I didn't have painter's tape.  The electrical tape stuck a little bit to the paper.

I got a kick out of Savannah's sound effects while painting.  She was copying me - when I first tried to show them how to stamp with the celery, I said, "Doink. Doink."  Pretty cute that she did the same thing, until she knocked the paint bowl off the table...

 This is what the idea was for stamp painting with celery.  

I could probably do a whole post on how projects really turn out with 2-5 year olds...  

The kiddie pool from my friend Vivianne came in handy again.  The kids loved fishing in it.  I loved seeing Weston's imagination at work too.  He pulled the slide off our little play set and used it as a boat.  His fishing poles were the oars.  He also had to get his little piggies to include with the fish.  I love the picture of Savannah and Weston sitting on their boat! 

The dog eventually joined in too, figuring out how to catch fish.  

We took an outing to an aquarium.  They spent quite a bit of time with the puppets, even though Weston eventually said, "This is bo-ring."  In the video, he also says, "We're making a big mess here."  Funny kid.     

We had a turtle show up in our yard during pet week too.  We kept it in a box for about a week and then let it go.  It was a pond turtle, so it wasn't doing very well in our box.

It was nice of him to drop in for pet week though!