Weekly Update 10/10

This week, we did almost no school projects. I did notice that Crumpet is starting to recognize numbers though. We were watching Blue's Clues and it was a numbers episode. Crumpet knew several of them. We have done no formal work with number recognition, because he got so bored and frustrated when we were working through the alphabet (he has somehow learned all the letters on his own). Instead we've been adding numbers to our calendar daily, and reviewing all the numbers at the same time. It seems to be working.

We did do lots of "life school" this week, and we had some good new experiences...
We went to a wonderful corn maze at a farm nearby. This was our second year there, and it is a blast. This year, there was a lot of new stuff to do. Crumpet had a duck race with his dad.

He "milked a cow".
There was a great petting zoo area. They had baby bunnies and chicks to hold, and Crumpet returned to this area a hundred times. One of my great goals in life was to foster a love of animals and respect for all living things in him, and it has worked. He adores animals, and is really gentle with them. It melts my heart (except when he is trying to save the scorpions we occasionally find in our house. Uggh.).

And we made it through the corn maze!

In other news from the week, Crumpet had a slumber party at his cousin's house so that his dad and I could go to the U2 concert (awesome, by the way!). There was a lot of worry about whether or not he'd behave at his cousin's football game, or go to bed when the time came (he's an awful sleeper). He was wonderful at the game, and he was asleep before anyone else in the house. Hurray, he'll be welcome back if we ever need to take advantage of my sister-in-law again!

We baked banana bread. Crumpet had been asking to do this for weeks, but we never had ripe bananas at a time when we could bake... It was yummy, and Crumpet is becoming much more of a help in the kitchen.

On Friday, we tried out one of the many preschool classes at a "local" community center (for us, a half hour drive is local...). The mudpuppies class we went to was held at the same place. This class was a gym class with lots of running, ball throwing, and play with a giant parachute. Crumpet rarely participates in such things, but he had a great time with this and did almost everything with the other kids. We've noticed a huge change in him over the last month or so, and he is becoming much more outgoing and willing to participate in group activities. Hurray! After our travel chaos ends next month, we will start going to these classes regularly.

This is one of my favorite pictures from the week:

Bye from the farm! We're off on our trip(s) now!