New Photos, New Tooth, New Questions, New Stuff to Do
Here’s a quick catch-up on some happenings at the Hill house:
I’ve finally caught up on posting pictures to our photo gallery. I haven’t added captions yet, but I hope to go back and do that soon. Most of it should be pretty self-explanatory, anyway. 
So, for your viewing pleasure we now have albums for August, Early September (including a trip to the zoo), and Mid-September (including recent trips to an apple orchard and the Children’s Museum).
As Erik nears six months old, he now has one tooth on the way in! He has been gnawing away at anything he can get his hands on for several weeks, and finally the sharp little point of a tooth appeared on his lower gums yesterday! Luckily, he hasn’t been too crabby so far from the teething process.
Madeline has finally entered the dreaded “why” phase. For several weeks she has been asking a lot of other recurring questions including, “What’s ______ for?”, “What kind of _____ ?”, “Where did _____ go?” (asked about anywhere we are going or about any place we have left).  I thought those were slightly annoying at times, but at least there was a bit of variety. Then out of the blue, she started asking “Why?” yesterday. She asked the other questions a couple of times today, but otherwise her response was “Why?” to pretty much anything I had to say. I had no idea how quickly that could really grate on me, and now I know exactly why parents are known for saying “BECAUSE I SAID SO!” I came up with some good coping strategies (like giving overly complex answers) to get her to stop asking some of the other questions when it was getting old, so I am sure I will find some good coping strategies for this phase too. I know it is great that she is curious, but I also know that some of it is just to get on my nerves, because I have already seen the sly little smile as she continually asks the question.
This fall I have started doing some home preschool activities with Madeline. I’m sure she could learn through whatever we did, whether it was something organized or something informal, but having a curriculum to follow and a daily plan of action really helps me from just falling back on the same few activities all the time. I’m just not very creative at thinking on my feet to come up with new games, crafts, and so on for her to do…and she is often asking me for new things to do! We’re using a free curriculum for three-year-olds I found on the web called “Bible and Rhyme“. A lot of the curriculum activities are the general type of thing we’d be doing anyway — reading books, singing songs, playing games, doing art, etc…but the writer of this curriculum has way better ideas and better ways of grouping them together than I would ever come up with!
We’re just finishing our third week, and we’ve had some ups and downs already. The first two weeks Madeline asked to do it every day (even though the curriculum is only planned for 3x per week), and then today she didn’t want to do it at all after getting frustrated with one of the games yesterday. :-(  But it is great to get started after spending nearly a year and a half researching and considering what to do. We haven’t been doing every activity and we may modify it further to suit our needs as I better understand how Madeline likes to learn. But I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to work with a preschooler at home. I’m sure I’ll have more blog posts in the future about our preschool activities.
