Campbell's Top Ten

It's been quite a while since we did a top ten of  Campbell's favorite things.  I thought it was high time for an update!

#10  Her handmade outfits, including this seersucker dress, from Daffodils and Daisies.  Ok....maybe these are actually mommy's favorites ;)

#9 Maggie's Boppy Travel Swing...she finally is not freaking out when Maggie gets in it 

#8  Dot Paints (really any paints!)

#7  Her water table...however, to Campbell it's a mini-pool on legs :)

#6  Wood Foam Blocks

I found these blocks at Dollar General ($8 rather than the $16 on Amazon).  Campbell loves them, especially in the bathtub because they stick together and it's easier to build with them.

#5  Books

We are so lucky in our area to have access to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library.   This program sends all children under the age of 5 a new free book each month.  Some of Campbell's favorite books are ones she's gotten from them.  Check to see if it's available in your area! 

#4  Abby Cadabby Quilt

One of my co-workers is an amazingly talented quilter.  She made Campbell and Maggie quilts to celebrate Maggie's birth.  When she asked me what Campbell would like, all I could think was Sesame Street.  So, she made this beautiful quilt for Campbell and Maggie has a smaller quilt with Abby in a different pose.  Campbell loves it so much that she insists upon sleeping on top of her bedspread with her Abby quilt covering her.

#3  Bows

Campbell is definitely a "girly girl".  Every day when I dress her, she insists on having a bow (normally this is great, but when she's wearing a bathing suit to go to the pool, the bow can be a bit much).  Some of our current favorites are these bows that are handmade with her initial on them. You can see more bottle cap creations from our friend Missy: http://www.facebook.com/#!/KustomKapKreations.

#2  Baby Dolls

Campbell loves baby dolls of all kinds.  She's not snobby...in this picture she's piled her American Girl doll right along with cheap-o dolls of all kinds.

#1 Anything Sesame Street

Campbell currently owns dolls for almost the whole Sesame Street cast.  Most mornings we'll hear her playing with the dolls in her bed.  As soon as we find a doll for Bert, she'll have everyone (and believe me, she knows he's missing).

Adventure to Edventure

Last week Campbell, Maggie, and I traveled to Columbia to go to Edventure Children's Museum with a great friend from college, Anna, and her little boy, Hampton. 

It was the first time Anna and I had met each others' children and we were so surprised when they looked like brother and sister. 

Here they are pretending to drum (there was a camera that showed them drumming on drums)

Edventure has an actual Fire truck that the kids can play on and explore.  Hampton and Campbell enjoyed dressing up like firefighters and pretending to drive the truck.

 They also had a VW Beetle that they enjoyed "driving".

We had a great time!

Crafty Mommy Monday- High 5 Hands

Campbell's Early Interventionist, Crystal, did a very cute activity with her a few weeks ago that I'm totally stealing for today's post.  I thought it was so cute and Campbell really enjoyed it.

First, we traced Campbell's hands on several pieces of different colored felt.

Next, I cut the hands and placed them on the felt board (see this post on how to make your own felt board for about $5).

Then we played "High 5" with the different colored hands.  In this video Campbell uses her Elmo doll to do the High 5 because she had been playing with him and couldn't be persuaded to put him down.  :)

I also want to share a new blog I found that I love!  It's a fellow former teacher who does activities with her daughter...she blows me out of the water!  I'm very inspired by all the things she does...I just have to keep reminding myself that she doesn't have a new baby ;)

http://littlelearnerslounge.blogspot.com/

Crafty Mommy Monday- Brown Bear continued

This post continues our unit on Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?.  If you didn't see last week's post, make sure to check it out for descriptions of and links to activities.

Here is a picture of Campbell doing the shadow matching activity.

Campbell really liked it, but again, it was a pain to cut out all the pieces...

This is a small picture book that Campbell colored from a tot pack on 1+1+1=1.  We colored the book earlier in the week and then read it throughout the week.  We also used the Looking At Me mini book and the size sequencing pictures.

This week we will be making a bigger version of our own book using the pictures from here.  We will probably use paint (God help us) since Campbell loves to paint so much.  

I think for fun this week we will also make the brown bear puppet from this page.

Here is a video of Campbell and I using the story re-telling cards for the felt board. She has really loved this book and her ability to "tell the story".  We've started not always using the book and just using the cards to tell the story.  She can do it really well until I get out the camera ;)

Maggie- 2 months

Maggie is 2 months old!

She now weighs 11 lbs, 3 oz!
(went from the 25th percentile to the 75th!)

This month Maggie has started smiling and cooing. It is so much fun for all of us to start being able to interact with her. She hasn't lost any of her hair and I'm having too much fun puting bows in it. Her eyes are getting to be a brighter blue so I'm hoping she'll have blue eyes like Campbell.

How clever are you? A Contest!

I recently posted this hilarious picture of the girls from Maggie's newborn photo session.

Robbie and I love this pictures so much that it's the background picture on our laptop.  Today someone sent me a message telling me how much she loved Maggie's birth announcement.  After I read the message, I closed out the internet and saw the picture.  I started thinking about the wording we could have used if that was the picture on Maggie's birth announcement.  Somehow I don't think we could have said "Campbell is so excited to introduce her baby sister" like we did on the actual announcement.

So, I want to see how funny the readers of the Compton Corner are.  What could have the announcement said if we had used this picture?  Tell us your idea as a comment.  I'll pick the 3 I think are funniest and put them up as a poll (we haven't done a poll in a long time!).  The winner of the poll might just get a prize...once I figure out something good  ;)   I'll edit this post when I figure out the prize.

Crafty Mommy Monday- Brown Bear, Brown Bear

Campbell is already so excited about this unit (which we will be doing at least the next two weeks)!  I put some of the new activities up and she has already discovered them and begun interacting with them.  

This unit is based on the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?.  There are tons of great activities on the internet based on this book and I'm excited to show you a few that we'll be doing.  There are so many that I'll post some of them today and then more next week along with pictures of this week's activities.

The first activity Campbell noticed that I put up is the story re-telling pictures on her felt board.

She then saw this shadow matching activity on the table and insisted on having it.  She seemed to get the point immediately but then got distracted (which I encouraged because I wanted to do this activity another day).  I'll be honest, it took forever to cut the pieces out, so I wouldn't do it again...

The next activity she found was this head/tail matching activity.  After printing, laminating, and cutting out the pieces, I put pieces of magnet tape (found in the craft section of Wal Mart, Michael's, etc) on the back and put them up on the refrigerator.  They are all together right now, but this week I'll teach her how to match them and then each day after she plays with it and matches them, I'll scramble them up for the next day.

I'll print these pictures for her to use with her Dot Paints.

For her sensory box, I printed little pictures from the story and put them in the box along with dried pinto beans.  I have a sheet for her to match the pictures to as she finds them.

And I'll be honest...I'm learning lessons along the way, too.  For example, earlier this week I thought it would be so fun to get some shaving cream and add food coloring for some cheap, toddler-friendly "art".  It was great- she loved it and it kept her busy for about 15 minutes (which is hard to do), but can you tell what I did wrong?

I fixed that mistake during our next art activity.  I found a cute shark paint set on clearance at Michael's for 99 cents for our unit on Ocean Animals.  Can you tell what's different and the lesson I learned from the shaving cream activity?

Check back next week for pictures and more Brown Bear fun!

Many thanks to makinglearningfun.com and 1+1+1=1 for the great activities!

A great offer

My good friend from college, Jaime, is the head, heart, and hands behind FinePrints on Etsy. Jaime has designed Campbell's birthday invitation and Maggie's birth announcement.  She is amazingly talented and does wonderful work.  She creates personalized invitations, announcements, Christmas cards, business cards, and has a new addition to her store: party packs.  I think they are adorable and you can be sure that the next Compton girl birthday party will include these...check them out!

She is extending a special offer to all readers of The Compton Corner.  Through the end of August, all orders will be 20% off if you let her know you learned about her here.  So if you have a party coming up or want to get a head's start on Christmas cards, check her out!

Maggie's Birth Announcement

Many thanks to Ashley Gillett for a gorgeous picture and Jaime Lengel Williams at http://www.etsy.com/shop/fineprints for the beautiful design.

Beach Trip 2010

 This year we took a fun family vacation with my parents, nephew Ethan, sister Sara and her boyfriend John, and my sister Julie, her husband Dean, and their three children, Jacob, Zachary, and Lydia.  We're hoping to make this an annual trip!  

Campbell had an amazing time and every day since we got back has said "I want to go beach!"  She even got out her bathing suit and started crying when we said we couldn't go to the beach.  Sadly, I don't have any pictures of her on the beach because I kept putting off taking the camera and then she ended up getting a little stomach bug and wasn't able to go on the beach on our last day.  So sad, because she was so cute!

The view from our condo

Maggie and her older cousin Lydia.  They spent a lot of time cooing at each other.  Many thanks to Nana for watching them so Lydia's mommy and I could get out every once in a while :).

Zachary had a very fun birthday party at Ripley's Aquarium.  Campbell loved all the ocean animals.

Including the sharks...

and the horseshoe crabs

(notice I'm wearing Maggie in the ever-present Baby K'tan)

Robbie had a lot of fun...he got to show off his new golf clubs and golf skills (thanks to the lessons he got for Father's Day) and he got to go jet skiing with Ethan

Campbell enjoyed putt putt, riding in our wagon to go get ice cream, and having picnics with Jacob and Zach on the patio

Nana, Pop, and the kids

Crafty Mommy Monday

We had a great trip to the beach!  We'll post more about the beach trip later, but I wanted to post some of the follow up activities I'll be doing with Campbell this week.  Campbell doesn't have pre-school this week, so we'll have lots of time to do some of our ocean-themed activities from past weeks (see the 2 previous C.M.M. posts to see those).  We will also be working on potty-training for the next few weeks...I'm sure there will also be blog posts about that...

(There are some editing issues with the linked documents but you get the idea...)

Our 1st follow up activity we'll do is one that I used a lot with my class after field trips and other special activities.  We'll be writing a book about our trip.  The prep was very simple.  I just took pictures from our trip and put them 1 per page into Microsoft Word.  I will let Campbell describe the picture and transcribe what she says at the bottom of each page below the picture.  Then I will assemble all of the pages into a book.  This activity is especially valuable for Campbell because her speech therapist uses pictures to encourage Campbell to use complete sentences by having her describe what is happening in the picture.

Here is the book (it is missing a few pictures that I hope to get from my sister of the kids at the beach).
http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B28RxtF1GjDcY2I5OGIwZjYtMTljOC00NGJmLWI5MGQtOGEwNDcyY2ZlZTVm&hl=en&authkey=CNzhx-MD

Another activity that I thought would be fun would be a paper and pencil activity where she has to circle all of the ocean animals.  I plan to use it to work on her answering yes/no questions by pointing to each animal and asking if it lives in the ocean.  If the answer is yes, I will help her circle the animal.
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B28RxtF1GjDcOGY1NTk3N2QtZWRlMC00NmU2LTg0OGEtNjA4MTcwZjllYmNl&hl=en&authkey=CLSk9p8B

We are also working on Campbell answering wh-questions (who, what, where).  This activity uses pictures to support the answer options.
http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B28RxtF1GjDcYWI1ZWEzMjktNmIyZC00MmM5LTk5YWMtYTU2MWE4ZGQ5Njgz&hl=en&authkey=CPDN5HU

For all of these activities I used clip art from Microsoft word or photos from our trip.

Check back next week to see our activities for our upcoming unit...
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You Hear?