4th of July

 Melodie and Rocky spent the day swimming at a friend's house. That night we went to a friend's house for BBQ and fireworks. Fireworks aren't legal in our city, but they are in the next city over. I think this is the fourth year we've spent 4th of July at her house. But first, I had to do Melodie's holiday hair.

I took inspiration from one of my favorite girl hair style sites, Cute2TryHairdos. I got all the decorations from a dollar store bow that I took apart. I've only been doing these fun hairstyles for a little over a year, but I love them. Melodie really looks forward to the holiday ones. Here's the one from last year.

 I love making cute food, so I was bummed not to make any this year. I just wasn't feeling up to it, so I'll share what I've made previously.

2009 Not a great picture, but mine are the red and blue star shaped rice krispie treats.
2008 & 2010 were cookies, but I didn't get good pictures.

These are from last year. I love the cookie/candy bouquet. Maybe, because I made two things last year, that makes up for this year. But back to this year. Good food, great people, and fun fireworks celebrating our freedom. Can't ask for more.

Announcement

America Week

While I'm still going to try to follow my schedules I've planned, I'm not going to post them. The reality is that I've been pretty sick and not able to follow them as much as I would like.
 So now for America Week. Here's what we did on Monday and Tuesday. First we read about why we celebrate the 4th of July. We read the Declaration on Independence (I bought a poster of it) and talked about how it was written in 1776. I found this website called Liberty's Kids. Melodie loved watching the "Now & Then" episodes.
 We also learned about fireworks by watching 3, 2, 1 Firework. I was surprised at how interested Melodie was in this. She loved going to the firework stand to pick out our fireworks for this year.
 We did our weekly alphabet, of course.

 And that's it for the beginning of the week!

The Rest of Bird Week

Wednesday
 Melodie loved watching all the bird songs on youtube.  Then we read this book:

This is the second Just Ask book we've read and we really enjoy them. After reading about why birds sing, we listened to bird sounds on the Canadian Museum of Nature website. It's actually a matching game. Mel enjoyed it so we did all four habitats.
 For the craft we were going to make bottle cap birds. I even saved bottle caps, but I couldn't find small bottle caps. They were all the same size, which would have made pretty silly looking birds. So Melodie cut out circles instead.

With the extra feathers she made a random picture.
 She played to games on the computer and liked both of them. Shapes: Starfall and letter matching: abcya.com. The letter matching was too easy for her, so she chose some other games to try on that website too.
Thursday
  We made two kinds of bird feeders. One kind was out of toilet paper rolls and one was out of bagels.

 I haven't been feeling well all week. She's in her swim suit because this was after her swimming lessons, but before going to a friends' house (they have a pool) that were going to watch her while I went to the doctor. On Friday we didn't get a chance to do anything (I was so bummed because the fun food was so cute!) because after swimming lessons I had to go back to the doctor (auntie watched her) and then she had tap. After that she wanted to stay with her auntie the rest of the night. Well, maybe we can do the fun food another time just for fun.