So I have gotten so far behind on these posts. This was one of the last weeks of March and I’m writing this in July. Oops. For sure next year I want to do more of a monthly highlights for blog posts.

We kept this week really simple. I got a bunch of books about spring from the library and of course we made coffee filter butterflies. We love coffee filter crafts. The tie dye look is just too cool.

We have also been going to open gym at a local gymnastics place. Millie becomes more bold around the other kids. She is very extroverted. The usually daring Charlee becomes more cautious around the other kids and sticks pretty close to me. It’s so good for them to practice social skills and gross motor skills. Plus it’s just plain fun.

Welcome spring!

Woohoo basketball! My favorite sport. I’m so behind on posting these. But we have been so busy I haven’t had time.

I made a bracket for the girls favorite books and called it “book madness”. It was so cute to watch the girls choose which book was going to move on to the next round. When it came down to the finals between “Smarter than a Monster” and “Good Night Owl” they had the hardest time picking. Charlee kept pointing to both. But in the end Smarter than a Monster by Brandon Mull won out.

In addition to our bracket we brought in the girls tiny basketball hoop and played with it a lot together throughout the month.

Millie wasn’t too into the basketball theme but Charlee was all about it. We were showing the girls what a slam dunk is and turned on some slam dunk competition videos on YouTube. Every time they dunked it Charlee cheered.

We didn’t actually watch any March madness games because we don’t have cable and Millie wasn’t that interested. But I for sure want to continue the bracket tradition! It was so fun to have something to do every single day.

Millie loves Valentine’s Day so we celebrated for two weeks.

We picked out some inexpensive decorations at the grocery store and the girls loved them. I also let Millie pick out some things for a valentines gift for Charlee. She picked Hershey kisses and a plastic heart necklace. I snuck and grabbed some more of the same thing to be her gift from Charlee.

From me they got T-shirt’s they wore all month.

They also got candy and valentines from some girls in their music class. Millie kept saying it was the best day ever.

Conrad got them some new episodes of blues clues on Amazon. They both liked that.

Millie made lots of valentines for everyone in our family.

Here is a picture of Millie giving her valentine to Charlee Valentine’s Day morning. Enjoy the mess.

We made red beet pancakes for breakfast. Millie noticed the beet stems were very juicy and had the idea to use them as stamps! Conrad and I thought the pancakes were gross, the beet flavor was so strong. My sister tried one and said “wow you took the fun out of pancakes”. But the girls gobbled them up with butter and red sprinkles.

We read lots of valentines books and watched plenty of valentines episodes of their favorite cartoons. It was a super fun couple of weeks.

I have been so excited to celebrate CNY with my kids since I was a kid. I am no expert on Chinese history, but I loved learning about all the traditions associated with Chinese New Year. Now I can learn more about them with my family.

First thing we did was place an order to an Asian market through Instacart. It was super awesome they delivered because it was about a 30min drive from us so it made my life a lot easier. We got the girls training chopsticks. Tons of mochi flavors that I don’t even know what they were (one had sweet red beans inside). So it was really fun, after it was delivered we all just gathered around the table and tried all the new treats.

Millie caught on to using the chopsticks right away. She thought she was pretty cool with them to say the least.

Charlee is still getting the hang of them.

We had fun making paper lanterns. We used gold paint and the bottom of an empty water bottle to stamp shapes onto them. Millie loved that.

As far as food. We had mandarin oranges and apples which the girls loved. The rest of this they didn’t really try. Lol but I had a blast cooking.

Nian Gao is a traditional CNY treat that was too complicated for me to make. So I made this Nian Gao inspired cake. I got all these recipes from https://whattocooktoday.com.

The cake had this crazy chewy texture. It was awesome. Very weird at first though.

I also made these spicy noodles which are Chinese and Indonesian inspired.

Our favorite dish was this chicken. Mmmm mm.

We also watch some YouTube videos about Chinese New Year and read some books. We also watched Ni Hao Kai-Lan which is an American show that teaches Chinese words.

My main goal of this week was to try new things together and to bring to the girls’ attention to the fact that the world is huge! That there are people who look, talk, eat, and live differently than us, and that it is pretty awesome how diverse we all are. I feel like we accomplished this goal. Everyone had a lot of fun too.

For my Christmas present for the girls I got us tickets to a Van Gogh Immersive Experience, so naturally we had to take a week to learn about him!

We started watching this YouTube video together:

It summarizes Van Gogh’s life and briefly mentions that he cut his ear off. I didn’t think Millie was paying attention, but when he said he cut his own ear Millie looked at me wide-eyed and said “Is he kidding???”. It was a really good opportunity to talk about mental health and how sometimes things just don’t go right in our brain. We talked about how he went to a special hospital that helped but that he was sick for the rest of his life. She understood a lot better than I expected her to. Then, we moved on to looking at some of his paintings.

I printed some coloring pages from the Van Gogh Museum website, which I spent a ton of time on myself reading all about Vincent! I learned so much and stayed up way too late. Anyway, Charlee and I enjoyed coloring. It’s just not Millie’s thing.

Millie did however paint her own version of starry night and loved that.

Throughout the week we watched every episode of Little Einsteins with a Van Gogh painting. The girls loved that.

On Thursday it was finally time to go to the exhibit! It didn’t go totally as planned, it turns out it wasn’t as child friendly as the website claimed. Charlee was being a toddler and being loud and someone asked me to step out with her until she could be quiet or come back a different day. I wasn’t sure what to do or say so we just didn’t stay long. But the girls had no idea what was going on and had a blast.

The paintings were all projected on the walls. Millie asked me to take this picture of her with Starry Night.

Probably my favorite feature was going inside Van Gogh’s bedroom painting! I didn’t have time to get a good picture but it was awesome. Millie recognized it from Little Einsteins.

At the end is a big room that has 360 projections. Paintings on the ceiling, walls, and floor. When we walked in the sunflowers were on displayed and Charlee was so excited. She was shouting “flowrs!” (That’s the closest spelling I can think of to how it sounds when she says “flowers”). Anyway that’s where we got asked to leave and so we were only in there for about 15mins but both girls loved it.

They had coloring pages in the next room so we did that. Then we went across the street to Krispy Kream and I let the girls pick out a donut. They thought that was awesome.

We had a great time learning together. I didn’t know a lot about Van Gogh before this so it was fun to learn together.

So basically this week I was so behind in housework and so bummed out. I was reading about Chinese New Year and learned that one of the traditions associated with CNY is spring cleaning. I thought about how much funner it would be to celebrate in a clean home. Then I proceeded to do the most mom thing I’ve ever done and forced my kids to dedicate a week to cleaning. Well, not the whole week, but they did have to pick up their toys.

I made them cute little charts with their chores. Make bed, pick up toys, set table (Millie), sweep (Charlee). For the most part they have been happy to “help”. It would still be easier to do it myself but we are learning. We sang lots of clean up songs too.

This week was a short week with Martin Luther King Jr Day so we did kind of a mini lesson week. Millie has been taking all of the toys to her room so Charlee has nothing to play with. She is going through a phase where she just has to have what Charlee has. So instead of lecturing we are trying to make it fun too.

We read “Should I Share My Ice Cream?” which is such a cute and silly book that I myself, relate to on a spiritual level. We also read Pete the Cat and the Missing Cupcakes (I think that’s what it’s called).

We just asked her how she feels when someone shares with her, how she feels when she shares, how she feels when she doesn’t share, etc. and how sharing makes everyone happy. I told her I have a really hard time sharing too and that we don’t have to share everything but that most of the toys are to share.

We also played some beanbag passing games and talked about how sharing made the game fun.

Toward the end of the week she seemed to be doing better. It was fun just to relax and read and snuggle.