Easter Egg Hunt

We woke up this morning with a reading lesson. I was still in bed when Thomas brought me a handfull of letters and asked, "what does this spell?" With just a little bit of help on some of the individual letter sounds he was able to read at least 20 different 3 and 4 letter words. Some that I can remember are TOY, TOP, STOP, POT, PAT and HAT. He continued playing with the letters, matching them to their cards and sounding out the words, while I was in the shower.

We met our friends at Chastain Park for playgroup and an Easter Egg hunt. Thomas and Quinn found an inch worm on the playground. Thomas freaked out a little bit when it ended up on his shirt.

Finally it was time to hunt for eggs. Each family brought eggs to contribute. I have the coolest friends - the majority of the eggs were filled with toys or stickers instead of candy. The eggs we brought were actually egg shaped sidewalk chalk.



Here's Jacob and Cole showing off their loot.

Thomas thought he could hide under the swing to get out of the group picture.

Have you ever seen this kind of bug before? They were all over the playground today. Now that I am carrying my camera around everywhere we go I can take pictures of these kinds of things to remind me to look them up later. This is actually the larva of a ladybug! I had no idea they were so ugly and scary looking before growing into the familiar red with black spots.
Here is a link with more information about the life cycle of ladybugs, in case you are interested.


After more playing and pic-nic-ing at the park, our friend Quinn came over to our house to play. The boys all had a great time building train tracks and pretending to be dinosaurs.

While I was cooking dinner Thomas pulled out his electronic LeapFrog Word Builder. This is the first time in the 3 years that we've owned this toy that he has actually used it to build words. The boys usually just push the button that plays the alphabet song and then sing and dance to it. Tonight he played for a good hour putting in different combinations of letters to see which ones make real words. He immediately went for T and O. I thought because those are two of his favorite letters and they are in his name but then he said, "I'm looking for the Y so I can spell toy."  I asked him how he knew that T-O-Y spells toy and he said, "Remember, we spelled it this morning." I am amazed every day by the things he remembers!

Ryan went golfing with his co-workers today and he brought home a toy golf set for the boys. They played with it all evening. Thomas batted the balls around the house while Jacob pretended he was vacuuming with the bag.

Before bed we read several books. Jacob picked out Eat Healthy, Feel Great and Thomas wanted to read about volcanoes... again.

I wanted to continue the egg theme from the Easter egg hunt earlier but, poor planning on my part, I didn't get any spring time or Easter related books from the library so we skimmed through our big nursery rhyme book and found Humpty Dumpty and The Ugly Duckling. We also read Let's Grow a Garden (a book from my childhood) and What is an Omnivore. Thomas really got into the section about teeth and we looked in the mirror and at each other's teeth while learning to identify incisors, canines, and molars. We even took a peek at Mr. Kitty's teeth to see her long sharp canines. Thomas knew a lot more about teeth than I expected. He already knew that the front teeth are called incisors from watching Sid the Science Kid. He called them "cisors" but that's pretty close. He also told me that his baby teeth will fall out and he will get new teeth and that the tooth fairy will come and bring him a surprise. We've never talked about the Tooth Fairy before. Apparently, he learned that from watching Word World.