amelia – The Thing With The Stuff

Powell Butte adventure

This morning we decided to bike over to Powell Butte and hike around. Powell Butte is about 7.5 miles from our house, along the Springwater Corridor, which google maps said would take us about 50m. I’m not sure exactly how long we took, but we stopped semi-often along the bike path, and had a nice time in the late spring sunshine. There’s a lot of bike theft along that stretch of the Springwater Corridor, so when we got to Powell Butte we decided against leaving the bikes, even locked up. I hiked a short spate either the kids, then doubled back and sent Tom in to hike a little with Amelia as Baxter and I snacked and rested. 4-year-olds have very different endurance levels compared to 7-year-olds, even when they’ve ridden the whole way in a bike trailer!

While we were hanging out, 5 riders on horseback came through and started riding on the trails! After our party was reunited once again, we rode back down the corridor, stopped for lunch at Cartopia, the food cart pod on 82nd (yakisoba noodles for the kids and banh mi for the adults) and then rode home. We were feeling our legs by the time we finished that last mile, and I’m pretty sure we’ll both be sore in the morning, but we had a really good time.

Pre-breakfast art time

Amelia’s new shirt

Check out the work of our little designer! Amelia made her first shirt this morning, before 6:30am, using just a small length of fabric, a pair of scissors and some yarn. “I made it short sleeved because today’s going to be a warm day.”

She made armholes by holding the fabric up to her body and estimating where she should cut — which is really hard to get right! The fit on her is pretty amazingly great, considering. Do I need to get this girl into some kind of sewing or fashion design class?

Not a creature was stirring

Isabella’s Dream

Amelia wrote a story and one of the guides at her school typed it up and printed it out for her. It’s based on this collage. Not sure who made the collage.

Breakfast daffodils

Lazy Sunday morning with Legos

A girl and her cat

The future

The kids decided their professional goals over breakfast. Amelia is going to be a microbiologist, and Baxter is going to invent a microscope that can see inside of atoms. Amelia will get the first microscope Baxter makes.

Climber

Letter cards

Amelia came out of her room this morning with a set of “letter cards” she had made “for Baxter’s classroom.” I asked her how she imagined the kids in preschool using them, and as she tried to explain, I suggested she try to show Baxter how to use them. Hilarity ensued (for me at least). She’s ridiculously patient. An excerpt:

Amelia: “Now I’m going to teach you some double sounds.”

Baxter: “Ugh, I don’t know ANY double sounds.”

Amelia: “That’s why I’m going to teach you.”

Another game she made up with the “letter cards”:

She puts out three letters and explains to Baxter what they all are. Then she asks him to identify them back by asking, “Can you touch B? Can you blow a kiss to E? Can you sing C?”

I think it’s interesting she wants to teach the kids letters because at their school, all the kids focus on phonemes first, not letters. 🙂 That said, phoneme cards might be harder to make than just a bunch of slips of paper with letter on them.

Bax got silly pretty quick and the lesson devolved into play quite gracefully:

“It’s not time to be silly right now, Bax. OK, you’ve had enough learning.”

Pictures of the kids

Tom’s been in Texas caring for his dad for the last week, and I’ve been sending him lots of every-day photos of the kids. Here are some of my favorites.