may your joy be like the freedom to cover your face with frosting after the celebration of a friend’s birthday with warm water and giggles to get as clean as you deem necessary with more friends following your lead while bing crosby plays in the background knowing your mom will be back soon all the while wearing your pajamas at preschool where the temperature inside is 38 degrees warmer than outside.
joy like that.

merry christmas with love from new creation preschool.

oh, the elf on the shelf. the great fad, the commercialism, the bandwagon, the misleading antics…well, here’s how I think of it: like tom, tom the leprechaun. a sneaky, clever, well-meaning, magical creature (and I think I have the most fun in the whole thing…).

I mean, this tricky friend turns into a doll every time we’re around. he must have been alive when we were gone or else how could he have made himself a duct tape swing? and he was obviously running around our room the day he spilled my coffee. so, we’ll keep his shelf ready for him, even though he’s never been there so far! oh, buddy, you’re a tricky friend. the treasure of conversation he has initiated alongside our j is for baby jesus theme is precious. as I posted on facebook this week:
sacred. I learn every day myself.

we’ve had weather that has beckoned us outside. one of my favorite activities from a warm day: removing the kernels from cobs of corn.

so golden!

so satisfying!

so hopeful that “some raccoons or deer that aren’t afraid of town or dogs that are hungry and are allowed to eat corn or people who like to chew hard corn because this really is just corn that is hard” will come to eat some!

we took the week to celebrate the feasting elements of thanksgiving.

and since it was i week, we talked a lot about ingredients.
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we made play dough pie crusts…a new kind each day. 
and wow, what to do when it’s too wet? add a dry ingredient! too dry? add a wet ingredient! 
this corner of our room brought more constructive play than anything I’ve ever had going on. what a joy. (the mixer was actually used to make the play dough and then unplugged. after conversations about electrical appliance safety, what to do when you see a machine like this at home or somewhere else, etc, it was used for make believe.)– – – – – – – – – –

we made turkeys too…using paper painted the week before, the shapes were layered and glued in all sorts of ways. I wish I would have taken more photos!

– – – – –we mixed spices (ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg) and sprinkled them on a paper pie covered with glue. the next days the glue had dried (i mean, the pies baked all the way on our family corner stove top) and we could do some fraction work by cutting the pies apart!

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thankful and grateful and living in the moment…

a teachable moment…and it even went with our letter of the week!

here is a preschool friend and her dad who is also a teacher showing us how they use the inhaler. impressive! interesting!
if you go to our facebook page, you can see the video. it will be worth the investment of your time.