Rocky Mountain National Park

While in Colorado one of the little trips our family took was to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had planned to hike a few trails. However, Little Lady was pretty weary after a night of battling altitude sickness so we decided to just hike to Horse Trail Falls and hang out for there for a bit...we stayed for almost three hours! It ended up being a perfect spot for us. The path to the falls was a quick walk from the parking lots. The boys were happy to explore the falls and climb on the rocks, while Litte Lady rested for a bit. She actually fell asleep on a rock! Baby Z and I took a little rest too. When Little Lady woke up she felt much better and was ready to join the boys in their exploring.

After leaving Rocky Mountain National Park we went to Estes Park to window shop and indulge in some sweets. BabyZ got his first taste of ice cream - it was so fun to watch the pleasure and excitement all over his face.

To add a little excitement to hiking and walking I added Geocaching to my phone. Estes Park is the perfect town for geocaching, they have plethora of caches. The kids loved hunting for treasures and since they were occupied it gave Jer and I chance to slow down and enjoy the scenery.

Another fun thing we saw while walking around Estes Park was a bunch of elks. It was crazy how fearless they were, they actually kept trying to approach us!

We had some long time friends move from Illinois to Colorado this summer. It's hard to think of them being so far away! Sometimes Jeremy and I dream about gathering all our favorite people and forming a commune. Life is just better when you do it with good company. Despite the distance, though, we are determined to stay connected. They were about midway between Estes Park and Castle Rock so stopped by their new town for a pizza picnic and some nighttime beach swimming.

I think I have about two more posts full of Colorado fun...please bear with me as i stretch this out as long as possible. :)

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A Little Red Cardboard Barn

We've finished our farm unit and are moving on to a new theme tomorrow - but before we do I wanted share the barn we made. The wooden farm animals came with a beautiful handmade ark that we gave Big Buddy for Christmas a couple years ago. I would someday love to have a wood barn but it's currently not in the budget. So in the mean time we decided to improvise and make our own. I stumbled upon this perfectly sized milk box (4 gallons per box) while subbing and thought it would be sturdy enough to handle play. Hubandie and the boys used an x-acto knife and wood glue to build a barn shape. to get the doors to fold out hubandie used an x-acto knife and scored the inside of the cardboard We then painted with a basic primer and outlined a window and a door with painters tape. cardboard is very porous so priming is a must if you want decent coverage Big Buddy however insisted that we add more windows so it looked like the barn in our book The Big

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Preschool Syllabus: Dr. Seuss

Normally I'd do a Dr. Seuss unit in March around his birthday. We had to do one now though because on Saturday Big Buddy and I going on a date to a Dr. Seuss exhibit . The exhibit is only at the museum until January and I'm afraid if we don't go now we might not get the chance. We are of course reading lots of Dr. Seuss's books. A great advatage to studying Dr. Seuss in November rather than March is that all his books were available at the library. I also found a great children's biography which is perfect for preschoolers. Pebble First Biographies: Dr. Seuss We've read it a couple times and Big Buddy loves reciting all the facts he's learned WRITING CENTER ADDITIONS big buddy's name in sand paper letters, coloring pages & mazes from seussville.com skills practiced: fine motor, letter recognition, creativity, reading comprehension LEARNING "TRAYS" - I rotate these, setting out about four a day from which the boy&#

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Jack-O-Lanterns on the Fridge

Last fall I saw the idea for refrigerator pumpkins with face pieces in FamilyFun Magazine and have been anxious to recreate them ever since. It was pretty quick and easy and since the only thing we didn't have on hand was magnetic sheets ($1.50 with coupon at Joann's) it was also very cheap. my supplies: magnetic sheets, orange & black construction paper, white pen, tacky glue *i know they have self adhesive sheets but my Joann's didn't carry them glued (very messily) and ready to cut Both the boys were quite enthused when they discovered them after rest time :) Hopefully it will keep them entertained until we carve real pumpkins.

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Joyfully Weary

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