Notable quotables

Skating on a  perfect Caleb-sized pond in Duncans Cove. 

Life has been busy at the Sprague/Jeffries house. Work, a sick boy, a wild weasel loose in our bedroom (which seems to have shown itself out), and hunting for our first house!! Wow. It's definitely the first time I've posted a sentence like that!

Caleb seems to be bursting with questions and hilarious quotes these days, so I wanted to make sure I captured a few of them. During our morning commute, Cale has decided to play a game "Guys, I have 3 questions for you" he'll say. "First question, (and this is an actual string of questions from last week) how do boats stop? Second question, what does a bees nest look like? And last question, why do you have to work to make money." As you can imagine, these questions give us lots to discuss while sitting in traffic at the rotary!

A couple other of my latest favorite quotes are:

This morning before breakfast - "Mom, quick, I need an appletizer!"

He loves words, spelling and sounds so I was impressed when he said "I can spell machine - p...p...p...p..pachine. It's starts with a p." So close!

And when he was feeling particularly sick he woke up and said "I just don't know what will ever make me feel better." Heartbreakingly adorable.

Family fun with Photobooth

The games we play

I thought I'd write a little post on some of Caleb's favourite activities these days. I try to come up with things that are engaging and creative, and can keep Cale busy on days when I'm working from home. Here are some of the games we like to play at our house:

Treasure Map

 This is by far Caleb's favorite thing to do. We make several maps a day. Make one, find the treasure, flip the paper over, make another map and repeat. We hide one piece of lego at each clue, then a bigger prize at the final stop which can be a toy (that he already owns, but acts excited about), a sticker or a little treat (cheerios, piece of fruit or a little chocolate if it is a really special day). 

Road Map

This map even has a rotary (bottom left), and ants on the runway. Yikes!

Yes, there is definitely a map theme going on in our house right now. We love to draw roads for his toy cars to drive on, then add houses, grocery stores, airports, libraries, train stations...whatever we need until we've created a giant city. This is another great way to use the back side of old treasure maps! Lately we've been covering our maps with stickers, which is something Cale can do completely independently if I need to spend time on my computer.


Fun with Cardboard Boxes

We've been burning a lot of energy efficient logs in our wood stove, which means we have a lot of cardboard boxes floating around. They make great kindling, but I have been trying to do something with them before tossing them in the fire. Here are a few things we've had some success with.

Robot head! Buttons for on/off, volume, talk in a funny voice, etc. make for lots of laughs. 

We had more fun making these masks than actually playing with them, but I still think they are cool, especially Caleb's owl mask. 

Animals and airplanes!

Cards

 

What? Can a toddler play cards? Apparently so! We started playing 'black or red' in Jamaica and Cale loved it. Just take turns guessing if the next card in the pile will be red or black. If you are right, you keep the card and get a point. If you are wrong, move to the next player. First one to 5 points wins. Super simple, but good fun. 

Hope this has given you a few ideas of what to do next time you are stuck inside the house with a toddler! I'd love to hear any other crafty ideas you have, especially ones that use lots of cardboard!