Preparing for my nephews’ first sleep-over at my house, I switched to teacher mode. At ages 3 and 5, my little love bugs have a very short attention span, so I decided to take a “learning centers” approach. I checked out 21 books from the Lake Orion library and planned corresponding activities for many of them. In addition, I had gone cuckoo-la-la at the Dollar Store, stocking my pantry with coloring books, markers, crayons, construction paper, sidewalk chalk, craft supplies, and Play-Doh. I designed a nature walk scavenger hunt and prepared some music-and-movement games. I stumbled upon the website krazydad.com, where I found and printed piles of mazes (some in dinosaur shapes!).
Unfortunately, Nico and Paul had “Superhero Letters and Numbers Day Camp” until 3:30, so we got off to a late start. We managed to cram in a lot of fun, nevertheless.
Scootered to the field and kicked the soccer ball around.
Nico’s more than a little obsessed with crayfish, so we read the book About Crustaceans: A Guide for Children (about 38 times) and then Tony and Nico rigged up a crayfish trap. Their hotdog bait lured half a dozen little bass into the trap, but alas, no crayfish wandered in.
Paul made lots of rainbow spaghetti with his Fun Factory.
Rain dampened our al fresco dinner, so we took the mac-n-cheese inside.
After reading The Rainbow Fish, we stuck colorful paper and tinfoil “scales” on paper fish and decorated foam fish with self-adhesive stripes, googly eyes and glitter glue.
Around 8 p.m., they wanted to play in the lake. So hard to say no to these guys! (They forgot swimsuits, so they swam in their underpants.)
In the morning, we visited the library to return our books, play in the puppet house and toy boat, and attend Legos at the Library.
Tonight, I had to say good-bye to Nico and Paul (and the rest of the family), but I’m so glad we had this special sleep-over before heading back to India.
