Book inspired projects

I am sitting here, with my laptop on my lap, in the car, in the garage of our home, while Damian sleeps in his car seat. He fell asleep on the way home and my hubby brought my computer down to the car so I could at least blog while Damian naps. And yes, naps really are that important to me, they make the rest of the day a happy one!

Now on to what I was going to write…a friend commented on my last post, asking me which book started Rylan’s fascination with dinosaurs, and answering it kind of took me down memory lane a little! “Dinosaurumpus!” was the book that started it all.
I innocently took it out of the library, never imagining where it would lead us! We eventually bought the book, and read it many, many times. I had read it a couple of times to Damian, but it is only in the last few weeks that his interest in dinosaurs has blossomed, so after Chelsea’s question, I pulled it out again and read it to him, and he is in love! I think I will be reading it a whole lot, a second time around! :) That’s okay, it is a fun book and I read it so many times with Rylan I started to develop a rhythm and now it is almost like a fun song. Rylan loved this book so much around his second birthday, we even had a Dinosaurumpus birthday party for him.

{I made this out of construction paper and it took up almost the whole wall of the dining room in our then apartment.}

Thinking about the boy’s favourite books, led to “My Big Brother”, only Damian’s favourite book for about 6 months around the age of 12 to 18 months. There were days when he asked me to read this book to him 10 times. Another one I knew off by heart. It was his favourite because he adores his own big brother oh-so-much, so how can a mom resist?

I kept reading it to him and then one day, said to Rylan, “Why don’t we make him his own big brother book”, so we set off to do a photo shoot. Rylan happily helped me re-enact all the images in the book by Valerie Fisher, and after 45 minutes we had all the pics. I bought a special album, and slotted the photos and the words in (which I had typed up and printed out), then Rylan gave it to Damian. It was an instant hit! We did this project probably about 6 months ago, well before I started this blog, but I thought it would be nice to share.

{Our cover - model Rylan}

Hope you all have a blessed weekend! See you on Monday!

A lighter footprint

Our family has lived in many places…South Africa, Swaziland, Israel, and now we have recently settled in beautiful Hawaii…we hope that in exposing our children to many cultures and countries, as my husband and I were as children, they will grow with a more global perspective and greater appreciation of this beautiful planet that we live on.

Rylan at the tender age of four is already getting a head start…passionate about all things animal and nature, he asked me a few weeks ago whether we recycle (pointing out to me that if we didn’t we would be endangering the polar bears because the arctic is melting thanks to global warming, yes, the things out of a babe’s mouth!)…well, on this little island they don’t do curbside recycling collection, just regular garbage (something I was very disappointed with when we moved here). So, we did some research and found out that they do have recycle collection centres, two of which are not too far from where we live.

This gave rise to one of Rylan’s current school projects - helping with the recycling collection, sorting, and disposal. The first thing we did was make sorting bins for our garage. In the spirit of recycling, we made them out of our leftover moving boxes and added colourful signs which he and I made together. We only have three boxes, because that is all they have collection bins for (well, they also have a bin for aluminum drink cans, but we don’t drink soda, so no need for a box for that). Here is the finished project in a corner of our garage:

Every time we drop off the recycling both Rylan and I feel immense satisfaction that we are doing a little bit more to lighten our family’s footprint on this beautiful world God has given us.