Muffin Tin Monday- Veteran's Day

                                              

In honor of Veteran's Day on Thursday JDaniel had an American flag lunch. I guess it should be called a silicone tray lunch this week rather than a muffin tin.

The tray contained a bread stick cut into fourths, the tops and bottoms of meatballs (The center pieces were removed and used in my lunch.), daps of tomato sauce for dipping, and apple stars. I usually do a better job of balancing JDaniel's lunches with veggies and much less meat. After the fact I thought cherry tomatoes or grapes would have been better than so many meatballs.

I will do better next week when the theme is the food pyramid.

Glencara Irish Jewelry $50 Gift Certificate Giveaway

When I was in high school, my mom gave me a claddagh ring as a birthday gift. I love it and wore it for years. The claddagh is a ring with special meaning. When you wear it on your right hand with the heart facing out, your heart has not yet been won. If you wear it on the right hand with the heart facing in, you are in love. If the ring switches hands and it on the left and facing in it can be a wedding ring. It than means two hearts forever joined.

Glencara specializes in Claddagh; Celtic Rings and other Jewelry since 1978. Glencara is a family business, passionate about Irish & Celtic culture and the jewelry created is based on Celtic design and symbolism, centuries old.

The company is located in Ireland and they do offer FREE shipping and normal shipping time to the US and Canada is 4 days! You can also get FREE inscriptions (personalization) on rings over $40.00.

They have given me the opportunity to offer you a $50 gift certificate for a ring or jewelry pieceyou’re your choice.



How to win?

* Visit Glencara and tell me which piece of jewelry is your favorite. (1 entry)

For additional entries you can do one or more of the following:

*Follow Glencara on Twitter.

*Become a Facebook Fan of Glencara.( 2 entries)

*Follow me on Twitter or Networked Blogs (3 entries for each)

*Write a blog post about this giveaway. (1 entry)

*Enter another giveaway I am hosting. (1 entry for each giveaway)

*Twitter about this giveaway with a link back, you must also be following me on Twitter. Copy and paste: Glencara$50GCGiveaway@JDaniel4's Mom#giveaway (1 entry per day)

*Add my button to your blog. Please leave a link to your site.(3 entries)

*Add me to your blog roll. Please leave a link to your site. ( 3 entries)

This giveaway begins November 7th and ends November 22nd.That is 9 ways to win. The winner will be selected randomly using Random.org


Disclosure: I was not paid to host this giveaway. I was sent information about Glencara that I used in this post.

    

Adventure in Booga Booga Land Review

 

Adventures in the Booga Booga Land is a DVD put out by Tommy Nelson Press that I just watched with JDaniel recently. The subtitle of the DVD is Stories from the Parables of Jesus. When I sat down to watch it with JDaniel I expected to see a cartoon about a giraffe and monkey learning lesson about how to live life. I thought I would be able to sit with JDaniel and talk about what we were seeing on the screen and what each parable was teaching us. What I found was a cartoon that was very silly stories loosely based on the parables.

This video contained a lot of cartoon violence. Marty and Gerard are the cause of one characters many visits to a hospital. There is a lot of blowing things up in this video. JDaniel enjoyed watching it through once. I don’t think I want him to watch it again. The heart of each episode gets lost in all the silly activities in going on.

Maybe older children will love this and parents of older children will find a way to dialogue about its content. This just wasn’t the right fit of me and what I want JDaniel to watch.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this movie to review by Book Sneeze.

 

Great Posts I Came Across This Week- November 6

Christmas Related

Fawn Dear has a number of Christmas resources for planning in a post called The Best Holiday Planner - By You, For You!

Giver's Log also has a great Handmade Holiday Organizer. I love that you can print it out and carry it on a metal ring.

Mother Related

A time to be Faithful in the Little things... is an inspirational post by There is a Time. It is all about lessons you can learn from your children.

Sweetest Jane has a super post on How to Get Your Babies to Clean the Bathroom. JDaniel is big into cleaning and helping right now. Her little guy reminds me a lot of JDaniel.

Sellabit has a beautiful post about her daughter I really loved. She called her post Growing Up..

Blogging Related

Confessions of a Cookbook Queen has a wonderful post called Blogger's Code of Ethics. It is so well written and hits on really important points about blogging.

Child Related

Ready. Set. Read! has a great way of teaching vocabulary words and language skills while doing a puzzle. Her post is called Puzzle Problem Solving.

Love and Lollipops has a cute idea for helping your children learn colors in her post Colour Fun #9- Buckets of Colour. While you are there you may want to check out her World in a Box.

   

Read.Explore.Learn.- Electing to Change

Welcome to Read. Explore. Learn! This meme was designed to be a place for you to share the learning opportunities, crafts, field trips, and other activities you have done this week that tie-in to children’s books. I look forward to seeing ways you have learned with and explored books.

Steps:

•  Link your activity below. 

• Please place the Read.Explore.Learn. badge on your post or create a link back to this meme.
  
                                                      

<center><a href="http://www.jdaniel4smom.com/"><img alt="Shibley Smiles" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-wYnCaxCjpQ/TIbl9KccMVI/AAAAAAAAB98/vjalStjjb-I/s1600/ReadExploreLearn.jpg" alt="jdaniel4smom" width="150" height="150" /></a></center>

• Please try to visit at least three of the other people that have placed links below and leave a comment. I will visit each of you and leave a kind comment.

• If you are not linking up an activity and are just visiting, please try to stop by a few of the links below.

My Book Tie-Ins of the Week:

Ordinary Oscar by Laura Adkins reminds its readers that it is okay to be you. Oscar wants to be famous. He is bored with his color, his night eating, and sleeping during the day. He gets a Fairy Godsnail to grant him three wishes.  He gets each of them. The final wish is the only one that truly makes him happy. It isn't the wish to look stupendous and spectacular that makes him happy. It isn't the wish to be huge that fulfills his dreams. Can you guess what it is? Did you guess that he wanted to be ordinary again? If you did, you were right!
     

The Bear with Sticky Paws Goes to School by Clara Vulliamy is about a little girl named Lily who doesn't want to go to her school. It is boring. When she goes to visit Sticky Paws school she realizes, she misses the routine of her school. Sticky Paw's school is filled with chaos, messy play, and a little counting. He only wants to play and do work that focuses on him. Lily learns a wonderful lesson about school routines and in the end finds a friend who loves her school too.
     
Coloring and Tracing

 I printed a snail coloring page and we traced the outline of the snail together.
     
Playdough Fun

JDaniel has learned to roll snakes with play dough

We wrapped the snakes around the snail until JDaniel got bored with it and started piling play dough on the snake.

Getting Out The Vote!

Many elementary schools hold mock elections for their students. It gives them an opportunity to experience the voting process and grow in their understanding of what an election is. The first school I taught at in Virginia held a mock election my fourth year teaching. I will always remember it, because of a wonderful little boy named Clinton and his zealous desire to see his candidate win.

Clinton was a smart little boy. He loved learning and absorbed everything that was going on around him. He came in on Election Day all fired up about voting and the candidate he wanted to win. He had listened to the T.V. ads and talked with his parents. Clinton was filled with reasons his man was the best man to be president.

As the other students filtered into the classroom, I heard a loud voice from the coat closet in the back of the classroom saying, “I can’t vote for him. My dad used to work for Perot.” I rushed to the back of the room just in time to hear the tail end of the conversation. Clinton was saying to a little boy named Kevin, “Do you know what he will do to our country?” “I don’t care,” Kevin replied, “I have to vote for Perot.

I called Clinton out of the coat closet and asked him if had been trying to persuade other children to vote for his candidate. “Yes, I have,” he said, “They don’t have any idea who to vote for.” “You know they can pick anyone they want for president,” I told him. “My guy is the guy,” he informed me. “You know this is not a real vote don’t you Clinton? We are just voting to see what voting is like,” I told him. “Oh! No! This is real,” he said. Clinton went on to tell me that he was the only one voting in his family in this election. His vote had to count. His candidate needed to win. The other candidates would destroy our country. Bush needed his vote!

He was right. Bush needed his vote. When he came in the next day he looked crestfallen, the election had not gone the way he wanted it to. He was now worried about what would happen to his country.

I loved Clinton’s passion for voting then and I still love it now. Clinton has been old enough to vote for years. I hope the disappoint he had in American voting system in second grade hasn’t kept him from going to the polls.

   

Trick or Treating Pictures

We went trick or treating with our next door neighbors. JDaniel wore a Dalmatian costume his Aunt Kate sent him for Halloween. Nathan, the little boy next door, was a police officer. As you can see JDaniel was always a few steps behind Nathan in their search for and seizure of candy.

  

 He had a great time!   

Mandate for Change- Pacies Will They Go or Stay

JDaniel has a major problem with his pacie collection. There are four pacies in the collection that lives in his crib. These particular pacies have been in the crib for over a year. They have aided in JDaniel’s restful naps and uneventful nighttime sleep. They have traveled up and down the East Coast and have even visited Mississippi. They no longer work I was informed via the baby monitor in his room at 12:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Really what he said was, “These are not working anymore!” He repeated these words or words similar to them every hour on the hour until just before it was time to get up and go to church.

They are not working due to the fact that a certain two and half year old has pierced holes in them with his sharp teeth. The pleasure they once gave him disappeared literally overnight. I knew two of them were faulty. JDaniel has told me that they were now “Icky”. Yes, those were his exact words. They had been “icky” for almost a week. The other two must have been on their last legs or should I say final sucks since pacies don’t have legs.

JDaniel and I sat down and talked about what to do about the pacie problem on Sunday night. I mentioned that we had talked about giving them to the donation box at church for Christmas. “Maybe we need to give them to church early,” I said. That idea was vetoed. “How about buying new ones?” JDaniel suggested. “Well, what if we see if we can sleep without them?” I suggested. “We can see,” JDaniel answered.

He went to bed Sunday night with the pacies in his bed. “Please take them out,” he told me. I took them out. “Please put them back in,” he asked as I was closing his bedroom door. He curled them into the fist of his right hand. JDaniel slept all night without a peep. There may still be rough nights ahead of us. We seem to be moving on without them. I have my fingers crossed. It was time for a change.

  

Tea Party Lunch- Muffin Tin Monday

In honor of Election Day tomorrow JDaniel had a tea party lunch in a muffin tin. I love having high tea. JDaniel's tea is nothing like the ones I have had at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin or the Augusta Snow House in Cape Cod. He did really seem enjoy it as much as I enjoyed those.

There were vegetable cream cheese and turkey sandwiches, chocolate dipped cookies, and black grapes. The black grapes looked elegant to me and added a fruit to his otherwise carb filled tin. JDaniel also had a teacup of Lipton's Green Tea.