Laundry Day

Sarah goes to kindergarten next year.  I know she'll rise to the challenge like she always does, but it still doesn't seem possible.  I mean, we just brought her home from the hospital, like, YESTERDAY. 

Since she'll be among the youngest in her class, I want to try to prepare her as much as possible.  But it's kind of hard.  If she gets the slightest whiff of teach-iness from me, she goes into Evil Twin mode and all bets are off.  

There are some ways around her resistance to be taught by me.  The first involves an elaborate Cold War-esque ruse to wrap a lesson in a mystery inside an enigma, but I don't really have the patience for that.  The alternative is to sneak a little learning into playtime.  That's so easy with this age group, since the lines are still blurred between learning and fun.  

One thing I've noticed we need to work on with Sarah is fine motor skills.  Girlfriend is a triple-threat in dancing, baseball, and pool-noodle sword-fighting, but not so much on buttoning, snapping, or Legos.  If a tiny Barbie shoe gets stuck in a toy truck, she'll pass it off to Will "Meat Hooks" Brown, because, for whatever reason, he's got the hand strength
 and fine motor skills to fix stuff.  

Mostly because he breaks stuff in the first place. 

I've been giving her a lot of sewing, beading, and Play-Doh playing to do, and I've been looking into some other ways to sneak fine motor in. One of the activities
I've been meaning to do for awhile now is to have her hang clothes on a clothesline.  Simple, right?  But all of that pinscer-gripping is perfect for building strength in those little digits and getting them nice and strong for writing.

The other day, I finally got around to setting up a clothesline in the back yard. I gave her some clothespins and clothes, and away she went!

I'd seen Busy Bags with felt clothing for kids to string up, but I figured we'd use the real thing.  So, I hauled out some old baby clothes that I can't bear to part with, put them in a laundry basket, and brought them outside.

Both kids thought it was HILARIOUS that they could have been small enough to fit in some of those newborn onesies.  
Sarah thinks Dreft is the second-best smell in the world.  

Right behind cookies.

Will wasn't amused to the point of being motivated to abandon his mud pie.  

However, Sarah had a blast "hanging the wash" and practicing whistling while she worked.  

Believe it or not, it was a fun little activity for her, and it required minimal setup and zero cost for me.  I count that as a win-win all the way around.

Next up on my to-do list is to start a Mommy and Me journal, where we write/draw notes back and forth.  She's going to smell the lesson in that one a mile away.