Countdown to Thanksgiving!

We're counting down the days to Thanksgiving here--literally. Henry asks multiple time each day how long it is until we go to California, at which point we have to remind him that Grammy and Grandpa Snow live in Rhode Island. But regardless of what state we're going to, we're all excited to see the Snows and introduce Rick and Derek to Elizabeth next week.

As part of our homeschooling, Henry's been learning about the story of Thanksgiving. He loves the books about Thanksgiving that I bought, and he's especially fascinated by the fact that he's related to one of the families that sailed on the Mayflower. (Greg recently confirmed the connection while playing around on ancestry.com.) Constance Hopkins (direct ancestor and eventual wife of Nicholas Snow) seems to have been singled out by children's book authors as a good Pilgrim protagonist, so strangely enough there are several books in which she is the star.

But besides the history lesson, what's Thanksgiving without hand turkeys? Henry was quite intrigued by the hand turkeys in one of his bedtime books, so he and Greg had a father-son hand turkey time this weekend.





We've also been discussing thankfulness. Henry and I made a special "thankful jar." At dinner, we write things that we're thankful for on slips of paper and put them in the jar. Most of the things are pretty mundane, but it's been sweet to have some time to focus on being thankful together as a family.





In addition to reading about Thanksgiving, we've also been learning about dinosaurs. Thanks to a PBS show on dinosaurs, Henry's become fascinated with them. It's amazing how much he's learned just from watching the show and reading a few books together. This morning he got creative with his two different dinosaur and fairy tale magnet sets, with these results:





He was quite proud of the fact that he'd thought to put the fish-like dinosaurs in the water!

Other than that, we've been plugging along with some phonics and number games. We played some Candy Land this past week...



...and Henry built a "mall" out of his wooden blocks during his rest time. I always love going in at the end of rest time to see what he's created or pretended.



Elizabeth has her four-month check-up this week, so we can't wait to find out how much weight she's gained. She seems to be thriving, and she continues to be an amazing sleeper--nearly 14 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night! She's finally losing her baby hair. Here's a picture from last week when she still had most of it:



And here's a picture from today. It's a little hard to see, but there's a lot less now! She may be bald as a bean by the time we land in Rhode Island.



And lastly, a great picture from this weekend.