Brainy Baby Goodies

We were SUPER lucky to win one of the giveaways over at 1+1+1=1 for their 1,000 Subscribers Celebration. We won an Animal Puzzle game, where each animal has 3 separate puzzle pieces to match up, and on the opposite side is the name of the animal that you can use to learn how to spell.

It was also the perfect prize for Jase, seeing as how he loves animals and has been working on his letters and just beginning to spell, now.

Something a little.. odd happened, however, and when we received our prize in the mail, it ended up being 5 Personalized CD's to children that I have never heard of before. Somehow our prize got messed up with someone else's order! I contacted Brainy Baby right away to let them know what happened and WOW, their customer service is absolutely amazing.

Not only did the lady that I worked with apologize over and over for the confusion (hey - this was a giveaway! it's not like we were missing out on too much!), but she insisted on making it up and having us choose an additional item from their website. I went ahead and picked the similar Numbers memory game that they offer, since numbers are the next thing that I want to start working on intensely with Jase. I'm keeping these saved for Christmas, though.

So, you'd think that'd be enough, right? Obviously not in her opinion! When we received the package, not only was there the Animal Puzzles and the Numbers Memory Game, but she sent Jase a Brainy Baby T-Shirt (which you can see him wearing in the photo above) and 3 of their books for Preschoolers (1 of which is also being saved for Christmas)! Like I said, the customer service offered at Brainy Baby is so incredible. Go check out their website to see all of the awesome products that they have!

Now, I'm going on and on about how amazing Brainy Baby is, but none of this would have even been possible without the amazing family over at 1+1+1=1 for hosting such a great assortment of giveaways! We are super, super thankful for their kindness - so be sure to check them out! They always have some really amazing ideas for toddlers that I love to use with Jase.

T

The Letter T! For T Day, we made a Train. Jase decided that the cars of the train were holding animals, so he drew cages to keep all of the animals in.

Jase also helped his Grandma make Taco Dip. After stirring up the mix, he...

Spread dip and the lettuce...

Sprinkled Cheese and Tomatoes...

and made one big clump of black olives =]

S

The Letter S! For our S Day, we made this Snake. We also read " Secret Seahorse" by Stella Blackstone, but moved quickly onto our next letter, so we didn't do much else besides our Tracing and Find a Letter worksheets that we do for each letter.

By the way - each day, we've added a letter to our letter chain when we finish up. We erase the letter from our whiteboard, say "Bye Bye S!" (or whatever letter it is), and then add that letter to this chain, and it's getting quite long! I picked up the cute letter stickers that hold the paper chain pieces together from Michaels in their $1 section. Jase has a fun time trying to find the letter of the day in all of the stickers (and hasn't seem to caught on to the fact that they are all in order.. lol) I plan on using the letter chain possibly as a review of the entire alphabet once we finish all of the letters up.

Q & R

Q is for Quail! We really didn't do anything else for Q, so we combined it with...

R for Rabbit! We also made a Rainbow by going through a bunch of magazines and cut out items of individual colors and then he glued them on in the appropriate areas on the rainbow. He did such a good job at it, and I really like how it turned out. I was expecting it to take just an hour or so, and we ended up doing it in 3 different sessions of 2+ hours each, so be prepared to spend a lot of time on this project! Also, have a lot of magazines on hand - this took about 10 magazines, and towards the end I ran out of Family themed ones and had to switch to fashion magazines, which led me to saying, "No, let's not put bras on our rainbow.." along with a bunch of other.. "adult" themed items..lol.

P

Wow, were really behind with our posting. Hopefully I can catch us up a litle bit today. For P day, we made a Penguin and read the book "Penguins, Penguins Everywhere!". I also came across this yummy recipe for Peanut Butter Patties over at Glamour Moms. Click on her link below to go see it - I strongly recommend it! It sounded like quite a bit of icing, though, so we cut the recipe in half for the filling part and still had some left over, so unless you like a lot of frosting, you could probably do the same!

Last, Jasey has been really interested in photography lately - he always wants to use my camera and go around the house and take pictures of everything that he can. Since it was P Day, we went on a walk to the Park and I let him take the camera along to work on his Photography. Below is a collection of what he has picked out to be his best pictures.