The Eclipse Let Down

I got myself up before the kids this morning so that I could get them fed and dressed in time for the Eclipse.  My kids are late sleepers so I planned to get breakfast made while they slept.  It worked out well for timing.  I made some homemade Eclipse projectors.  I didn’t get glasses to watch, but I did that on purpose.  I figured at the kids ages it wasn’t the safest thing to try.  Too bad my husband and I thought about the welding helmet too late (it’s auto darkening and charges off solar power and its been sitting in the dark garage since we moved here almost 4 year ago). I got fancy with our projectors and made the pinholes in an S and an N design.  I was so excited.  I thought this would be such a fun way to teach the kids about the eclipse, letters, and shadows.  Boy was I wrong.  My kids couldn’t have cared less about it.  I pulled out the welding helmet hoping that while they played in the sandbox I could maybe get a few pictures.  That’s when we realized it wasn’t working so I could even get any good pictures with my nice camera. I finally got Samantha interested enough to at least try to use the projection we used and she was happy to see an “S”, but that lasted about 2 minutes (maybe).  Then I spent some time trying to attempt some pictures quickly, though I couldn’t risk much since I didn’t have the proper equipment to try to shoot the eclipse.  I was feeling pretty down.  This big event and I couldn’t even enjoy it.  I was feeling pretty much like a failure.  Thankfully we have Mother Goose Time to save the day.  The kids were fighting, sand was pretty much everywhere except the sand box so it was time to go inside and do something I knew would turn out well.

Today we got to talk about firemen and this was just the lesson I needed as well as my kids.  It was super fun and it just felt like we were playing the whole time.  We live near a fire station so we often see the truck go out and hear the sirens.  My kids love them so it was the perfect thing to lift my spirits and the kids sure loved it a lot more than mommy trying to show them tiny half circles on a piece of paper.  I let the kids choose which stuffed animals they wanted to “rescue” as they pretended to be firefighters catching people jumping out of a burning building.  This was a great thing.  The kids had to work together.  They needed to do something fun together after all the fighting that was happening this morning and on top of playing together we got some more gross motor practice in!  That’s a great thing for an almost 2-year-old and a 3-year-old! You’ll see in the pictures the delight they had in rescuing the Lion Guard crew.  I should back up a moment.  My kids never like to go inside once I’ve let them out.  I am always having to come up with creative reasons to go inside that makes it more exciting to go inside.  Today that was playing the circle time song! That got them in, we did our fun morning finger play song “I’m A Fire Fighter” (sung to “I’m A Little Teapot”) was perfect transition to get us into a more serious, but fun learning mode.  Before that though I let the kids draw with their sidewalk chalk and spray it out with the hose since we had to fill up the dog water as well.  Our morning was full! Going  from eclipse to free play, to your dramatic play, to circle time worked well for us today and has given me some new thoughts one how I want our days to go in the future.  Back to playing firefighter! I really enjoyed watching my kids work together to catch their stuffed toys and find a safe place to put them after.

I loved our craft time today.  We made a firefighter puppet.  It was another fun way to practice those fine motor skills and it’s great to see how much both my kids have grown in their coloring skills.  Nathaniel is actually coloring only on his paper, Samantha has so much more control and is able to color specific areas.  She colored her puppet’s hand’s black because fire firefighters need gloves so they don’t get burnt “like mommy’s wears when she cooks food.”  I sure loved that connection she made.  This craft gave them a toy to play with throughout the day.  It was something they made so they took pride in it and treated it much better than many of their other toys.

Today was a let down, but it was also uplifting.  We had a big huge historical once in a lifetime moment, but my kids would rather “play pre-school” than experience  it.  At least I can say I tried to get them to experience the Eclipse and while that wasn’t that successful at least they still did some learning today and had a whole lot of fun.