our "thanks" and "giving" trees

kalia gluing on the trees

cut out letters- waiting to be glued

finished trees

kalia putting her leaf with what she is thankful for on the "thanks" tree

I saw this idea online and fell in love with it. So the other rainy afternoon, I took a piece of poster board which i meant to be a potty chart and cut out two trees - a "thanks" tree & a "giving" tree. Each day if we have something to be thankful for, we write it on a leaf and put it on the "thanks" tree and if we have been kind or giving, we can put it on a leaf for the "giving" tree. I'm really trying to work on kalia being kind and feeling good about giving/sharing. It is definitely a work in progress! We are going to keep our trees up until Thanksgiving and then I'm going to take the leaves down and keep them to look back on and save the trees to use again next year. So far kalia has been thankful for making pumpkins, going to school, planting food (our carrots & corn). Kalia has been kind by sharing snacks with maya without being asked and sharing her toys today. Maya is thankful for her big sister playing with her (guess who thought of that one).

So maya climbed onto the coffee table yesterday and was crawling around on it! She used the dvd box that kalia used to use as a chair as a step to climb up. She also crawled out the front door - erik went outside and had closed both the door & screen, but i guess neither was completely closed, she opened both and crawled outside! Erik was right there, but I looked up, the door was open and maya was gone!

A couple times this week, while I was making lunch, kalia would go to her room and set up her tea picnic and make lunch in her kitchen. One of those days she came to me in the kitchen and said, "I only have leftovers today mommy and the cupcakes were in the refrigerator, so they are a little hard." I laughed so hard over this! She really picks up on everything! I immediately called mom and we had a good laugh.