My favorite of their selections is the blue pony, I did turn away the stuffed butterfly that Elena tried to include, but the pony would indeed be able to carry us if he showed up.

After we played with the bevy of toys we built roads with our blocks and then built an entire city using leggos and blocks. This was the first time Zhanna took imagination play and really locked into the theme and built on in (she most often takes a story line and then runs it back to one she prefers)

The field trip today was to the museum of science and industry- full size train, actual airplane to climb through, it’s a Mecca of transportation.

Later this week we’ll ride the “EL” with stops at a favorite bakery.

Art projects and cooking posts related to our theme will be posted later this week.

Once we got past the shock and awwwwww ( as in oh my goodness they are adorable) stage, we started to notice small things that the girls needed some help with.

The fact that both girls had small hand tremmors was pretty high on our list. The doctors chalked this up to effects from lack of nutrition and sunshine (read that as ricketts) and to potential nuerological delays that would take time to catch up/resolve. Basically the brain is trying to do so many new things that the signals start to get crossed up a bit, resulting in tiny hands being a bit more shaky than you’d want to see. Doing puzzles (especially ones with small pieces) was one of the recommendations we got from the team of the international adoption specialist that we met with.

That made sense, but puzzles are expensive (at least the solid wood ones we were looking at) and Elena in particular was getting frustrated by her inability to place the pieces easily.

Time to break out the playdoh. Rolling and smooshing it seems to have helped with the tremors and overall hand strength. Then one morning I realized that all those cookie cutters made it possible to create puzzles on the fly that required all the dexterity (pincer grasp, two finger pulls etc) that we were loooking for with the added bonus of no frustration since pieces can be squished into place when need be.

In our case we found that contrasting colors work best. Basically you make the puzzles twice and then switch the pieces.

After a while we added in matching, colors and shapes to the game turning it into a great lesson.

Now the girls make their own puzzles.

There are lots of ways to do this, but regardless of the “school of thought” that we choose to follow it will be really important to document all the lessons and skills that we cover so that the transition into “notathome school” won’t be frought with scary administrators testing the girls or making them redo any grades.

That is really what this section of the blog is all about. We are going to use it primarily to track and plan and document the learning, discovery and imagination building that we do around here.

I’ll include any resourcess we find really helpful and, whenever possible, the actual lesson plans and guides for any one interested.

The comments section and discusion forum pages are open for anyone who has suggestions, ideas, or even questions. We welcome you to start a topic and for others to join in. Some of the best ideas we’ve used so far started as tips shared by friends.