Just a Typical Weekday Evening

Aside from Wednesdays (when we have religious ed) and every other Tuesday (when we have standing playdates with the Papkes), we like to spend the weekday evenings hanging out at home together. Those few hours between work/school and bedtime go by SO quickly!1st grade brings regular homework to the Hanson house. Here's Carter working hard on his nightly assignment at his drop-down desk in his bedroom. Typically, the work is designed to be completed independently but with someone being there to check in. So, we like to have one of us there to supervise (and keep on track)! Mrs. D recommended that Carter not complete the regular Math Home Link activity (that is part of the math curriculum) each evening because he's ready for more of a challenge. So, he completes 2 math problems from a higher order thinking math packet each evening! Besides the daily math, he has Making Words homework on Mondays (where they take specific letter tiles and manipulate them to create as many different words as they can and then sort the words in a variety of ways), a daily problem solving packet with a math problem for each day of the week, Wednesday Work (reading comprehension and making connections to text assignments), and Friday Book Briefcase (rereading the books he read throughout the week during his book club time in class), and 10 minutes of independent reading per day. Phew...talk about college prep! So far, he's loving every minute of it, though!
Homework time for Amelia too...practicing letters, numbers and shapes on Daddy's iPhone.
"I'm a good reader too!"

Monday Funday

Daddy was home from work today and spent the day raking up leaves. We couldn't resist leaving work right at 3:30 to arrive home early for some family fun outside!


"1, 2, 3, JUMP!"
"I'm not too sure of this..."

Mission accomplished...Carter had a great time and Mommy had a heart attack.

Playing in the leaves on a windy day is the BEST!


Two peas in a pod...
Make that 3 peas in a pod!



Catching a pop fly!
No Carter didn't strand his love for baseball...he just picked up an obsession with football as well. He says that's what he does EVERY day at recess - and he brings home the grass stains to prove it! (Gotta love Oxi Clean Laundry!)

A Spook-tacular Halloween

"We're ready!"
Fifi, our little pink poodle
Mario...complete with a pillow-filled big belly
Trick or Treat! The kids loved going door to door to collect candy! Amelia quickly learned exactly what trick or treating was all about...walking up to the door and holding her bucket up for some candy. With prompting, she responded with "tank oo" (thank you)!
After an hour or so of outside trick or treating, we headed to the citywide Halloween party, where we hit up "trick or treat alley" to get more candy than we'd eat in an entire year and play some games.


And, the winner is...CARTER! The city sponsors a Halloween coloring contest, and Carter won 1st place for all 1st graders in Bloomington! Congrats buddy!
Usually, house decorating fun has to wait until December, but this year, we found a gingerbread haunted house! We made the house a few weeks ago, but it couldn't serve as a table centerpiece because Amelia can climb the chair and learned quickly that she can easily sneak the candy off! So, it needed to stay on the kitchen counter for the month!
Our school sponsors a literary pumpkin contest for the month of October. The kids decorate a pumpkin like their favorite book character. Carter chose "Otto" from "A Fish Out of Water". Although it didn't win a place medal this year, we had a wonderful time making it together as a family. And, as Carter says "It's not important to win. What's the most important is that it was fun. And, I would've won if Daddy had make the mouth shaped like a circle like I said instead of shaped like a triangle."

A "Corn-y" Halloween Afternoon

We're off...to...
Sever's Corn Maze! What better way to spend Halloween afternoon than crawling through a maze of corn! We missed you Daddy...sorry that you had to work. But, we're glad that you were only gone during the day and could spend the night with us!
"I'm ALL bundled up and ready to go!"
We'll try not to lose you in all that corn, Carter!
What does 10,000 bails of corn look like? THIS! There was a pit filled with corn - at least 2 feet high! What a great time we had playing, flipping, burying, digging, and dumping hard corn!



"How deep is this stuff?"
Last picture in the big vat of corn...our toes were getting much too cold. But, we hit it up again as our last stop for the day before heading home! And, we thought of the fun quite often for days to come, as we found corn remnants everywhere around the house from our shoes, socks, and clothes!
They've thought of everything here! This is a mini-maze, a perfect size for little ones, made out of hay bails. It was SO much fun to watch the kids wander through it!

"I am queen of the hay maze!"
"And, I am king of the maze too!"
What trip to the corn maze would be complete with out a ride (or 3 or 4) down the giant slide. And you thought that the only giant slide was at the State Fair, huh?!
"Alice the camel has 1 hump..." Here we are inside of the "exotic" petting zoo!
And, the pumpkin sling shot was a big hit as well - even though ours didn't make it through the big mouth on the other side of the field!
"You guys...this maze is SO big that I just can't make it out of here without a nap!"
Grandma was such a trooper to trek through the entire maze with us!
On the hunt for all 26 letter signs...through America's largest corn maze!
And, they did it! Through the maze and all 26 letter signs were found! What a great job you did following the map!
Gotta take a ride on the display tractor before we head home!