When I'm Not Sewing...

Well, as of late, I've been falling asleep as soon as I get Lil'Schep down for the night, but I've also got a few other things going on.  Right now, I've been focused on getting this little nerd educated:

We are blessed to have grandma providing his care during the day, and she agreed to follow a curriculum for him during these vital preschool years.  After some research and a bit of personal experience with it, we opted to purchase the A Beka Book curriculum for our son:

Lousy picture quality, but I was excited to get this special delivery!

There really aren't many books involved yet, so it's chock full of coloring/painting pages and arts and crafts aimed at teaching them letters, shapes, numbers, and vocabulary.  Overall, I'm really happy with it, and the customer service I received from them has been great. 

I spent a few evenings laminating smaller flash cards on my little Scotch thermal laminator. 

Once again, shoddy photo quality, but these are the Bible curriculum pages that I cut out and laminated.

If you want my opinion on this machine, it gets the job done.  Of course, I wish you could laminate something larger than an 8.5" x 11", but that's what the library is for!  A local library will laminate posters for $0.75/linear foot on their 24" laminator, so I'm saving my dollars to take a stack of roughly 100 posters to them sometime next month.  Before y'all ask, I have seen the YouTube videos of thrifty moms self-laminating posters at home, but given the investment that these posters represent, I'll stick with the professionals this time.  I obviously have no qualms about laminating stuff at home, but I'll save that for replaceable items. 

Along these lines, grandma has been going over the weather with our little guy everyday, so I made her some magnets they can use on their board:

I cut these out on my Cricut, and laminated them with the same Scotch machine I mentioned earlier. 

I spy my new Cricut in the background!

I stuck some Scotch magnetic tape on the back, and voila! 

Whaddya know?  A bolt of MM Glitz?  Perhaps I'm using it in BabySchep's nursery???

Durable magnets!  I'm looking forward to using this technique for other learning tools for our kids. 

As a working mom, I often feel guilt that I cannot be there for my little boy (soon to be two!), but finding the energy to use my God-given crafty abilities to enhance his education does warm my heart.  When the time comes, I think I will live for working on school projects with them!  I'm just starting to learn how all you crafty mommas out there feel!  Well, until next time, God Bless!