{"id":945,"date":"2010-09-29T23:39:09","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T03:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/?p=945"},"modified":"2010-09-30T00:01:50","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T04:01:50","slug":"fallintheforest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/2010\/09\/fallintheforest\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall in the Forest- a spontaneous “welcome fall” event."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It was a couple of Thursdays ago when Alexander came up to me after several minutes of playing by himself (gasp!) and asked.<\/p>\n

“Muma- what can we do?” “I don’t know, what would you like to do?” “We should have a party!”<\/p>\n

We occasionally have little pretend birthday parties for the choice character of the day- sometimes more or less elaborate, so this was not an uncommon request.\u00a0 But being up for a real event of some kind and knowing Grammy & Grandpapa were coming for the weekend anyhow, I decided to go with it, and make some fun out of it.\u00a0 “Okay, what kind of party- what would you like to do?”\u00a0 “Let’s make a list!” said Alex.<\/p>\n

And so it began.\u00a0 I let him pick pretty much everything.\u00a0 Who should we invite? What food would you like to serve?\u00a0 What decorations should we have?\u00a0 When should we have it?\u00a0 Do we need invitations?\u00a0 What games do you want to play?\u00a0 And we themed it Fall in the Forest, and transformed our cluttered classroom into a festive little autumn party lounge.\u00a0 (We even got Papa to finally move his weight bench, so now we really can<\/em> use it as a classroom!)<\/p>\n

And I also made Alexander help with as much as he could.\u00a0 Muma printed a picture for the front of the invitations but Alex ‘wrote’ everyone’s name inside.\u00a0 He helped paint big green and brown papers, tape them together, muma cut a tree, and Papa taped it to the wall.\u00a0 He called Nana and asked her to bring forest stuffed animals and a couple items on the ‘menu’.\u00a0 He helped place decorations, directed the ceiling streamers, set up chairs, picked out foods in the store and poured chips into the bowl.<\/p>\n

And wow- was he excited!\u00a0 Even Nana said it just kindof perked him up and brought him ‘to life’.\u00a0 He talked about it all day Friday telling everyone the details, and kept asking- ‘when is it time for my party?’\u00a0 We left it pretty open to ‘sometime Saturday night’ but when Miss Sammy said they’d be over about 7:30- we figured that was just about right.<\/p>\n

It was a laid back but grand time.\u00a0 The twinkle lights set the mood for pin the tail on the raccoon, a forest treasure tray memory game, and of course the Elefun game (elephants live in the forest right?)\u00a0 We dined on chips, pretzels, dips, m&m’s, popcorn, and strawberries & bananas.\u00a0 We had some good grown-up chatting time while kids played in the other room.\u00a0 And we topped off the evening with fun fall cupcakes complete with Welcome Fall signs that Alex & Nana picked out.\u00a0 It was just a really good time for grown-ups and kids too.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a>
\nYesterday we finally got around to taking down the streamers from Alexander’s little event.\u00a0 It was just as fun to watch him run around in the dangling crepes as they hung half-down, then run and jump into the pile as if it were a pile of leaves, have them dangle all over his head, toss them up into the air, then ‘rake’ them together and do it all again.\u00a0 Even Muma got into the action.<\/p>\n

And now, fall is here indeed.\u00a0 We’ve been watching out for colorful trees as we’re out and about and are looking forward to spending some real time in the forest’s autumn splendor.\u00a0 Welcome, welcome fall!<\/p>\n

-act. Sept11,2010<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a couple of Thursdays ago when Alexander came up to me after several minutes of playing by himself (gasp!) and asked. “Muma- what can we do?” “I don’t know, what would you like to do?” “We should have a party!” We occasionally have little pretend birthday parties for Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,13],"tags":[408,195,197,198,50,412,82,97,54,104,146,49,405,196],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":976,"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/winklerworldonline.com\/sda2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}