Cinco de Mayo - What went down

Ya know, I'm pretty impressed with how much I managed to squeeze into the Cinco de Mayo celebrations.  We started our morning with a super cute e-card from Vinny that ran through a quick history and then suggested perhaps margaritas were better than history.  It gave me a smile to face the day with.

So, as planned (see the plan here), we first hit the whole air/land/water distinction.  Quite correctly she said that the bottle of air was empty, so that was cool, and I was able to do the presentation almost by the book.

There was a slight snag when I realized there was no balloon in the house for me to demonstrate how air fills a space.  Luckily, she has a ball that was a good substitute.

Even after naptime, when I asked her what was inside the ball, she said 'air', and that rocked my world I was so happy.  She also told me the elephant stomps on land, another big thumbs up.

And we also managed to talk about land water and air on the globe...also on the plan.  I sort of did the whole,  'this is North America' and showed her where we lived and where Mexico was, but it was more half hearted than the land/water/air lesson.  Though, Bella is always happy to cheese for a few pictures as long as she gets to peek at them afterwards.

We also added green, orange, and purple into the color tablets and she did a great job with the introduction of those.  And she didn't even call anything 'pink.'  See more of that joke here.

She wanted to do music, so we shifted the plan a bit to accommodate some time for Mexican music.  We checked out some videos on you tube of traditional Mexican dances, then we pulled out the skirts and danced the rest of the morning.  Bella insisted that I wear one of her skirts too, even though it only fit on one leg...luckily no pictures of that.  Just this clip:

My friend Emma came and joined us for our fish taco lunch.  Bella decorated the wall with her first taco...I think she was trying to keep it away from the cat, but it ended up splattered all over the dining room.  Thank goodness for the margaritas!  She ended up eating her lettuce and cheese and fish and salsa on a plate all separately and with a fork.

After our siesta, we hit the local library where we found the children's section empty of other patrons...which is almost unheard of.  So Bella asked the librarians if she could hold Happy, the resident guinea pig.  No pictures of that, because I was too busy making sure she didn't squish him.  It was super special to get to hold him though.  And when we went to check out downstairs she asked the librarian (without prompting) if she could "check these out please?" And that was cuter than I can explain in words.  She used a lot of "please" today.  Who knows...maybe I am getting through to her.

We talked about flags on the way home, looking for houses with flags.  Then when we got home we talked again about the countries of North America, and which flag belonged to America and Mexico (and Canada for good measure).  She colored her own flag, naming the colors along the way and we hung it in the room where the other flags are.

She wanted to put her name on her flag, so we got to talk about the letters in her name:

We finished our school day talking about whether the ball would be good if it didn't have air inside (and experimented with it) and got some energy out throwing the ball different ways (bouncing, rolling, etc.) both with and without air.

Daddy came home and we ate burritos and listened to more music before bedtime.  We really crammed it in today.  I fully expect tomorrow to be one of those days where we eat cereal all day and don't make it out of pajamas!