Mirena IUD and Depression

I'm writing this post in the the hopes that I can help even just one person out there who may be having the same problems I suffered through for four years.

Right after I had my second child I knew I wanted some sort of birth control, however, anything hormonal was not an option.  I had tried the mini pill after my first kid and spent three months on the couch thinking that was normal after having a baby.  Thankfully I talked to a friend who had suffered through depression and she suggested I stop taking the pill.  I did the next day and fell 100% better.

So fast forward 2 years to after the birth of kid number two and I was very clear with my doctor that I couldn't have anything hormonal.  I had heard about Mirena and liked what I heard - five years without having to think about birth control, no periods, no pills to take, etc. - but I was definitely concerned about the small amount of hormones that are in the IUD.  My doctored assured me over and over that since the IUD is in your uterus, none of the hormones ever travel through your blood stream and it would not affect me whatsoever.  I read through all the information I could on it at the time, which pretty much consisted of a three-fold flyer, and didn't see anything to make me concerned, so I went ahead and got a Mirena IUD.

When child two was about 8 months old we moved to the back waters of Florida and I started feeling depressed again.  Over the next few months it got to the point where I was angry about everything and couldn't get off the couch and so on.  Classic clinical depression.  I went to therapists who told me it was situational.  I tried three different medications that all made me worse than before.

We moved again, and I hoped this would remove the "situation" and I would feel better.  It didn't.  I saw more therapists.

All this time my relationship with my husband was pretty much nonexistant.  We were glorified roommates.  Physical relationships were a joke.  I didn't want it, and so it was always a fight.  Nothing was fun to me.  I wanted to stay home and do nothing.  Most everyday about midafternoon I would have to go lay in my bed and cover up my head because my anxiety levels had risen too high for me to cope anymore.  I was living in a dark box that I just couldn't get out of.

Then we moved again.  More therapy.  I didn't bother trying new medications because we didn't have insurance and I knew the side effects would be awful.  This is now four years after I had gotten the Mirena put in.  Over this time my depression symptoms had gradually lessened, but they were definitely still there.

Then one day a light bulb went on.  I realized that I had been feeling depressed since I got the Mirena put in.  The fact that my symptoms were slowly lessening made me think that it might be because the dosage of hormone in the IUD was slowly wearing out, which makes sense since I was about a year away from needing it removed and replaced.

So I went to Google.  The magic search terms "Mirena depression" brought up nightmare story after nightmare story.  I was not alone!  There were so many stories of people who had been suffering just like me. There were marriages ruined, relationships on the brink, lives practically destroyed.  It was so sad to read, but also so wonderfully hopeful at the same time.  Maybe I wasn't broken!  Maybe this was something that could be fixed!

The next day I called around to all the doctors in the area to find someone who would take my Mirena out without charging me $300 dollars.  I found a place, made an appointment, and three days later it was gone.

I knew I wouldn't have a miracle turnaround like after the mini pill.  But let me tell you, seven months later my life is where I never thought I would be able to have it again.  I'm happy.  I am able to enjoy things.  I leave the house willingly and sometimes have to drag my family because they don't want to go.  I've only had to crawl into my bed because of anxiety two or three times compared to the daily occurrence before.

I look back on those four years and all I see is fog.  I can't remember a lot of what went on.  I feel like they've been stolen from me, but I can't tell you how glad I am to be able to take the rest of my life for myself and not live under that cloud.

So please, if you have a Mirena and you've not felt like yourself, think about having it taken out.  Read the information that comes up when you Google "Mirena depression."

I've since found this quote in the Mirena product monograph:

"Patients with a history of emotional disturbances, especially the depressive type, may be more
prone to have a recurrence of depression while using MIRENA. In cases of a serious recurrence,
consideration should be given to removing MIRENA since the depression may be drug-related."


Nowhere in the information I was given when considering this product did it ever say that depression was a possible side effect.  But trust me, it definitely is.  And while I'm a little bit bummed that I now have to suffer through my period again, a week's worth of inconvenience is far better than a life of nothing.

Please pass this on to any friends or family you think it might help.  Please don't suffer needlessly!!

Preschool - Birds, Week 2

Day 1: Birds of North America

Today was supposed to be about birds in our area, but somehow it ended up being more about the bird songs of North America.  We first looked at a little fold-out bird guide specifically for Utah called Utah Birds.

Who knew there were so many!  We picked out the ones we had seen before outside.

Then we read The BLUES Go Birding Across America.

It was kind of long and involved, but having Ella help keep Alex focused allowed us to get through it all.

Then we read the book Birdsongs.

Then we went to the computer, and using the Web site What Bird, we listened to the bird calls of the birds mentioned in the book and ones we have around here.  Then the kids picked their favorite bird of the ones we've talked about and I printed out that page from a bird coloring book you can find here.  Alex picked the crow and Ella picked the Bluejay.  

After they finished coloring we read the book How Robin Saved Spring.

Ella is in love with this book.  She's crying right now because I won't read it to her.  (She's being punished.  I promise I'm not just ignoring her for the computer.)

Then we gathered up paper and pencil and took our bird guide and headed outside.  We walked around the neighborhood trying to find as many different kinds of birds as we could.  We had to be really quiet to find them.  Ella kept telling me to make my flip flops be quiet.  We found a magpie, robin, chickadee, sparrow, and quails.  It was a bad time of day to do this.  The next morning on the way to the bus stop we saw that many birds in one minute.  Oh well.

Field trip time!  We went to the Tracy Aviary.  Most of the birds there are from around the world and not just North America, but since everyone in the family was home today, this is the day we decided to go.

The kids loved the condor.  Ella declared it her favorite.  Alex first loved the pelicans, and then changed his mind to the peapock, as he calls it.

There were actually really attentive and interested in all the shows and talks we went to.  It was a lot of fun, especially watching Anton get whacked in the head by the great horned owl in the birds in flight show.

When we got back the kids helped Grandma fill the birdfeeder in the hopes of seeing some birds in our backyard!

Day 2:  Birds Around the World

Since we saw a lot of different birds from around the world on our field trip the other day, I didn't spend a whole lot of time introducing them.  We went straight over to the map with our hefty Complete Birds of the World.

I printed out little discs with a different bird on each one, and we looked the bird up in our book.  Each bird showed a map of where the birds live, and we would stick the disc up on our map wherever it belonged.  Some birds lived in more than one region, so we would pick the biggest one.

After we'd stuck up all the birds I'd printed out, we played a game where I'd flip the pages of the book and Alex would stick his hand in to stop me.  We would look and see what bird it was and where it lived.  We are really familiar with Madagascar and Australia now.  Who knew they had so many unique bird species!

Here's the bird discs if you want them:

I've labeled their names and where we stuck them on our map.

After that we read the book The Emperor's Egg.

Which was written at the perfect level for Alex.  Then we read Mud City: A Flamingo Story.

This one was a little above his level.

And that's all we did today.  A nice laid back day.  

You want to know what makes me super happy?  Alex was "reading" the book The Lion and The Mouse (I say "reading" because it has no words), when all of a sudden he screamed, "LOOK!"  I jumped out of my skin and turned to see what the matter was.  He pointed to a picture on the page and said, "It's a great horned owl!"  And sure enough, it was.  So he must be learning something!

Day 3: Birds of Prey

The end of bird week!  I actually liked spending this much time on one topic.  My kids have really absorbed it.

We started today with the book Amazing Birds of Prey.

We just looked at the pictures and talked about the different birds that are considered birds of prey and how they eat other animals and have special claws and so on.

Then we read Good-night Owl.

And talked about owls sleeping at night.

Then Hawk, I'm Your Brother.

A bit above Alex's story level.  I think if I'd spent some time talking about Native Americans and their culture and such and the desert, this would have meant more, but it wasn't really about how birds of prey act or anything like that.  Oh well.

Then we waited for Ella to come home to finish up our school day.  I had ordered some owl pellets from Home Science Tools, and we dissected them!  

The kids lasted about one minute doing this.  

Ella was disappointed that my big end of week surprise wasn't coloring.  Alex started doing his, but as soon as Ella abandoned, he did too.  He probably would have sat longer otherwise.  So I ended up doing all the dissecting of one pellet, and I left the other one for Anton to do when he gets home from work.  It was pretty tedious, so I would leave an activity like this for older kids.  Though maybe my kids' little hands would have been an advantage!

There's all the bones I found in my pellet, and you can see all the fur in the bag above the plate.  I would never have guessed this much stuff would have come from a pellet smaller than a golf ball.

Look at the teeth on that thing!  Speaking of teeth, Ella lost her first tooth today!!

(Excellent photography by Alex)

Here's all the bones laid out in their skeleton shape:

It's either a mouse or a vole.  The only way to tell the different is from it's teeth, and they're so small I couldn't tell whether they had roots or not.  Plus, I think this guy had at least 6 hands and feet from the number of minuscule bones I pulled out of the pellet.

So I thought this was pretty cool, but probably not for preschool!

And that ends our bird weeks!

Preschool - Birds, Week 1

Day 1: What is a bird?


We started out with the book Bird.

It's not very young child friendly as far as the text goes, but I just used the pictures and talked about them in words Alex would understand.

We talked about bird feathers and how they help a bird fly and keep them warm in the winter and keep some birds dry.  We talked about different beaks and how they are used to eat the different foods birds eat.  We talked about different feet - webbed, claws - and what they're used for.  We talked about their tails and how they are used.  We talked about some of their habits - migrating, changing colors, eating.

Then we read the book Birds.

This one was more on Alex's level.

Then we did a fingerplay that goes like this:

Two little blackbirds sitting on a hill,
One named Jack and one named Jill.
Fly away Jack.  Fly away Jill.
Come back Jack.  Come back Jill.

You pretend your two index fingers are the birds and put them behind your back when they fly away and bring them back out when they come back.  Simple, but Alex thought it was fun

Then we read the book Flap Your Wings.

This book would have been better on the day we talked about eggs, but I didn't realize that until after I read it.  And since Alex is right now sitting on the floor behind me reading it himself, I'm not going to complain.

Then we made a bird book.  I copied it out of our science book.  Each page has different birds on it.  Some needed beaks added, some needed branches to sit on, and some needed their wings glued on.  We looked up each bird and made sure they were all colored correctly.  It took a while, but Alex stuck with it.  Then we stapled it all together.

This would also have probably been better next week when we talk about the birds of North America, but oh well.  Everything bird kind of all melds together.

And last but not least, we played a migration game online.  Find it here.  It goes pretty quick so we played it a few times.  I also kept winning so we had to play until Alex won.

Another thing I would have had us do if I didn't think grandpa would freak out about it, we would have spread peanut butter on rice cakes and hung them in the trees outside.  But it would have been messy and attracted animals, and we wouldn't want that.  :)


Day 2: Nests


We started out today with the book Bird again, but this time we looked at the pages about nests.  We followed that up with the book Birds, Nests, and Eggs.

We focused just on the nests on each page today.  We talked about how different birds build different kinds of nests, some out of mud, some out of sticks, some by water, and some up in trees.  Then we used the duvet off my bed and built a nest for Alex.

While he was all curled up and cozy we read the book The Perfect Nest.

Fabulously funny book.  The kids have had me read it to them over and over again.

The we read the book The Magpies' Nest.

It's a story about after the creation of the world the magpies try to teach all the birds how to build a nest, but they don't all listen to all the instructions so they end up making nests all different ways.  It's a cute story and it describes how to build a nest.  So that's what we did next.  We headed outside with the book and followed the instructions on how to build a nest.

We started with a base of a rolled down paper bag and went from there.  We lined it with mud, then sticks, then grass (we used pine needles so as to not pull out the lawn), and then we put some acorn "eggs" in it.  Alex loved this.

Though he was pretty disappointed that we weren't going to build a mud nest on the side of the house like a swallow does.  He was pretty hooked on that idea and it took grandpa telling him he would lose a limb if he built a nest on the side of the house to get him to drop it.  :)  If the weather had been inclement, we would have made rice krispy nests instead.  And that's it for nests!


Day 3:  Eggs


We had big sister in tow for school today thanks to UEA, but we had fun anyway!  We started by talking about where birds come from (eggs), and we looked at pictures of bird eggs in the Bird book.  There are some pretty cool eggs out there in the world.  Did you know there was a bird that lived on Madagascar 700 years ago that laid eggs bigger than any dinosaur egg?  They held over 2 gallons of fluid!!  That'd make quite the omlette!

We talked about how eggs must be kept warm if you want them to hatch.  Then we pulled out the same book again, Birds, and looked at the pages showing baby birds hatching.  It shows step by step how a baby bird hatches out of an egg.  It's pretty cool.

Then we looked through the book Eggs.

The actual text of the book would have been way over the kids' heads, so I just summarized each page for them.  This book talks about other animals that come from eggs too, not just birds.

Then it was science time!  I had a hardboiled egg for each kid and we performed a few different tests on them.  First, we put them in a glass of water to see how much water they would displace.  Ella impressed me by being able to say that the reason the water level rises is because the egg pushes the water out of the way.  Then we used our balance to see how many Unifix cubes our eggs weighed.  I purposely picked different sized eggs for the kids so we would have different answers.  Alex's was 17 cubes and Ella's 15.  Then they had to guess how many squares on a grid their egg would cover when traced, then trace their egg and see if they were right.  All of these experiments were recorded on a sheet from our science book.

And then the final test was the taste test, of course.  Perfect snack.

And then since I hadn't showered yet, I sent the kids to watch the Reading Rainbow episode of Rechenka's Eggs.

Later on after lunch (which was supposed to be egg sandwiches but the eggs were consumed after science instead) we went outside and had an egg hunt.  We had a bunch of plastic eggs from Easter so we used those.  We did a couple of rounds and then the kids took over and hid them for each other.  They have been hiding eggs around the house ever since.

And then after that we took the sidewalk chalk outside and drew pretty eggs all over the driveway.  I was going to draw all the different eggs to size so they could see how they compared, but the Bird book did a really good job of that so I just let the kids draw and have fun.

And that's the end of our first week of birds.  More next week!

Preschool - Book List

I compiled this list from a variety of sources.  My goal is to get a few of these from the library each week and try to get at least one from each topic (math, art, etc.).  It's amazing to me how entranced my kids are by these classic read-aloud kids' books.  I'll continue to edit this list as I find more or find I don't like one on the list.  Feel free to suggest any I don't have on here!


Picture Books:
Winnie the Pooh Series
Beatrix Potter (Benjamin Bunny, Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, etc.)
The Little House
The Story About Ping
The Little Engine That Could
Blueberries For Sal
Make Way For Ducklings
One Morning In Maine
Ferdinand
Ox-cart Man
Stone Soup
Miss Rumphius and other Barbara Cooney
The Story of Little Babaji
Brer Rabbit
Aesop's Fables
Caps For Sale
Roxaboxen
Books by Elsa Beskow (Pelle's New Suit)
One Grain of Rice
Millions of Cats
Carl the dog books
Stranger in the Woods
Lost in the Woods
Eric Carle Books
The Very Best Home For Me
Corduroy
A Pocket For Corduroy
Swimmy
Harry the Dirty Dog
Harry By the Sea
No Roses For Harry
Billy's Picture
Harold and the Purple Crayon
Home For a Bunny
McDuff books
Pretzel
The Poky Little Puppy
Polite Elephant
The Saggy, Baggy Elephant
The Shy Little Kitten
Whistle For Willie (Ezra Jack Keat's Books)
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
Norman the Doorman
Pet of the Met
Burt Down
Time of Wonder
Lentil
A New Coat for Anna
Jeremy, The Tale of an Honest Bunny
Bearymore
Chester the Worldly Pig
The Giving Tree
Gregory's Shadow
Little Toot
Raggedy Ann and Andy stories
The Ugly Duckling
The Taxi That Hurried
Tootle
James Herriot's Treasury for Children
The Biggest Bear
Thy Friend, Obadiah
Imogene's Antlers
The Magic Hill
The Little House series
Borrequita and the Coyote
Alejandro's Gift
We're Going on a Lion Hunt, David Axtell
Madeleine
Juan Bobo
Goodnight Moon
The Runaway Bunny
Strega Nona
Are You My Mother?
Go, Dog, Go
Ask Mr. Bear
The Bossy Gallito
The Lion and the Mouse
A House is a House For Me
I know an Old Lady by Mary Ann Hoberman
Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman
Swamp Angel
The Tale of Rabbit and Coyote
The Carrot Seed
The Red Balloon
Sam and the Tigers
Kite Flying
Frederick
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
A Boy, A Dog and a Frog
Uncle Jed's Barbershop
Tikki Tikki Tembo
Good Night Gorilla
Who Is in the Garden?
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
Where the Wild Things Are
Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters
My Father's Dragon
The Cat in the Hat
The Park Bench
The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig
Round is a Mooncake
The Kite Festival
Quick as a Cricket

Art Books:
Katie Meets the Impressionists
Katie and the Mona Lisa
Katie and the Sunflowers
Degas and the Little Dancer
Camille and the Sunflowers
Leonoard and the Flying Boy
The Magical Garden of Claude Monet
Picasso and the Girl With the Pony Tail
Baby Loves
Marie in Fourth Position
In the Garden With Van Gogh
A Magical Day With Matisse
Dancing With Degas
Sharing With Renoir
Sunday with Seurat
A Child's Book of Art
Colors: A First Art Book
I Spy: An Alphabet in Art
I Spy: Shapes In Art
I Spy Two Eyes: Numbers in Art
Can You Find It Inside
Can You Find It Outside
Vincent's Colors
You Can't Take a Balloon Into The Metropolitan Museum (and others in series)
Rockwell: A Boy and His Dog
Lawrence Anholt books
I Spy a Freight Train

Math Books:
Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar, Anno
Pigs Will Be Pigs, Axelrod
Greedy Triangle, Burns
Spaghetti and Meatballs For All, Burns
Splash!, Jonas
One Hundred Hungry Ants, MacKain
Monster Math, Miranda
Gobble Up Math, Mogard
Divide and Ride, Murphy (and other MathStart books)
How Big is a Foot?, Myllar
Sir Cumference and the First Round Table, Neuschwander
How Much is a Million?, Schwartz (and others)
Math Curse, Scieska
Math For All Seasons, Tang
Bunny Money, Wells
Alexander, Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday, Viorst
The Doorbell Rang, Hutchins
One Grain of Rice

Poetry Books:
A Child's Garden of Verses
The Real Mother Goose
When We Were Very Young
Now We Are Six
Favorite Poems Old and New
Poems For Young Children
The Oxford Book of Children's Verse

Character Building Books:
God's Wisdom For Little Boys
The 7 Habits of Happy Kids
Child's Book of Character Building
Polite Moments
The Book of Virtues

Preschool - Fall Theme

I scheduled this week in the hopes that it would actually look like fall outside.  No such luck.  So we're going to have to make do!

Day 1: What is Fall?


First we talked about Fall also being called Autumn, and then why we call it Fall (because the leaves fall off the trees).  We talked about ways you can tell it's fall: cooler weather, leaves falling, birds flying south, animals gathering food, etc.

We read the book I Know It's Autumn.

And then sang the song It's Autumn Time.

Then read the book Fall Is Not Easy.

I also wanted to read the book Count Down to Fall, but it didn't come in in time.

Then it was science experiment time.  We had a collection of acorns, and I had him sort them into piles of caps and no caps.  We had a little worksheet from our science book that he marked them on and drew how many in each group.  Then we put them in water to see how many would sink or float and marked and drew them on the worksheet too.  You're also supposed to plant them afterwards, but I didn't think my parents would want random tree sprouts in their front yard.

And then time for failed art projects!  The idea is to melt fall-colored crayon shavings between two pieces of wax paper and then cut leaf shapes out of it.  Like so.  But come to find out that different brands of crayons have different melting points, some which appear to be above the boiling point.  So we ended up with lumpy, not very well stuck together wax paper with crayon bits inside.  I salvaged what I could from it and cut out some leaves to hang in the window.

(Do you like our lovely cement window-well view?)

But this really ended up being a mom project that Alex just watched.  If it had gone well I would probably have let him trace the leaves and cut them out, but there were too many crayon bits going everywhere.  Oh well.

We were also going to go on a fall walk to gather leaves for our next day of school, but the weather outside was frightful, so we scratched that.  That is why I always plan more than I think I'll need because something always goes wrong!


Day 2: Trees and Leaves


We started today with the book Fletcher and The Falling Leaves.

Then we sang "The leaves on the trees turn orange and brown," to the tune of "The Wheels on the Bus."  The other verses are "The leaves on the trees come tumbling down," and "The leaves on the ground go swish, swish, swish, all through the Fall."

While I was walking this morning I gathered up a big pile of fall leaves off the ground.  I tried to get as many different kinds and colors as I could because our next activity was leaf sorting.  I cut out four different colored leaves out of construction paper - red, yellow, green, and orange (though brown would have been better, I didn't have that color) - and four different shapes - smooth edged, toothed, lobed, and toothed and lobed together (like a maple leaf).  I put the shapes below a whiteboard and we sorted and counted by color first.

We used tally marks so he could learn a new way of counting.

Then we sorted them by shape.

This activity actually spanned over the morning and then after lunch because someone had a breakdown during the middle of it all, and it wasn't me.

Then we took a closer look at one of the leaves to see its veins.  We talked about what they were for and how they bring food to the leaf.

Then to better learn the parts of a leaf we made a leaf book (pattern from our science book).  It's made with a pocket in the back and see-through pages in the middle.  You trace a different part of the leaf on each page so that as you turn the pages each part shows up and is labeled and at the end the whole leaf is put together.  Then you keep the real leaf that you traced in the pocket in the back.  It's kind of hard to explain, but here's some pictures:

Then we read the book Leaf Man.

This book is full of beautiful pictures all made from leaves.

We waited for Ella to come home so the kids could make their own leaf men together.  Alex didn't want to glue anything down so he could try all different combinations, but Ella got right down to business.  Here's hers:

Fun stuff!

(On the day in between school days I gave Alex this fall color by number to do.)


Day 3: What Do Animals and People Do In The Fall?


I'm going to rearrange the order of things we did when telling it here on the blog because after we'd finished our school for the day I wish I had done things in a slightly different order.  So this is how our day would have looked if perfect:

We started by looking at pictures of bears, squirrels, birds, and rabbits and talking about the different things they do to get ready for winter (eat a lot, hoard food, fly south, change fur color, etc.).  Then we talked about the different things people do to get ready for winter (harvest crops, clean out gardens, get out winter clothes, rake leaves, etc.)

Then in my imaginary perfect world we read the book It's Fall!

This book does a great job of cover all the things everyone, both animal and human, do in the fall.  And the pictures are all cut paper and look pretty cool.

Then we read the book Leaves.

It kind of had a similar idea of the book above, Fletcher and the Falling Leaves, where an animal is confused when the leaves start falling from the trees, but this one describes the bear finding a den and hibernating, so I went with it anyways.

Next we talked about what might happen if you didn't prepare for the winter, and we followed that up by reading The Ant and The Grasshopper.

It's based on an Aesop fable, but it's been redone and set in China.  We found China on the map before reading it, and afterwards talked about what happened to the grasshopper after the story ends, since it ends kind of abruptly before you really witness the consequences of not preparing (aka, he dies).

Then we finished up by doing a migration maze.  I just found a freebie maze online and added some geese up top and the compass points at the bottom.  Here it is if you'd like it:

And that finished our day and our week.  It was kind of a quickie school day, but by Friday those are the kind I need.  Have a great weekend!

Preschool - Piano Lessons!

So Ella has been wanting to learn to play the piano for a while, and I just haven't gotten around to doing anything about it.  But I finally got my lazy duff off my computer chair long enough to go to the store and get a beginning piano book.  And of course Ella can't do anything without Alex wanting to do it too, so I'm letting him start too.  I'm going to teach them for at least the first year since I know enough piano to get that far.

We are using the book 67 Easy Songs Primer by Jon Schmidt.

I love his method of teaching note reading, and this book is specifically written for the 4-8 age group.  It gives me all the text I need to say and has pretty good instructions along the way.  His method gets kids sight reading music really quickly so that they can then go on and play any music they want.  It leads into his book 67 Fun Songs which starts the first three chapters with the same info as the primer then moves on to more methodology and such.

Somewhere in there I will probably put them in real lessons, but until we are moved and settled, it's just going to have to be mom.

Another program I looked at and that a lot of people seem to like is Simply Music because it gets kids playing real music at the get-go, but I figured I'd try the cheaper piano book first and see how it goes.

So that's the plan.  I'll keep you updated on how it goes!

Preschool - Food and Harvest, Week 2

Day 1: Meat


I don't know if it was just my teaching abilities today or what, but Alex was just not getting this.  I started out by showing him pictures of a cow, pig, chicken, turkey, and the ocean and we talked about what kinds of meat came from which place.  Here are the animals I used if you want it:

Then we read the book Meat and Protein.

It talks about all different kinds of meat and proteins and has all the pictures labeled.  It was a pretty good overview.  (I actually had a REALLY hard time finding books about meat for today.)

Then we played fishing for food.  I printed out a bunch of different meats and cut them apart and put paperclips on them.

Then we rigged up our fishing pole with a magnet on the end.  I put the foods in a box and let Alex fish for them.

Daddy ended up having to help a bit because Alex just couldn't get the paperclips to stick to his magnet.  When he would catch one I would have him tell me what animal (or ocean) it came from and then he put it in a baggie with that animal's picture on the front (the same animals I showed him at the beginning).

He had fun with this, but I had to tell him what animal every piece of meat came from.  He just doesn't get the different between beef and pork and cows and pigs.  It's not sticking in his little head.

We read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs next, the original one.

Then since I had to go to the grocery store anyway we piled in the car and went to check out the meat at the store.  He was able to tell me what most of the seafoods were, but packaged meats were beyond him.  I was going to let him pick one for us to buy and take home and cook, but he was being a brat so he lost his meat privileges.  

So I'm not sure what I could have done differently, but this just wasn't the best subject.  Maybe if we keep playing the fishing game over and over again he'll finally get it!

Day 2: Grains

I got four small bowls and filled them each with rice, oats, wheat, and popcorn.  I showed them each to Alex and let him feel them and we talked about the kinds of foods we make with each one.  We read the book The Grain Group to back this all up.

Next we did our science project.  We got a quart baggie, a paper towel, and a stapler.  We put the paper towel into the baggie then stapled it across the middle to make it stay put.

(My awesome staple helper.)  Then we put enough water in the bag to soak the paper towel and leave about half an inch of water in the bottom.  The we lined up a row of popcorn kernels along the staple line.

And then we hung it in the window.

The idea here is that they are supposed to grow.  We live in a basement, so hopefully it will work!

Next we read the book One Grain of Rice.

It's about rice and math, so two birds with one stone!  I really liked the illustrations in it.  Every page has gold on it.

Then it was craft time.  We used craft glue and our four bowls of grains to make grain "collages."  I guess that's what you'd call it.

Just put down the glue, dump on the grains, then pour off the extras.  The kids have been doing this for a few days now.  It was a big hit.

Putting the paper and bowls in an edged tray kept the mess contained.

We had to take a break for lunch and to run errands, but when we got back we listened to the story of The Little Red Hen.

The book we got had a CD, otherwise we would have just read it.

And then what does one do when discussing grains and you've just read The Little Red Hen?  Why make bread of course!  We ground the wheat and everything.  The kids love helping me make bread.  My dad calls it wheat cake because he likes it so much.  A tasty way to end the grain day!

Day 3: Water

So water isn't really a food group, but this is where is got stuck anyways.  I had high hopes for all the fun water experiments there are out there, but Alex just wasn't into our activities today.

I gave him a glass of water to start with and had him smell it and feel it and drink it.  Then I gave him a glass of ice and we talked about how ice is solid water.  Then we put the ice into a pan and melted it on the stove until we could see the steam and talked about evaporation and water vapor.

We read the book The Magic School Bus Wet All Over about the water cycle.

We sang Give Said the Little Stream and It's Raining, It's Pouring.  Then we looked at the pictures in the book A Drop of Water.

It talks about a bunch of different experiments you can do, but most of them were over Alex's head.  But the pictures are good for discussing the properties of water.

Next we played sink or float.  I filled a big bowl with water and got a bunch of stuff that was similar (like a plastic spoon and a metal spoon or a foam ball and a marble) but one would float and one would sink.  We tested them all, guessing ahead of time whether they would float or sink.  In case you were wondering, tomatoes sink.  Who'd have thought?

Then for a final water experiment we got a clear 2-liter bottle and filled it with water.  Then we dropped red, yellow, and blue food coloring into it and watched it swirl around.  This shows how water molecules are constantly moving.  By using the three colors you end up with a rainbow swirl.  Alex didn't care about molecules, he just wanted to dump it out at the end.  Oh well.  Anton and I thought it was cool.

After Ella got home from school I sent the kids outside with a bucket of water and paintbrushes and let them paint the sidewalk.  The kids have loved doing this for a long time.  It keeps them busy forever.  They try to paint the whole sidewalk but the sun keeps drying the water so they never finish!  Good stuff.

And that ends our Food unit!