Some of the ways that I try to do that as a stay at home mom is through music, dance,
art and the outdoors. A good portion of each day is spent playing and listening to music and Toby truly loves it! His favorite things to play are the drums then guitar then keyboard. He has great musicality and it's so cool to watch him respond and react to different types of music. He is also quite the little dancer! He has this crazy shoulder shrug dance that morphs into all sorts of other moves including booty shakin, break dancing and a hilarious squat and scoot dance. (you will see an assortment of these moves in the videos to be uploaded later today).
Another thing we have been doing a lot of is painting and he really loves it. He will bring me his paint brush, paint set and brushes and ask to please paint. We have started using this pine bench in our backyard as the main canvas for his painting which is a lot of fun and he has also painted on 2 small canvases, one of which hangs proudly in our home and the other was a gift to Vanessa (Toby's birthmom). He doesn't so much use crayons or markers because he just wants to eat them the whole time for some strange reason so we are sticking with paints as the main medium for now.
Thankfully, here in AZ we have a good portion of time where the weather is beautiful so we take full advantage of that and have a lot of outdoor adventures. The pics you see in Flickr are of the more recent explorations where we visited an old cotton gin, the big field across from our house by the airport and a bunch of other farmy/field areas (also scoping out new photo locations in the process). I want Toby to have that thrill of discovery and exploration and it is so much fun to watch him roam around and pick up sticks, through rocks, knock over flowers, etc. I can tell that he loves it and that makes me love it all the more.
