Update

Brian, Tia and kiddos came to visit last week which was a total blast. We went to Boise with them for a day and went to the aquarium. It looked lame from the outside but we had a ton of fun. 

 Unfortunately I didn't take any other pictures while they were here, be we also went on a picnic and a waterfall and played. It was so fun.

In other news, Ruth made herself a blue ribbon and glued it onto her clothes

Since our colors of the week ended up being successful (Will is now very color competent) I decided, since he's turning three next week, that he should start learning the letters. This week is the letter A. We made "A" animals:

We are making an "A" letter wall. It's awesome how I can adapt our activities for both kids. Ruth helps me come up with the "A" words and even wrote some of them, and Will looks at the words and shows us where the "A" is and tells us what sound the "A" makes.

 Today we made letter "A" sun catchers for the back door.

Yesterday was also Brad's birthday, like mine it was a pretty uneventful day for him. He went to work. When he came home we went to a greenhouse to get bushes and flowers for our front yard. Then I made him homemade mac and cheese with bacon and goat cheese and we had banana cream pie and strawberry rhubarb pie with ice cream. Happy 30th bebe!

April Stuff

 We made playdough 

 Brad had all the kids laughing with duck sounds

Ice cream while Brad was out of town

Claire eating her first ravioli, pasta is her new favorite

Will being a beast

 Ruth's costume for the dance show

More Stuff We've Done

Paint our hands and feet

Will so kindly shared his new pajamas with Ruth, who could hardly stand still

Yellow week crafts and activities

Yellow sorting

Yellow bee

Push-pin worksheets

Easter Eggs

Grandma watching the egg hunt

 Grandpa watching the egg hunt

My Birthday

My birthday started out super uneventful, like any other day. Zumba, park with kids, make food for people. But then Brad and I went out to a new sushi place and ordered a Happy Boat filled with chicken and beef teriyaki, sushi, potstickers, fried veggies and pineapple. I thought it was gonna be a little plate sized boat thing, but no, it took up our entire table...and it was delicious!

Spring Break

We had lots of fun with my parents and Uncle Matt

Days 3, 4, and 5 of Orange Week

We made ORANGE handprint flowers:

We played in our ORANGE tupperware and blew bubbles with ORANGE straws:

We made ORANGE tigers:

 And today we made ORANGE paint and made prints by only painting on one side of the paper:

This week we also got PINK eye!

Color of the Week: ORANGE

Day one we played with gum drops and toothpicks and had an orange lunch of mac and cheese, goldfish, mandarin oranges, carrots and orange Emergen-C.

 Today we had a lunch of orange juice, cheese, orange bell pepper and cheese crackers with peanut butter.

Then we had 4 stations set up at the table:

 Orange envelopes and orange popsicle sticks

Sorting beads to find the orange ones

Playing with orange Easter eggs, buckets and beads

The last station was playing with an orange truck, not really picture worthy. I'm really happy to say that our color weeks are totally helping. Will can tell you when something is green or orange now! But the best part of all of these activities is that I'm growing. When I set up these activities I have very clear ideas about what should happen. Then the kids sit down and they don't play with the objects the way I'd envisioned. So I start to correct them...and then I see that what they've come up with is so much more creative than what I thought of. I need a lot more practice not being in control of every second. It's been such a joy to watch the kids explore and play and to start to control my control-freak ways. 

Final Green Week Activities

 We went to the park in our greenest clothing. As you can see, Claire is not so happy discovering grass. But she thought the dirt and gravel looked too good to pass up.

Today we took a green bath. The bath paint was made from conditioner and cornstarch with blue and yellow food coloring. (use more conditioner than starch) I let the kids moosh it all up in a big zip-loc bag so they could watch the blue and yellow combine to make green. This was the easiest clean up of all the activities.

We played in the dried peas again. Today I hid all the letters of the alphabet. Will found the letters and Ruth marked off which letters they were so they knew when they had found them all. This was good team work, good exposure for Will to all the letters and good practice for Ruth being patient!

 Next week: Orange!

More Green

As I do these messy activities I'm learning things that will help make them better. The first activity we did inside, mistake. The second activity I didn't observe the entire time, mistake. This activity...I used normal house paint that we had laying around, MISTAKE. Always use washable paint people! These small things will make it so we can continue to have fun and I won't be stressed by them mess.