Telling Our Story

Do you have any idea how desperately I want to have a written blog every single day? Badly. I want our story recorded. Two things stop me 1) Exhaustion. Pure exhaustion. I go go go all day long, especially now that school is out and Jack is crawling. I was so thankful for rain today because we were trapped inside. Usually it's breakfast, fast house clean up, pack a picnic, gym class, pool all day, "Mommy school," cook dinner, clean up dinner, bath and bed. If I don't fall asleep when the kids go down (I'm not kidding, sometimes I don't even come downstairs after putting them to bed) then the last thing I want to do is think of something witty to say on here. That brings me to part 2) Perfectionism. I want it all--an accurate story, a couple chuckles and nicely edited photos. It just isn't going to happen. Then I think of something I want to tell but I remember that I still haven't blogged about all the field trips and the end of school parties and surely I should cover all that before I mention the silly thing the kids said today. So instead I do nothing. But I miss it, not the doing but just having it all recorded. There are so many stories I want told.
I'm not here to make promises or even set a goal for myself but I am here reminding myself that I want it written, this story of their childhood, this story of our craziness and this story of exhaustion. Pure exhaustion, pure fun filled, baby chasing, pool splashing, mommy schooling exhaustion. Plain and simple.
Just to feel a little caught up here is a quick recap with some unedited, imperfect photos.

Jack was a big hit at the field trip

The water table and hurricane wind simulator was fun too

We went skating. In short, it was hilarious and awesome. Sadly they don't even make regular skates small enough to fit my little nuggets feet so she had to sport these plastic kicks.

Actually, we found out that Wednesday night is free family skate night and you can bet your bottom dollar we'll be back. Cause, you know, I'm not exhausted enough.

We toured the firehouse. When we got there Kate marched up to the fireman and declared, "My sister is six." 

It is now 7:30pm and I may have just drooled on my computer when I dozed off while waiting for that photo to load. 

Celebrating Kendall

We had Kendall's Tangled themed birthday party today. Luckily we had our party photographer handy to take lots of pictures. We had hoped to have the party outside but this nonstop rain kept us indoors

Guests were directed to a "photo booth" where they could choose from a variety of props and take a picture with the birthday girl (who choose the tiara every.single.time).

Some of the guests preferred to have their picture taken alone.

We decorated princess crowns and swords while we waited for the everyone to arrive.

Next we had a yummy lunch of grilled hot dogs, veggies, fruit salad, and chips. The kids were so incredibly cute sitting at the table chatting about various things--primarily Tangled related things.

Next we tried to play a funny little game. Last night we spent far too much time blowing up sooo many balloons, we also attached rubber bands to each one and at the party we put one on each of the kids legs. They were supposed to pop each others balloons while keeping their own intact. My fear was that they would all be too timid to pop a balloon. However I was wrong, the kids jumped in without a problem and attacked each others balloons with gusto. The lesson is that next time I will buy really cheap balloons because we just could not pop the things!! The game went on far longer then I had planned until I deemed that there were multiple winners!

We had better luck finding a winner in the next game: Pin the nose on Flynn Rider. If you haven't seen the movie then this makes no sense to you. This was a game we decided on at about 11pm last night so I drew this Wanted poster and created various noses for the kids to pin on. We actually had three winners! Luckily I had purchased extra "prizes."

We finished up with opening presents. 

Then we had to immediately open some of the presents of course.

The kids left shortly after. The girls with their bubbles and pansy flowers and the boys with bubbles and swords. Uncle Jeff, Pat and Great Gram stuck around and we were able to visit with them.

They were subjected to the photo booth too :)

Finally Kendall and Kate spent a little bit of time outside on Kendall's new bike.

What a fun day!

Book Love

We love going to the library. Something about all those books stacked together and they’re all FREE! Every time I check out I feel like I need to pull out my wallet. After the girls make their selections they settle in at the craft table while I continue to browse. Jack enjoys the smells and sounds of the library too.

Today our library basket held:

Bringing up Girls by James Dobson  

Healthy Family Meals by the American Heart Association—always looking for new recipe ideas

This Book Made Me Do It by DK Publishing—planning activities for our days

Ed Emberley’s Great Thumbprint Book –not the first time this one has come home with us.

Each of the girls pick out four books and one movie. Kendall found a cute one called Scuba Bunnies

 and Kate chose Little Ballerina Dancing Book.

 I usually go around and pick out a children’s book or two as well. I like to pick from the award winners, the list of 100 best picture books or, most commonly, based on the illustrations.  As much as I love a good story, or the cadence of a well written book I think the illustrations are what help a child to loose themselves in that different world. It never hurts if the pictures will inspire a project at home.

The best part of going to the library is seeing books strewn all over the family room, seeing my girls looking at them, and anticipating time with my own stack.

Amazon Wish List

I wanted to take a quick minute to share with you one more thing that makes life flow a little more smoothly. In the past I have faced a holiday or a birthday with absolutely no idea what to get my kids and no idea what I wanted either.  I know that throughout the year there are things that we come across and want but when it comes time to get them I can't remember! Recently I started using Amazon.com's wish list. I downloaded the little button for my tool bar (see below on the top left of the screen shot it says "wish list") and now when I come across a cool gadget or toy I can just click that button and it adds  to our wish list.  Now when I face a birthday I can browse through the items that I marked through the year and either load up my Amazon cart or make a list to carry to the worlds most fun place...Target.

Fun things you would find on our list would include:

Pottery Barn Daily System

See the picture, the sun is shining down on it and the angels are singing, can't you hear them? 

Even I could be convinced to drink milk if I could have it out of this glass:

Anything that would make grocery shopping easier:

I'm curious, what's on your current wish list?

Pass the Meatballs

So we're a little mixed up on our crafty days but today we painted with spaghetti. The girls LOVED it and I loved the results. We may cut these up to use as our artist trading cards.

We found that it works better to drizzle paint over the cooked noodles instead of dipping the noodles in the paint. The spaghetti noodles were fun to fling around on the paper or roll under our hands. Next time we may try penne or other curly cue kinds.

Here are the finished masterpieces.

Cheap Cheep Chicks

Monday's grump deterring activity was a success. The girls had fun, they were able to do all steps on their own, it was fairly quick and managed to transition them into solo play without the usual post preschool grumpiness.

I think I may have shown this before but here is a closer look at how I use Google calendar for meal and activity planning. In Google you can create different "calendars" that all show in your main page (shown in different colors). I have one for each: general (appointments, school events...), activity, meal, and Brian's travel schedule. You can create reminders that either pop up on your screen or email to your account--could be used to send a reminder to yourself a few days before a birthday so you get a card in the mail on time (I get a great big FAIL for this). Every month the preschool sends home an outline with important dates, I input show-and-tell dates with reminders that morning.

So there you go. Tomorrow we get to go to Kindergarten screening for Kendall, she is SO excited! 

Planning on Fun

The girls have a hard time transitioning from school to home, they are tired, grumpy and quick to argue. I've found the best solution is to have a little activity planned each afternoon during that first hour home. After that they are more likely to go off on their own playing (and getting along) which allows me to work on dinner. In order to prepare I spend a little bit of time on the weekend planning and then putting it on my Google calendar. In Google you can set up email or pop-up reminders for earlier in the day so you can get any supplies that are necessary.


Tangent- I also use a Google Calendar to keep my dinner plan, I have it set up to send an email reminder for preparing--an early in the morning email for a dinner that goes in the crock-pot or late afternoon reminder for something that requires less time. This way at 5:00 when the kids are starting to get hungry I'm not surprised by a meal that requires a two hour cook time.

Here is our activity plan for the week.
Monday: We're working on our artist trading cards (see below post).

Tuesday: These cute Spring Chicks, idea from this blog.

Wednesday: Fancy hats from newspaper
Thursday: We're supposed to have some warmer weather so we're planning to make a chalk drawn city on the driveway.
Friday: No school for us on Friday's so I try to plan the messy, bigger projects then. This Friday we are going to paint with cooked spaghetti and maybe some other shaped noodles.

Do you have any fun activities planned this week? Do you have a good planning system that works for you?