Valentine’s Day

Third post of the day…why stop now?? Just wanted to post a few pictures of the sweet Valentine’s I got from the boys:

Thanks, Justin, for taking the time to help them make those for me. Quite precious.

And…the grapevine heart wreath that I found in the street on garbage day. That’s a true story. And a layered cardboard heart craft that the boys made. You may also notice in the background the lovely roses my wonderful husband got me for our 7th anniversary on the 10th. We were supposed to leave on Saturday for a night away at a resort with our good friends, unfortunately, our plans came to a crashing halt by this ridiculousness:

Seriously, Oregon? I don’t think I have had a night away with my husband since our anniversary LAST year. Thankfully, all parties involved (including grandma and grandpa who are watching the boys, our friends, and their babysitters), were able to reschedule for another two weeks from our original date. The fun is still going down, ya’ll!

M-I-C-K-E-Y…..

I happened to be on-call the weekend of my nephew’s 2nd birthday last month, so we hosted his party at our house. I pressured my slow-to-make-decisions sister to choose his theme so I could start planning some decor. She decided on Mickey Mouse…can’t go wrong, he’s always a classic.

We kept the decor pretty simple, I cut out a bunch of big circles to make a pathway from the front door to the family room (think “Mickey Mouse Playhouse”, if you’re familiar, yay for you if you’re not). Streamers on the entry to the family room, the family room filled with polka dot balloons, a huge Mickey balloon, a birthday banner out of Mickey Mouse shapes that I cut out, and Mickey Mouse ears for all the kids (goodbye all of my black headbands :( ) It all turned out cute. My mom and my sister’s family drove down this way and met us at an indoor kid-gym place where the kids played for an hour or so before coming back to our house. All of the granola Eugene people and their hippie kids made me deicide that our kids were promptly getting haircuts. But that’s another story.

 

Here’s what happened when the boys found me in the early morning, hiding in the guest room blowing up balloons. Please note how Thad is squeezing his brothers cheek as he jumps by….the little turkey!

Fun at the gym. Who knows what kind of diseases they caught. There were a LOT of kids there.

Back at the Par-tay. Mickey Mouse there to greet the birthday boy. Slightly terrifying. Please don’t make fun of our 1972 bar stools. I realize they are horrendous, but they were free, and they do not tip over no matter what kind of ridiculous behavior is taking place on them. They stay until my children are old enough to behave like human beings. Which may be a while.

The birthday boy seeing his tower of cupcakes for the first time (made by my sister)

And finally, the party people who made it all happen. Next up, all the other 3 non-birthday kids have a birthday within 10 days of each other (my California nephew brings that birthday group up to 4…yikes). We will likely have a local party here, and also go up to my parents to celebrate with our niece. We had decided on a pirate theme for the party here. At least until Thad announced that he thinks it should be a cowboysuperhero birthday…not sure how to decorate for that one…

School Days

Usually when I sit down to write a post, I have nice orderly thoughts in my head that I want to get out. For some reason this time, I’m all jumbled up, and keep getting stuck. So, I’m just going to dump everything out, even though it may not be organized or coherent. Here goes.

We continue to work through the alphabet using the format from Preschool Alphabet. I did decide to alter things a bit at the first of the year, and rather than going through all her ideas for each topic and picking my favorites, I’m really sticking to her calendars and doing the things she did that time. It has simplified things quite a bit, and takes less time for me to prep. I also have starting doing just one or two books per day from the library, rather than several. Having a lot of books per day is great because they boys are always willing to read, but it was taking me a LOT of time to search for our topics, and to find the books at the library. Realistically, a lot of time was being wasted with so much prep because some days, we skipped topic all together, or just didn’t make it through much for whatever reason. (For example, if I have to go to Winco with the boys by myself, that’s pretty much all I can handle). (For an unrelated example, being waist-deep in Winco is not a great time to realize you haven’t put on deodorant). 

Some recent fun days:

Nose Day:

We read Ferdinand (one of my all time favs), made cow noses out of cut-up egg cartons, and made smelly flowers using foam paper flowers with cotton balls with various scents dripped on them (maple extract, vanilla extract, lemon juice, peppermint extract, etc)

Orange Day:

 

We painted toilet roll “binoculars” orange to search for orange items around the house, make fresh-sqeezed orange juice, and ate orange jello.

Other Fun:

Making due with rainy weather, playing in the garage (don’t ask me why he is wearing jams…really don’t remember, but he does love his jams, he tries to pull them back together any time I unzip them to get dressed), and playing with the super cool Stomp Rocket my brother got them for Christmas (a worthwhile $15 investment if you have boys!)

Pizza Day:

We used leftover pizza boxes from my nephew’s birthday party to make a pizza, and to put the pizza in. The first box I cut up to make the circle for the pizza, the boys painted on red “sauce”, then we sprinkled it with cut up yard “cheese”, paper pepperoni, green peppers and mushrooms, and “olives” made out of buttons. I slathered it in Modge Podge and let it “bake” in the oven until it was dry.