Breakfast treat

Found a cute breakfast diversion - painting toast! Mix a few drops of food coloring with milk and let your kids paint designs on bread with a paintbrush (probably want to use a new one or one reserved just for this activity). Then pop it in the toaster and the designs really show up nicely!

Savoring Summer

With a new baby in the house and record-breaking heat, we haven't done as many typical summer activities outside this year. The kids have been missing the backyard, so we're taking advantage of the "relative cool" to head back outside this week. Yesterday we set up the pool, and the kids had a great time playing in the yard well into the evening.

Fun with the hose

Ringy-dingys



Even the big kid was out tossing a tennis ball around

Wearing different hats

Sounds like I'm about to write a post about all the differing demands of motherhood, right? WRONG! I'm writing about hats. Only one more week before preschool begins again, and I'm having to reach into the recesses of my brain to come up with things to entertain the kids. It seems like I've exhausted every good idea I've had all summer and am scraping the bottom of the barrel. So what I came up with today was making paper hats. It satisfied Kellen, especially since we learned how to make a new square paper hat - a pressman's hat. At least now if Kellen ever applies for a job in a newspaper printing press, he can write on his resume that he knows how to fold a pressman's hat to protect his hair from spraying ink!

Working on his pirate's hat. AHOY!

The hat Kellen fashioned all by himself!

Milestones

Today we celebrate 2 new milestones for Kellen and Ellary.

1) Kellen came to us having tied his own shoes! (His explanation of how it's done: "I wrap it and tie it, wrap it and tie it, wrap it and tie it, and then make a loop.) Now if we can just get him to put his shoes on the right feet!



2) Ellary rolled over from her tummy to her back! I was trying to take pictures of the back of her neck for her baby bits collage, and she was doing a lot of grunting and groaning. The next thing I knew she had flipped herself over!

Shrinking baby belly

Last night I had a funny dream. I was with two friends who have also just had babies, and we were at some large church function (like a festival or something) and discovered that Goodberry's was there with an ice cream bar (Goodberry's is one of my favorite treats - and I know it's my friend's favorite, too!). Anyway, I told my friend that we should go over and get ice cream, and she looked at me and said she really thought we should lay off the Goodberry's as it was not helping to melt away the baby pounds! I was disappointed, but agreed. We came up with an alternate plan. Every time we were offered Goodberry's and turned it down we would pay ourselves a dollar (WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?) and put it in our pocket. The more we turned down the ice cream, the bigger our pants would get and the more room we would have for additional dollars in our pockets. A winning cycle! We'll see if this plan gets put into place... (I really like my ice cream!). :)

And today's activity was...

...making sun prints! I remember doing this in grade school and thinking it was so much fun. So today we took advantage of all the sunny weather we've been having and made some sun prints of our own on the deck. I sent Kellen and Addie in search of small objects, and they came back with things like leaves, flowers, confetti, a key, a paperclip, a crayon, and a bead necklace. Then we got to work developing our very own prints of these objects. Here's how it worked:

Kellen places his leaf on the photosensitive paper and we covered it with Plexiglas. Then we found a nice sunny spot to leave it in for several minutes.


Once the paper turned white, we removed the objects, which revealed blue images on the paper.


Then we placed the paper in a water bath for 1 minute to "freeze" the images.


and voila! Kellen and Addie have made their own beautiful prints!

Color went down the drain

Ellary has a hold on Kellen

I'm having fun playing with my new camera. Addie's getting tired of seeing it, but Kellen's happy to stop whatever he's doing and pose whenever he sees me with the camera. Even bath time was fair game for my new toy.

Fun perspective messing with focus

OH SNAP! It's my birthday!

Today I am officially 30. I don't feel much different than I did yesterday, aside from being very hot and tired after hauling around 3 little ones around the NC Museum of Life and Sciences to try out my new birthday present! No more quick snapshots with the point and click for me! My absolute favorite thing to do is take pictures of the things we do with our kids, and now I can REALLY take pictures. I have a lot to learn about the camera, and since I have very little free time it will definitely take me a while, but I had fun taking pictures on the automatic setting this afternoon. I did manage to do some playing around with the manual zoom and focus, so I felt a little bit professional. :)

Here's a few pictures from the museum that I thought turned out well for a first try!

Something new to look at...

Ellary noticed her toes for the first time last night. Pretty funny!

Can You Dig It?

This morning we met friends at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. The kids played a while in the Discovery Room, and Addie was particularly excited about digging through the box of dirt and finding earthworms. The girl loves creepy crawly things! Of course we had to visit the Terror of the South room to see the Arcanthosaurus and the dinosaur with the "giant boo boo." Addie love to see the boo boo and every time we visit the exhibit she asks when he's going to get a giant band aid!

When we got home, I had a fossil digging activity for the kids. Kellen and Addie each got to be paleontologists and carefully dig out fossils of their own. Addie unearthed a stegosaurus and Kellen found a triceratops.

Addie hard at work unearthing her dinosaur fossil

Kellen's taking a closer look, trying to figure out what he's found

Kellen shows off his amazing discovery - the never before seen Kellasuarus!

Trendy Baby

We're a Crocs family - we all wear them, mostly because they are so comfortable and the kids can put them on by themselves. Even Ellary has a tiny little pair (I mean really, who wouldn't want their infant to have comfortable shoes?). So today at the store we ran across some Jibbitz, the little charms kids decorate their Crocs with. Addie really wanted some butterflies for her green Crocs, so we said that would be ok. I put them on her shoes in the car, and after 1 minute she was crying, saying she didn't like them and that I needed to take them off (very typical Addie). She said she wanted them on my shoes, so I put two butterflies on my own shoes and two on the baby's shoes! Ellary is thrilled to be such a trendy little baby!

Ellary's "crocs" and new bling

Pleased with herself that she got such trendy hand-me-downs!