Food on fire!

Tom likes to take the kids out for what Kaitlyn and Sarah like to call, "Daddy dates". (Alan doesn't call it that though, for him it's just one on one time with Dad :) A while ago, Tom decided to take both Alan and Sarah out to lunch at one of our favorite restaurants.

Happy 4th of July!!

For the 4th we went to our friend's the Holloways house. We ate yummy food, and played card games, while the kids played and swam in the pool. At the end of the day we went to our usual spot in Downtown Columbus to watch the fireworks. It was a fun day.

Sarah gets a facial

Last week for Activity Days the 8-11 yr old girls combined with the Young Women for a spa night. The Young Women treated the primary girls to a fun night of manicures and facials. Sarah had so much fun. She can't wait to be 12 and go into Young Women.
Here she is showing off her nails with roses on them and her chocolate facial mask.

Orchestra class

One of our kids' favorite games is to play orchestra. Alan will hook up his mp3 player to the stereo in the family room and they will all pretend they are playing a different instrument in the song.

Battleship for boredom

Ok, so I bribed Alan.

He was being lazy all day, and his sisters wanted to go in the pool and he didn't, so, I told him I would make him a little wooden battleship if he would go swimming with them.

It worked.

He went right into my workshop and grabbed some sandpaper,

"I'll help you sand it!" he said.

So I put together a quick battleship made out of pine. It took about 45 minutes. I had read somewhere that pine holds up really well in water and that it's good for making wooden bath toys out of. We'll see.

House of Cards

Building playing card houses on a Sunday afternoon.

Random silliness

Skipping Dirt?

I just have to post this because I think it's funny that when we go to the park, our kids love to pick up a handful of dirt and rocks and throw it in the lake almost more than they love to play on the toys there. If ever we're near a lake or stream, they have to throw dirt and rocks into it.

Shelly the turtle gets a bigger home.

Shelly is a snapping turtle that Tom found at the range where he was working almost 2 years ago. She has grown so much, that we didn't have a place big enough for her, so we took her to a place where she can have a bigger home.

Sarah is 10!!!

Sarah's birthday was on May 23 and it was a 3-day celebration!! It wasn't really intended to be, but it just kind of turned out that way. On Saturday the 21st, she had her birthday party with her friends. It was the day after the last day of school, so she was excited to make it kind of like the last big party of the school year. She invited her whole class over to go swimming, and just hang out. (No pics of the friends of course, but it was a well attended party)
She wanted cupcakes instead of a cake this year. So, when it was time to blow out the candles, we covered one cupcake with 10 candles.

Sarah loves chocolate and the TV show/ band, "Big Time Rush" on Nickelodeon. Here she is at the party eating chocolate wearing a T-shirt of the band. One of her friends came early and gave her a shirt and a CD of them, and Sarah immediately put on the shirt. She later hooked up her CD player to the speakers we had set up out side so that she and her friends could listen to "Big Time Rush" during the party. I had no idea how popular "Big Time Rush" was to 9-10 year old girls, but they were all super excited to listen to it.

Here's a view of some of the food. Because it was so hot, I blew up a little swimming pool I got at the dollar store, filled it with ice and put all the food on it. It worked really well.

Here's Sarah opening a gift from Daddy. She got a jewelry box. He often gets her and Kaitlyn necklaces from other countries. She also got her ears peirced 2 months ago so that she could wear earrings on her 10th birthday. Now she has a place to put everything.

Here's the "bowl of chocolate" that Sarah wanted as treats at her party. This bowl is also sitting in another bowl of ice to keep it from melting, because even in our playroom where it was, it was about 85 degrees with the Air Conditioning on.

Here's the cupcakes, some of them already eaten, in the shape of a 10.

Anticipating eating the chocolate cupcake. This is before we loaded it down with candles.

The day after her party, being Sunday, Alan made her a birthday crown for her to be queen for the day, and Sarah and Alan made plans for her actual day.

Then, the next day on the 23rd, her real birthday, at exactly 7:08am (the actual time she was born), she and Alan got up and made all sorts of noise and yelling, "Happy Birthday!!", "Sarah is 10"!!

Because she likes to cook, I let her go through a dessert recipe cookbook I had, and told her she could pick anything to make on her birthday. She picked a cookie pizza.

Then, the last thing she wanted to do was watch her favorite movie, "The Karate Kid" with Jaden Smith. We like that one better than the old one because there's only 2 swear words in it (which we muted), and we think it's cool that it's set in China, and that the guy who trains him (Jackie Chan) actually knows martial arts.... But, we still waited until after Kaitlyn and William had gone to bed to watch it because it was still too old for them with the fighting and stuff..

So, Sarah had a very happy 10th Birthday!!

Restoration Timeline

In primary this month we've been learning about the Restoration, so I thought it would be good ro reinforce the lessons at home. Something good and easy to do when learning about the Restoration is to make a timeline.

To set up, I tied a rope in between two chairs and attached dates to it with clothes pins.

For the learning activity, everyone in the family got a picture from the gospel art kit that depicted an event in the Restoration. After an opening song and prayer, everyone looked at their pictures and we discussed what was happening in them. Then we got to put them on the clothesline-timeline with their matching date. It went really well

Playing Birthday

One of Kaitlyn and William's favorite games is to play "birthday". They love to pretend it's their birthday and have a party. They always want to have a cake with balloons and presents. Well, I usually let them pretend to make a cake and if we have some balloons, I'll blow a few up. They'll sometimes get their own toys and wrap them up in paper and give them to each other. It's very cute. Well this morning, because they play this so often, I decided that we'd make our own little mini cakes together. I got out a cake mix and used my mini bread pans to let them bake their own individual little cakes. Since they love "sprinkles", I let them put some into the cake batter before we baked the cakes.

While the cakes were baking we made some frosting. Because the cakes were so small, they only baked for about 20 minutes, and they only took a few more minutes to cool. So we were able to get to work on the frosting right away. They even wanted to put candles on the cakes and sing "happy birthday".

Another fun activity we did this morning -that teaches all sorts of good stuff to little hands and little minds,- was making an owl "softie". I let Kaitlyn pick out the fabric she wanted and then let her trace and cut the pattern peices. Then I sewed it up for her really quick, and let her stuff it. Fun!! I think this little owl looks like "neopolitan ice cream". Kaitlyn has named her "Owlie".

Resurrection Eggs

On Easter Sunday, the primary children walked through 12 different scenes in the last hours of the Savior's life. After opening excercises, we dismissed the the classes one by one to go out on a "Resurrection Egg" hunt. Outside in the hallway, were 12 giant eggs sitting in front of 12 different rooms (These eggs were huge, like 2 feet long and a foot wide, and they opened up in the middle just like the small eggs) I got them from hobby lobby). The class would go to each egg, one at a time, and open the egg, and then go inside the room to learn about what they found in the egg. Once inside the room, a member of the ward greeted the children by simply reading a scripture. The rooms were set up with pictures and little bit of scenery to help it look like the place where the scripture for each egg took place. Then, each child got a smaller version of the item that was in the large egg to put in their own egg. Each child had their own set of 12 eggs with scriptures on the outside of each egg. They filled their eggs as they walked through the 12 different scenes. Some of the ward members who helped us in the scenes were dressed up. It was very effective, even with the littlest ones.
(The pictures below are the baskets full of the mini versions of the items we had to give to each child. There was of course only one of each of these items in the 12 large eggs outside the rooms. )

1.Matthew 26:36-39:36

2. Matthew 26:14-15
3. Matthew 27:1-2
4 Matthew 27:22-24
5. Matthew 27:28-30
6. Matthew 27:31-35
7. Matthew 27:35-37
8. Matthew 27;50,51, 54 9.Matthew 27:57-60

10.Matthew 27:62-666 11. Mark 16:1-2

12. Luke 24:1-6

(This egg was empty, because the tomb was empty.)

This is a picture of our Bishop in front of the empty tomb from last year when we were able to do it on Good Friday and set up an actual tomb. We even had a CD with nature sounds playing in the background. This year, our Bishop just stood outside with a picture of the Savior and a small tomb that I have from a miniature resurrection scene.