Kaitlyn's Preschool Party

Today at Kaitlyn's preschool they had a spring "dance". William and I went to go be a part of it. The kid's danced and sang to their favorite preschool songs, and then later ate cookies and fruit for refreshments. Kaitlyn was really happy to have us there. William was a little shy, but he enjoyed the cookies.

Easter week -Day 2-House of Prayer.

Like last year, Tom and I wanted to do an activity each day of the week leading up to Easter to help us think of the Savior. Yesterday we read how Jesus cleansed the temple right after he came into Jerusalem. He tells us that the Temple is a "house of prayer". So, we made big soft pretzels to represent arms folded in prayer.

Spring Party

Tom's Unit hosted a family day yesterday. It was the first one we've ever had in the 12 + years we've been here. It was alot of fun. There was a giant slide and a bounce house.Alan enjoyed going down the slide with his little brother. Sarah enjoyed jumping in the air at the top of the slide.

Sarah had her face painted.

There were crafts to make....And eggs to find...

They also had lunch for us with cake as the desert.

William gave up on using his fork for the cake. Lot's of fun, but a little too cold and windy for a spring day.

But it was better than being hot! :p

PVC pipe is cool

Years ago I was in charge of the Fall Festival at Alan and Sarah's school, and I built booths out of PVC pipe for it. Knowing that if I left it at school it would just get thrown out, I decided to keep it. Since then we've used it for all sorts of fun stuff. We've made houses and giant forts with it, we've made balloon arches with it for birthdays, and I've used it in primary for object lessons. William loves to just sit and put the shorter peices together.

It's kind of like giant tinker toys.

For those of you who are wondering, a 10 foot pole of PVC pipe is about $1 at the Home Depot or Lowes. The joints are about .20-40 cents each. You can cut it easily with pretty much any kind of saw, to any length you want. You can even spray paint it if you like a variety of colors. Very cool.

Leprechaun Day!

I tried to find some green spray paint because the girls wanted to have green hair for St. Patty's Day, but it was no where to be found. So I bought this cheap green wig. Kaitlyn now goes to a little preschool and this is what she wore yesterday. The teacher said she wore it all day!
Sarah did not want to wear the wig into the 3rd grade class, but she did want a little stripe of green hair. (Alan wanted nothing to do with the wearing of the green wig)

Here is Sarah showing us the irish dinner we had-Corned beef and cabbage with carrots and potatoes, and Irish soda bread. She's also modeling the wig.

After dinner we made rainbow cupcakes!! And played find the leprechaun.

Planting our little garden

For Family Home Evening last night we decided to make another attempt at planting a garden. I've never been able to get anything to grow except beans, peas, and tomatoes, I'm not sure what will come up.Last year we had no garden,and it was a good thing because our yard was over run with gigantic black grasshoppers. Hopefully they won't come back. Does anybody have a good way to get rid of those dinasaur sized things? I never knew they existed until I came here. Here's William doing his favorite chore: watering the garden!!

Sand imported from the Moon

A trip to the playroom on Friday afternoon revealed a new discovery at the sand and water table: Moon Sand!!

Toys R Us had it on sale, and so I bought some and put it in the long neglected sand table. I haven't had anything in their for a long time since it usually gets eaten. Yes, I said eaten. Either that or thrown all around the room.

I took a chance on the moon sand because it claims to be easy to clean up. I wouldn't support that claim. If you get it, don't let your kids play with it anywhere near a rug or you will spend quite a while vacuuming it up. But, they absolutely love it, and even Alan and Sarah spent hours in it on Saturday. I have looked for moon sand recipes, and I did make some moon sand-it is NOT the same. So for now we'll have fun with the real stuff and hope we don't lose too much of it to the vacuum.

Eggs!

These are the awesomely large eggs I found at Hobby Lobby. I love them!Here's some egg sugar cookies we made tonight. Cool tip: Melt a tub of vanilla icing in the microwave and color it with food coloring. It dries hard but still shiny.

Some wooden eggs I've finally figured out how to create with my scroll saw. I cut the wood at different angles then stack it together.

I really wanted to make them hollow, and yet still seemless when they're closed.

Rub-a-dub-dub, Swimsuits in a jetted tub

The kids wanted to go "swimming" in our tub yesterday. Our tub is alot bigger than theirs, and it has jets in it. I never let them take baths at bath time because it takes way too long and all they do is play, but yesterday I let them have play time. They all put on swimming suits and crowded into the bubbly tub. We couldn't keep the jets on because they scared William.

Wee workout on the wii

Alan was working out on the wii fit yesterday afternoon, and he chose the push-up activity. Everyone else thought it looked like something fun to try, even William. I took this picture before they knew I was watching them. I love the little diaper bottom in the air. :)

Bowls!

Ok, I know this is my family blog and I'm supposed to put my wood creations on my other blog, but I'm so excited about this, that I just have to share with everyone. I just learned how to make bowls with my scroll saw!! It's so neat. Don't look too closely though, I haven't quite perfected it yet, so I won't be selling any of these until I do.
I read about it in the scroll saw magazine. The technique is developed by a fellow scrollsawer, her blog is here http://www.scrollsawbowls.blogspot.com/

So, here are some pictures of my new adventure. Now that I know this technique, I'm thinking of making a salad bowl and some smaller bowls. Maybe even some wooden utensils. This is so fun.

The Great Dirt Box

One day this dirt box will return to being a garden, but in the mean time it's a great construction site! The kids have been playing in this after school alot.

William get's really dirty but he loves it!!Sarah was busy making a "trap". She dug a really deep hole and covered the hole with a board that just barely fit. The idea was that other people would fall in if they stepped on it. .....That's my Sarah... sigh...

Alan loves cookies

Giant Heart cookies we made were devoured happily.

A Valentine's Video

Last week Tom and I went out to dinner on Thursday for our Valentine's Day dinner date since there would be no other time for us to go. While we were gone, our Favorite babysitter Kate Harrell came over and helped the kids make a Valentine's Day present for us. We thought you'd like to see it.

White Rain?

On Friday last week, it was predicted to snow 1-2 inches, than they were saying 4-6 inches. Well Friday came and it snowed from 10:00am -6:30pm, but it was nearly 40 degrees for most of the day!! For the first two hours of hard snow falling, nothing was accumulating because it was 39 degrees. It got down to about 35 and started to stick, but the sides of grass were wet and sloshy because it was so warm. In the end we got maybe 1 1/2 inches after over 8 hours of snow. But we had so much fun! And the next day we played in it before it melted by the end of the day.

This picture is about 6:00pm just before it stopped. Notice how the driveway is not snowed on? All of the roads were just wet. That's because it was melting almost as fast as it was falling. Luckily it was falling pretty fast otherwise it would not've accumulated on the grass or anything at all.

Wet snow sticks on trees really well, so beautiful.

Kaitlyn is happy to play with a friend in the backyard- about 3 hours after it started snowing.