Summer Activities

Summer is just about here... only one more day of school for the kiddos and then it's over. Or it's beginning? Either way you look at it, the kids will be home all summer! My friend, Leslie, made a list of all the fun things they'd be doing this summer. I thought I'd do the same - even if only to get ideas from others so we don't end up playing video games all the days long!

Swim lessons

Swim in the pool

Water polo camp

Read books

Music camp

Go to Wild Water Adventures

Cub Scout Day Camp

$1 & $3 movie theaters

Scout Camp

Teach the kids how to cook - cookie squares, mac n cheese, pancakes, quesadillas (any other babysitting foods???)

Camping at the Beach

Once a week library visits (to check out more FREE video games! and books, of course)

Sleepovers

Camping in the mountains

Movies on the wall in the backyard

Smores with a backyard bonfire

Nerf battles

Airsoft wars

Pedicures

Chuck E Cheese when reading charts are filled!

Go to the farm

Check out the city parks with water features

Family bike rides

Walks to the gas station

Playdates


Of course, all of this fun will happen after the morning chore charts have been completed:
brush teeth
make bed
pick up dirty clothes
read
Jackson Job (read with Jackson, ABC Flashcards with Jackson, or white board writing letters with Jackson)
around the house job x2

That's the plan anyway... we'll see how long the mama's will power lasts :/


What are you doing for family fun this summer to keep the summer doldrums away?

It was raining like hail last week

We get only one good hailstorm a year in our area. This year it came on the first day of spring! Jackson and I were home when it hit. The "ping" sounds began and it got louder and louder until the thunder boomed and the lightning cracked! The sky was dark as night and the power went out for a few minutes. The hail continued for about 15 - 20 minutes. We will put one of our large bowls outside to see how much hail we can catch. The bowl was filled halfway by the time the storm was finished. Jackson had fun eating the hail and kept calling it "frozen rain".

It looked like there had been a snowstorm. The rooftops were solid white, the trampoline, and lawns were all covered in a blanket of hail.

And notice, in our play area, the lovely swamp that came because of all the rain before the hailstorm. Trevor tested its deepness and he came in the house with water up to his shins. That's like 7 or 8 inches in the deepest spots! The hail hung around most of the day and there was even some left for Jeremy to see when he got home from work.

Today, we are longing for the cooler weather. Our weather forecast for this week has a high of 79 degrees! Summer, do not come too early. We want to enjoy Spring for at least a month.

Friendly pool friends

Here we are on an average day - 15+ kids in the pool and a few moms lounging/life guarding on the deck. There are 17 kids that live within our 3 houses next door to each other which accounts for most of the bodies in the pool on any given day. And when you add in friends and neighbor kids that quickly turns into a pool party.

We keep trying to convince our pool service to treat our pool as they would any other community pool, but they just won't agree to it. Something about a "residential contract" or something like that.

Here is another pool friend that showed up on this same day. Buffy spotted him on the chair next to me and all the ladies had a great yelp and squeal because of him. This grasshopper was HUGE! - almost as big as Buff's hand. Sorry for the picture quality - I had only my cell phone camera on hand at the moment.

Like I said, we are out there by the pool on most hot afternoons - grasshopper friend or no grasshopper friend, but definitely with lots of people friends.

"Oh, What do YOU do in the summertime?"

Summer is quickly approaching and our activity idea list is hum drum BOR-RING same as every year. We need to spice things up a bit.

We want your tips for:

-keeping the house clean/bribes/rewards,
-places to go,
-crafts to create,
-imagination escapdes to pursue,
-pool games, board games, in-door/out-door games,
-good books to read
-hikes,
-bike trails,
-local/community events,
-kid-friendly recipes,
-night-time adventures too!

Please share ideas - big or small - so we can begin to create our summer fun itinerary!

The latest obsession

Jeremy loves to download the freebie apps for his ipod. He's had this game on his itouch for awhile now and he loves it. Just 2 days ago he downloaded it FREE to our desktop computer and now the kids can't get enough either! It is so addicting killing all those zombies!

Check it out if you haven't seen it yet and download the game FREE*. Plants vs. Zombies.
*Disclaimer: This game is NOT FREE. You must pay $19.95 to download it onto your computer.

Yes, the premise looks quite silly - Zombies trying to eat the plants and all - but I have been assured so many times that it really is very fun. And apparently, once you start you just can't get enough.

Turtle for Sale!

Read-Eared Slider Aquatic Turtle FOR SALE!!
$50 OBO

. . .

Included in your purchase price:
- Turtle
- 25 Gallon Tank
- filter and extra cartridges
- 2 lamps
- heater
- all accessories & rocks already in the tank
- background seen in the photo

Leave your contact info in a comment, email us, or send us a message on Facebook if you are interested in purchasing our turtle!

A Childhood Memory

I made cookies the other day. Delicious, oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies. Mmmmmm... they were tasty.

I was moving the hot cookies to my "cooling rack" and stacking the already cooled cookies to the back row when I had a *flash* memory from my childhood. I vividly remembered my mom making cookies just like this. I remember her standing at the counter, spatula in hand, taking cookies off the hot baking sheet, and transferring them to the cooling rack (which was actually a brown paper grocery sack from Gemco). I remember being barely tall enough to see over the counter and drooling over her stacks and stacks of cookies! The whole house would be filled with the aroma of fresh baked cookies and all I wanted was to plow one of those delicious morsels into my mouth. We were allowed to eat 2 or 3 for a snack. What a treat!

I love that the "tables have turned" or that "the circle of life" has continued and now it is my turn to be the mama standing in the kitchen, baking cookies, and telling the kids they can have one or 2 for a snack.

Such a simple memory, yet so sweet. And tasty.

Followin' a rainbow

We had a day of thunderstorms and lightning. (Jackson thought the lightning was pretty cool - he kept searching the sky for Lightning McQueen...) The rainbowS that came afterward were AMAZING! My pictures of the sky never do it justice, but you can get a little taste of what we saw anyway. We had a view of the entire arc. Wow. (The double rainbow is pretty faint in this picture, but you can still see it if you look close enough.)

This shot is the best of the double rainbow. Those colors were so vibrant! The kids were rattling off every color they saw. And they could see them all!

The expressions on their faces are just priceless. Sheer awe and joy as they marveled at that natural beauty.

There was talk of following the rainbow to find the pot of gold at the end. Finally, these boys get it. There really is no pot of gold. The real treasure is in the rainbow itself! We heart rainbows!

hail. Hail. HAIL!

It has been raining like crazy for the past several days. The rain is much needed and welcome. It does get hard when you try to go grocery shopping or when you dash from the car to the house or when you don't get any outside recess for several days in a row. BUT it can bring some fun surprises as well. Yesterday we had a chilly treat fall from the sky. No, that is not snow... it's HAIL! WOW. Check out that parking lot! They could've made snowballs out of all that hail and had a royal fight! The hail fell only in a small section of the city, but it really came down in this one spot. Do those boys look happy to be outside or what? They haven't played outside for so long, but it was so enjoyable for them even if it was just for a few freezing cold moments.

It's Autumn Time, it's autumn time, the leaves are falling down...

Our tree that sits right out front of our house is so beautiful this week! Check out it's vibrant yellow color. I had Jackson pose for a fall photo shoot and this picture was the best and the last of the session. The ones down below are the best of HIS personality and antics. It is hard to photograph a 3 year old! The nostril flare is my personal favorite.

Stair Sledding

This is what happens when the kids have a day off of school and nothing to do. I think the technical term for this is PWT Sledding...

"Take at least 2 pictures per person in your photo".

I've heard that advice several times and would love to put it to good use, but how in the world am I supposed to get my kids to sit still for 12 snaps of the shutter? I'll never know.

We were out of town for Labor Day weekend and tried to get a couple of good family pictures. Please tell me why this is so hard! We've taken a million pictures together - you'd think they'd have figured it out by now. Just look at the camera and SAY CHEESE already!

Here are the best and the worst of our family shots:

This one takes the cake. Seriously?! It must have been perfect timing to catch every one of us at the exact moment we all looked our goofiest at the SAME TIME!

These last 2 are the "best".

If only Trevor had his eyes open - it could've been a Christmas card mailer! (Robb, you wanna help us out with a little photoshop?)

And this last one counts as a "best" because at least everyone is facing the camera - eyes forward. And yes, even Jackson's goo-gah made it into our family picture.

Let's take a vote shall we? Which one would you frame up and put on your wall?

And heeere we go!

I think we're officially ready for summer!

We have our chore list. Check.

We have our "what to do if you're bored" list. Check.

We have our schedule in place. Water Polo. Swim Club. Tutoring. Piano lessons. Check. Check. Check. Check.

Our daily and weekly incentive programs are set. Check and check!

Let's do this thang!! ("This thang" meaning summer vacation of course.)

Chimp Lips

When Jackson puckers up....

...he PUCKERS UP!

This is Jackson's face whenever I ask for a kiss. He is not shy about it. It's always wet and smoochalicious! Sometimes he plants a good one on me and does not let go. He wraps his little arms around my neck and keeps his lips pressed against mine for a good 10 seconds. Whew! that's some love right there!

Does he not look like a little chimpanzee?

Are ya chicken?

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2nd clue summer is on it's way

THESE:

+ THESE

= THIS

6 months of homemade strawberry freezer jam!

One of life's simple pleasures

I may have already shared this memory once before, but it needs repeating at least once a year. It's a good one. This tradition may have even started during my mother's childhood. This is a real, down home, tradition.

Every year at the start of strawberry season my family had a simple unspoken tradition. Strawberry Shortcake.

Mom would buy a flat of strawberries from one of the local stands because of course their berries are the best. None of the store-bought ones are ever as good as the ones from the stands. She may have bought the entire flat just for the Strawberry Shortcake because I don't remember her canning jam like we do now. We would go through an entire flat of strawberries (that's 12 of those little plastic green baskets) in about 3 days. Mom would wash the strawberries, take off the stems, slice 'em up, and pour about a cup of sugar over them to sweeten the deal even more. While the sugar was soaking into the strawberries she would mix up a yellow cake mix, or maybe it was two, or even three (she had a really big cake pan just for these occasions) and bake it up just right. I can remember salivating as we were waiting and waiting through the baking and then the cooling of the cake until if was finally the moment when we were allowed to dig in.

Oh those were some of the sweetest memories. The perfect slice of cake in my bowl, split in half. Heaping spoonfulls of sugary deliciously fresh strawberries and their juices over my warm cake. Letting it soak in for just a moment. And then that first juicy bite of heaven. Oh yeah. It was good.

No whipped cream or ice cream was needed. Ok, maybe there was a tub of Cool Whip around sometimes, but come on - it was the strawberry goodness we were all after.

I think mom loved those Strawberry Shortcake moments just as much as us kids because she would let us eat AS MUCH AS WE WANTED. And if there was some leftover, we were even allowed to eat it for breakfast the next day! Is that awesome or what?!

So, to my mother I say, thanks for the memories and a great tradition that we now continue on in our family. I still love it and now your grandkids do too. This picture was taken a few nights ago. I was taken back to my childhood just like I am every year when I take that first delicious bite of Strawberry Shortcake.

Brown bird, brown bird through my window...

What the heck!? How do these birds happen to fly into our house every year - always in the spring? And these guys are not smart creatures either. He tried to get out about 5 times by ramming into our closed windows! You think they'd learn. I guess that's where the term "bird brain" came from.

So this guy finally banged his head too many times and injured himself somehow. He was not moving - breathing yes - so still alive. I had to scoop him up (All by myself! Why do these things always happen when Jeremy is at work?) and gently take him back outside. He was miraculously gone a few minutes later. The kids like to think that the "birdie ambulance" came along and took him to the hospital to get repaired. I just hope he regained his senses and flew away before a cat got to him.

You know it's time to go to the grocery store when you run out of....

Neslte Quick
Bread
Eggs
Tortillas
Pretzles
Cereal

(Notice how I didn't mention any fruits or veggies? I guess we like to eat the opposite of the Atkins diet around here. High carb, low protien.)

What food does your family need to survive?

"I looked out the window and what did I see?"

"PINK popcorn popping on the apricot (er... plum) tree!"


The kids love it when the trees begin to blossom. I have to admit that I do to. We were driving in the car yesterday and Lizzie and Jackson both could not contain their enthusiasm every time we drove by a "popcorn tree". They would shriek, "There's another one!" about every 2 seconds. (When Jackson says, "There's another one!" it sounds like, "nuh-wun." Oh I love it!)

Then the conversation always goes something like this:

Lizzie: Mommy can we eat that popcorn?
Me: No sweetie. It just looks like popcorn, but it's really just flowers.
Lizzie: Can we eat the flowers?
Me: (chuckling inside) You can eat the flowers if you want, but they won't taste very good.