Where's my cookie?

(March)
We made a family trip out to Elwood to see Andrew's fam. We spent some much needed time with them since we haven't been able to go there because of cold and other illnesses. But finally we drove to see them and enjoy time together. We played games with Mitchell and talks lots with Andrew's Mom and we were able to sit down and watch a movie with them all call Pure Luck. It was hilarious. If you haven't seen it I suggest you do! As we were watching the movie we had some oreo type cookies. We told Austin he was on his last one. A while later I look down at my kids and Gavin is completely covered in cookie.
Me: Where did he get the cookie?"
Andrew: "I don't know?"
me: Weird, OK, just make sure he doesn't get the carpet dirty."
Andrew : "No prob"
10-20 minutes pass Gavin finishes his cookie. We take some pictures and clean him up..

I just found a cookie!

Austin: "Cookie?  *looks around*   Where is it?  *Looks with asking eyes*  uh-oh, cookie?"
At least we know where it came from now....
Right before we left a got a few pics for a family book I'm going to be making. Everyone was sports to let me hold a camera with dying batteries in front of their faces for longer than I would like and know they are going to hate me for sharing! :)

 When did this happen Mitchell? We are going to have to keep those girl away from you!

I like all the pics. Now I will just have to hope the others agree! :)

(April)
For Easter Andrew and I had to divide an conquer with both of our families in town. Though it was mainly because Austin had a cold....still. When will these kids stay better longer than a week? So I stayed with my fam with Austin and Andrew took Gavin out to see his parents. I have no idea what happened there and what was said but I will show you the pics that Andrew took while he was there and hopefully that will be enough to tell some sort of a story. :)

I love how it looks like..I'm going to guess Ammon has a monocle around his eye.

Kids thursday activity part 2

 Week 5 (March)

The next week I decided on something simple since the last activity was so big. I brought some lunch bags stencils and colored pencils and crayons and more BEANS! haha! So we had them decorate the paper bag then filled them with beans. I tried to get them to dance and make sounds to music but they were not in the mood for that one! They LOVED to use the stencils even though they had a bit of a hard time with them.

 Austin did like to throw his up in the air until he broke his...

Our little spectator

 Week 6 (March)

 This week we focused on counting. I brought cups and but different number of dots. Then they needed to put the right number of  fuzzy's into the cups. It was amazing to hear them count and know how many went in each one.

Week 7 (April)

Baby Animal Days! We have a historical farm near were we live and every year they have a baby animal days were you come and see and pet the babies at a price. Luckily, my husbands parents volunteer there so we were able to get in free and then we divided the remainder of the cost between us, it wasn't too bad except for the weather. As many of you have heard and seen Utah was been having some crazy weather. I think a little more odd than normal. So it was raining the day we went. But it was a good thing we went when we did.it started snowing on the way home and hail storms. The rest of the weekends got worse and they even had to close down the animal days due to the cold.

 We had to wait around for a little bit to wait for Rochelle, who was nice enough to come and bring us our tickets to get in from mom and dad. So here is Andrew, yes Andrew was able to take some time off of school to come with us, waiting in the lobby

Aren't kids funny where they decide to play?

 Austin's choo choo train. For those of you the know my son Austin you know he is obsessive with trains. In fact he didn't want to look at the majority of the animal because we want to watch the train that kept going around in the circle.

 Now if you look at the train you can see Andrew is on it but guess who didn't want to go on the train?!?! Austin. I couldn't believe it! He was happy to watch Daimian and Gavin with daddy go on the train without us and wave at them. Kids can be frustrating...

After seeing the baby bears

Gavin ready to call it a day...and we did.

 The kids were so cold by the end of it but it was fun. So fun everyone fell asleep in the car on the way home. :) I love it when that happens!
Week 8 (April)
Egg Olympics
Andrew's family like to have egg Olympic for Easter instead of the egg hunt. It last longer and gives you a good reason to cook so many eggs. I decided to try it out toddler style. First I had they decorate their eggs with stickers and crayons here are the winner

They each did 2 eggs. First we played the classic balance the egg on the spoon. They did an awesome job of this!

Then we did the roll the egg on the floor with our nose or hand. They decided hand was easier

Next we did the wrestling game. This one is hard to explain but you have 2 components with a hard boiled egg each. then with wrist together you count to 3 then knock the eggs into each other. if you egg cracks your out. it was fun. Next we switched to plastic eggs and ahve the who can throw the farthest and make it into the bucket games.

Everyone had a blast, and I was excited it went over well with the little ones. We even had a closing ceremony.

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The beautiful sounds of the toilet band. :)

Week 9 (April today)

 

We went outside and enjoyed the little bit of sunshine by playing on the tramp and watching and "helping" the neighbors with the garden. Another easy and entertaining time together. With lots of talking which is always a plus!

Kids activity thursdays part 1

It is back and actually if has been back for a couple of months. I just have been bad about getting on here and writing about it. For those that don't know I get together with a few of Austin's little friends in Logan and we have an activity. Some are big but mostly small ideas that I get from a book I received at a baby shower or the awesome ideas in the blog world. So far they have been fun and it has been so awesome to have a day I get to talk to adults that are in the same boat as me! Both of the families we do this with have 2 boys like me and they are all only months apart so it is kind of fun to have all of our boys around the same age! So let me catch everyone up on the activities that we have done so far and then expect (I hope) a post every week about the fun that was had.
Week 1 (Feb)
I had planned on making my own play dough and letting the kids have fun with that but then it snowed! and quite a bit too. So I decided to nix the play dough idea and had everyone get their gear on to go out and have some fun. At first the kids didn't want to do anything, just stand around

But then I decided to start acting like my husband Andrew and that got the kids laughing and wanting to move around.  Though I understand why they didn't want to at first...Look at them it looks like a scene from A Christmas Story. "My hands won't go down!"
I just started throwing snow balls and yelling and that got everyone excited about throwing snowballs at each other. Whew. It was a good thing I was given a good example how to act crazy! I just wanted to stand around in the snow too. Everyone needs an Andrew in their life.

It was fun but We couldn't stand anymore of it! inside we went for some food and much needed talking :)

Week 2 (March)
We had an art project that was tons of fun. I got my ink pads out...yes that's right ink pads with 2 year olds around.... They were VERY supervised. And my Train stamp set along with punched and glue sticks. We helped them stamp their choo choo on their paper and -punched out different shapes for them to glue on.

It wasn't as bad as I envisioned it. I was expected Corinne not to let us come over anymore. But Guess what! We came back the next week!
Week 3 (March)
Sadly I didn't get any pics for this activity because I forgot my camera! Can you believe it? Corinne took some but I never did force her to give them to me so we are out of luck. But what I did was brought paper of different colors and then my bingo game we bought for Austin. It has shapes different colors. I gave each of them one and they would have to say the color and find the paper that matched. They really got into this. I would give one kids a card and everyone would be there finding the page and calling out the color. Can I just say we have BRILLIANT children. Though I might be bias... :) After that we starting putting cars and the magnet letters onto the colors they belonged to and then the game was done.
Time for good food.

Week 4 (March)
This was by far the funnest activity day we ever had. EVEN though there were some stops along the way. It was St. Patty's day so everything was Green. We had an art project first with construction paper and bleach. Yes I SAID BLEACH! I'm started to think we might be crazy mothers to let our kids do these things but there were no problems that came because of it. Though having our kids shirtless helped.

After that we had a story time about the 5 wee Leprechauns.  And how they left their pot of gold/treasure for us to find. Now this is when the REAL fun happened. While everyone was painting with bleach I was getting a Treasure hunt ready. I grabbed items from every room and put a shamrock on it. Then distributed them around the house for them to find the end box with the treasure in it. They didn't quite get the idea. until we found an item. They would go running for the room to go to next but then didn't know how to really look for the shamrocks, all well.

Humm, where is it?

Austin is standing on the shamrock in this pic. No wonder they couldn't find it!

And it's found!

They found it and had fun playing in all the black beans I had put in the bottom. I had meant to have enough to cover and hide some of the items but my box was too big for that....Maybe next time. They threw them all over the room while Corinne and I were talking in the other room. Needless to say they will be finding the beans for years to come! All in all a great day!