Every time I organize our photos and get ready to do a month of blogging, I'm surprised at how many fun things we capture each week. This entire blog is from the 9 days from March 14 to 22. Realizing how hard it is to narrow down the activities to share is really indicative of how full and wonderful this stage of life is. We have 3 kids who are busy exploring the world around them, and are trying to make our way as a family living quite far from our family in a new, crazy area of the country. But to get past the sentimental, here are the goings on of the middle of March!
We took all the kids one evening to a Library activity night called PJ Animal Math. Essentially, they had tables set up with preschool-appropriate math activities (Fruit Loop pattern necklaces, Goldfish graphing, Pretzel/marshmallow geometry, and thumbprint stamp counting) for the kids to explore at their own pace. I was so glad that we had 2 parents there, because our kids have totally different approaches. Olivia, who is at the perfect age to fully grasp the math involved, moved from activity to activity and back again, trying to be the first one done regardless of the sloppy results. Carter was much happier to take his time at each activity, but needed a bit of assistance with understanding the process involved in each activity. As usual, Kenzie was happy to grab a bag of Fruit Loops and explore by herself, she is such an easy toddler! Toward the end, the instructor set up a Stuffed Animal zip line for each kid to run their stuffed animals down. I never would have thought that some fishing line, a paperclip, and a rubber band could cause so much joy. A totally fun evening and a great reason to keep the kids up late one night.
The next day we got to see baby again for a 28 week ultrasound :) The doctor was checking some mystery fluid around baby's heart that was visible at the 20 week standard ultrasound. Everything was totally fine, baby is growing and moving more than any other baby I've had. It seems like as soon as I sit or lay down, he starts moving and doesn't stop. He's definitely prepping to keep up with all these older siblings running around.
Sometimes Makenzie likes to help mom with the laundry :). She is so cute in her absolute surety that she can do anything Olivia and Carter can do. In this case it was grabbing entire handfuls of laundry from my arms to put into the dryer. She dropped more than she got in, but she wasn't satisfied with one thing at a time.
Snack time often turns into a squished up pile watching a show on the couch. All of the kids want to be next to each other all of the time, so when their not pulling each others' hair out it's super cute.
Every morning we have a mad rush to get out of the house to school. It shouldn't be hard, we don't have to leave until 9:30, but I always let the kids play too much and I need to learn to cut my chore time shorter. However, since there is 5 weeks of school left, I'm not going to try to change anything now. This particular morning was St. Patrick's Day, so we had to do special holiday breakfast and lots of green hair chalk, so when I looked up from finishing Olivia's holiday hair to see Carter helping Makenzie put her shoes on, I was so proud. Sometimes the mom-isms we repeat 1000 times each day actually sink in, and this day it gave me a lot of hope.
Here's what we had going on for St. Patrick's Day. As a disclaimer, my goals for cute holiday hair and food always surpass my preparation, so I'm totally grateful for Pinterest and late night planning sessions. I completely forgot about St. Patty's until the day before, so we ended up with a rainbow-kabob and a pot of gold in Olivia's lunch. It turned out super cute, and I was thrilled to have everything I needed already.
Special holiday hair didn't turn out quite as well as lunch. This is a really bulky 3 leaf clover that wasn't super cute, but fulfilled the need for a cute 'youtube hair style' as O calls it. I secretly think she just likes watching the tutorials over and over :).
Add some green hair chalk and stick on earrings and we are ready to go. We had a slight disaster early in the morning because I looked through Olivia's clothes and found absolutely 0 green items. She is a pink sparkly girl, but I was totally surprised to find nothing that would pass for green. Luckily we have awesome girl cousins who pass down all their cute clothes, so I just had to look through the 'too big' bin for an official St. Patrick's Day shirt. Thanks Grover girls!!
Carter's hair chalk turned into Hulk Hair halfway through the day, and he insisted on it everyday for a week :).
I've been trying to make a consolidated list of 'skills' that I want to help the kids learn over the next year. One of the things on both of their list is making food. This is a scary venture for me because as of yet, they pretty much ask for food and get it from me. The kitchen hasn't been an 'open' room, but I know once we open that can of worms it will be all over. However, I think kids who are 5 and 3 can learn to make peanut butter sandwiches, toast, get cereal out (and pour milk if it's not too full), and hopefully O can learn a microwave quesadilla. Not super lofty goals, but it will do for our first venture into independent food preparation. As our first practice day, I gave Carter instructions for making his own 'ants on a log'. He loved it :)
More craft time! Today was an ambitious day that included both craft time at the table and baking with mom. Our tummies and hearts were full after a great afternoon.
While we were waiting for the cookies to bake, we got this picture from dad. I don't think softball will be happening on that field!
The kids were getting kind of bored with their chores so we decided to have Movin' On Up Day! Olivia moved from emptying the dishwasher to Mommy's helper (which will mean laundry/picking up one room, etc). Carter moved from putting away all the silverware to emptying the dishwasher (sans breakables...he's not quite there yet). Makenzie also graduated into doing a chore, so she gets to put away the silverware with lots of mommy help! I don't want to give the impression that we are amazing about doing chores. Every day the kids are responsible for dressing themselves, making beds, and most days picking up their rooms. We run the dishwasher 3 or 4 times a week, so those are the days that we do chores. Occasionally I find chores for them to do on other days, but it's not a daily routine that goes off without a hitch. I'm delusional enough to think that maybe someday it will be, but for now there is lots of mom involvement and reminders.
They were REALLY excited about their new chores, and did them all amazingly.
Kenzie's first foray into matching went well, she was able to match the spoons, forks, and knives to the ones in the drawer fairly well.
A little ambitious about the amount of laundry carried at once, but O got all the kid clothes into drawers with 90% accuracy and 30% neatness :).
I turned around once to help O with some of the drawers that are harder to open, and I came back to an entirely empty silverware drawer... Makenzie had emptied the entire thing into her bowl of silverware to put away. I guess we still have work to do with following directions, but she was having a blast, so no harm done :).
A very proud boy with his completed cupboard. I have completely given up on my organization system for now, but it's sweet to have the kids try so hard to put everything in its place.
Alex got in on the project action as well this week. He started a 'car garage' for the kids backyard toys. We noticed last fall that the sun here seems to do a lot more damage to the toys than in Idaho, so I wanted to find some way to protect the multitude of bikes, scooters, cars, etc. that litter our backyard. Hopefully a garage will be incentive enough to get those toys put away half the time as well.
We had lots of playdates this week as Allison and I realized that if we traded kids during doctors appointments, we could avoid taking 3 kids to each appointment that we have. I feel like with so many kids (and me being pregnant), we are at the doctor almost daily, so this is a huge blessing to me! One morning I had her two adorable boys for a couple hours, so I zipped all 5 kids into the trampoline and read a book for a while ;-). Really the trampoline is awesome, and the kids play so well together that it's not any harder to have 5 or 6 kids over here than it is to just have my 3. Yay! for fun friends!!
I cheated a little bit, and when the kids got a little grumpy I parked them in front of some Dinotrux and gave them a popcorn/muffin snack.
My beautiful baby girl. She is looking less and less like a baby every day, but every once in a while those cheeks show me that she still has some baby left in her :).
And this is why she sat and smiled at me...she was feeling a little guilty about her style of popcorn eating!
No comments:
Post a Comment