Fun times with popcorn

The kids are off school for Thanksgiving break and I wanted to do something to entertain them. I wanted something seasonal that will be useful as well. That is when I remembered stringing popcorn as a child. My grandma used to do crafts like that with us. It is a great, cheap, easy craft that you can hang outside for the birds to eat!! Here are some pics of our fun time....

Christmas Decorating

I love Christmas!!! It is my favorite time of year! The music, food, snow, trees, deco, fun times, and all that comes along with it!! I love it so much that we decorated last weekend. We put on some Christmas music and went for it. Usually I have a big tree up, but this year we decided against it since Zach is such a rascal. He would have the tree undecorated and taken apart in no time at all!! So here is what we ended up with this year....

Sam's cake

Well, today my bog boy turns 12! I cannot believe that I have a 12 year old!! Last night I bake him a cake and we sang and ate it! It was yummy! Not very pretty but tasted really good. It was cherry chip cake with Cherry frosting!! MMMMM. Here are some pics....

It's been a while...

It has been a while since I have posted. Not too much out of the ordinary going on. Just the same old stuff.

Zach is learning new words. His newest is more. I am glad I taught him "more". It makes for a few less fits during the day.

Mia is learning to read and spell words. She is doing great at sounding them out. She drew a picture of the family and sounded out all of our names - "mom", "dad", "Sam", Mia" (she already knew this one well), and "Zak" (Zach but she got so close)!!! I am so proud of her!

Sam is working on a science project that will need a lot of grown up help. I am excited! He chose to do his project on catapults. We get to build them, shoot them off and write up our findings. Tons of fun!!

Halloween Fun

We have had a blast today. The local Parks and Rec had a "Friday Fright Night" tonight. There were area businesses that were handing out candy, the ISBEN dance theatre did a performance, there were scary stories, and a puppet show. It was a blast - even though it was cold. Here are some pics of the day....

Fun of Fall

I LOVE Autumn. It is so beautiful. When I was growing up I lived in Colorado, where there is not a colorful fall. The leaves just turn brown and fall off the trees. It really isn't pretty. I moved to Missouri when I was 18 and enjoyed my first "real" fall. The colors are amazing. (I am planning on taking some fall pics soon.
I have always love the whole leaf piles, pumpkins, trick-or-treating and holiday shopping that happens in the autumn. So far this year we have walked through the first of the crunching leaves that have fallen and also carved our first jack-o-lantern. Mia went on a field trip to a pumpkin patch and was able to bring home a pumpkin. She was so excited to have a pumpkin that she drew all over it with red permanant marker. We finally carved it this week (field trip was last week).
Sam has a field trip planned for the pumpkin patch so I am sure we will have more carving and pics in the future!!

We also bought the Halloween costumes this past week. The kids all had an idea of what they wanted to be. Finding the right sizes, or even a costume in Zach's case, was a little more of a chalenge. Mia found a cute cat costume, but they didn't have her size. Sam got lucky that we found his size in his costume. There were only 2 of what he wanted to be left. One was a size 7, the other a 12 Huskey. Sam is not a huskey boy, but for the costume the husky size didn't matter too much. They had 2 boy costumes left in Zach's size - a monkey and a bear. The bear was ugly and he was a monkey last year. Soooo here is what we ended up with...

Fall Crafts

We set out to make all of these great paper crafts today. I had plans of making little construction paper candy corn, jack-o-lanterns, and fall colored leaves. It was in my mind and they were gonna be great.
So this morning I separated all the colors of construction paper, found the crayons, pencils, and scissors. Then I went to find the glue sticks. Oh no, where did the glue sticks go?? They were all used up.
Ok Plan B - regular glue........
oh wait, that is gone too!!

Plan C - tape.....
OMG do we not have any sticky stuff in the house at all???!?!?!?!?

I found duct tape, but that just wouldn't work. So we ended up making these instead....

While Mia and I did the craft, Sam and Zach played near by. They were so cute together....