Summer at Home: Week Two…

June 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I believe we have survived our second full week home. I only gained a couple of new gray hairs, so that is somewhat successful.

This week was our Vacation Bible School at church as well, which the kids loved! It was a fun and active week of VBS.

As far as our Summer Vacation Chart goes, the kids chose some fun activities for the week.

Monday, Daniel went to Police Academy and had a great time. The police officers fingerprinted the kids and dusted for fingerprints. He also saw a demonstration with the police dog and got to see in the police car and touch the handcuffs. J He seemed to enjoy it and still says he wants to be a policeman when he grows up.

Tuesday, the kiddos made s’mores. That’s always yummy… and messy. 

Wednesday, was Mississippi Flood- which is what I call it anyway. It’s a game where there is a bucket full of water at one end and an empty bucket of water at the other. You have to get a cup full of water from the full bucket and run it to the empty bucket until the empty bucket is full. The kids seemed to enjoy that.

Thursday, was Under the Sea Day. First we painted paper plate fish.

  

We also made a jello aquarium. I don’t have a good picture of this, but all we did was make blue jello and when it was starting to set we put in gummy fish.

 

I could have gone all out and made a themed meal, but I didn’t.

These squid dogs are cute and so are octopus hotdogs. You could pair it with shell mac and cheese. You could eat fish or fish sticks, but I’m allergic to fish, so I never even think of feeding these things. J I’m sure there are a ton of other cute ideas.

We also made a wave bottle and played Fish Bingo.

The kids loved the Bingo game. We used goldfish as Bingo markers and they got to eat them when they were done.

After a full week with the kiddos and a full week of VBS with a lot of kiddos and a full week of Dan being super busy, I’m ready for the weekend… and a trip to the lake! I might have to arrange that. J

Filed Under: Summer, Summer Vacation Chart, Us? Organized?

I Live With All Boys: Exhibit E…

June 14, 2010 By 1 Comment

So, Daniel went to Police Academy this morning and came home wanting me to take his picture like this.

This particular picture could have never been taken 2-3 years ago, because he wouldn’t have had the toy gun to take the picture with.

I read a blog post this weekend that remind me so much of myself. It was about that first born son and how he will never play with toy guns and he won’t own them and he won’t play them with his friends…. and then a realization comes… Boys are born with ‘pretend gun play’ in their DNA. Whether you like it or not.

For the longest time Daniel had no toy guns and I really didn’t like him playing with them, but then when he was around kids that had toy guns he was completely obsessed. All of a sudden the obsession and novelty of it seemed worse than a day to day exposure. I still frankly don’t love all of the playing around with toy guns, but it’s a losing battle. As long as the boys know that real guns are no joke and can really hurt people (and they know this) then I think we’re just fine.

I had to sort of let up on my play gun stance when my #2 boy was born anyway… he came out of the womb making machine gun noises. And both of the boys were making vroom noises with little cars and turning sticks into guns and swords without anyone teaching them. Some things seem to be inherently gender specific. There are no sticking guns in the hands of my boys- they are making them.

This particular little toy G.I. Joe gun above gave me a grin. I walked through my Dining Room the other day and saw the little gun sitting on the chair and thought that if I had a house full of girls, I’m not sure this would be a sight that I would see. It was a big reminder that I’m a girl living with all boys… and I wouldn’t change it for the world!

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
Exhibit D

Filed Under: I Live With All Boys

Summer at Home: Week One…

June 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This past week was our first full week of Summer Vacation here at home… and we survived!  The boys chose their cards for the week from their Summer Vacation chart and were a bit excited with the choices.

Monday they pulled the card for a trip to the park, which they thoroughly enjoyed. It was so hot that they were begging to leave, which was fine with me!

Tuesday they chose the card to make playdough, but we ended up not doing this. I had to run errands, Daniel had his library program in the afternoon and then I went out of town for the night with Dan to his meetings and my mom came to stay with the kids.

I arrived back Wednesday in time to wash the car, which is the card they pulled for that day.

The theme for Thursday was Rainbow Day and we did four activities.

First, the boys colored a rainbow.  Daniel’s rainbow was cool, but it didn’t have the colors in order, so I marked through some of the numbers and changed them.  Maybe I’m a smidge anal with some things, I don’t know.

Daniel’s rainbow

Luke’s rainbow

The second thing they did was make Fruit Loop necklaces.  Daniel patterned his in rainbow color order and Luke just strung the cereal.

The third thing we did was paint rainbows.

The last of the rainbow themed activities was making a rainbow cake.  I made it for Easter a couple of years back and it was awesome, but today I tried to half the recipe and it didn’t cook thoroughly and was not that great… but the boys thought is tasted good and looked really cool.  :)

Daniel pulled a few cards from the ‘Nothing to Do’ pocket this week, which seemed to work well.  All in all I would say the week was successful.  We still pretty much went with the flow and just threw in a project each day (or several on Theme Day).  The activities really don’t take all that long, but give a bit of direction to the day.  We’ll see if they stay excited through the summer.  I’m hoping so, since we have little things spliced through the summer as well.

Now, bring on the weekend!

Filed Under: Daniel, Luke, Summer, Summer Vacation Chart, The kiddos, Updates

Go Gators…

June 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During some downtime after our Disney trip, we went and spent the day with Dan’s brother and his family and headed to Dan’s beloved Swamp.

We walked around and took some pictures.

The cousins were being exceptionally cute that day.

Luke showed his Gator enthusiasm and modeled for us how to properly do the Gator chomp.

His Daddy was proud. J

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Summer’s here… Now what?

June 6, 2010 By 7 Comments

I posted a few months back about my idea for organizing our summer. 

Schedule free is great to an extent, but it doesn’t always work around here. I have a certain seven year old in my house that needs to stay busy, so I’m giving this a shot to organize our days a bit. There is still plenty of room for chilling and doing a whole lot of nothing.  

 

I decorated our Summer board with Phineas and Ferb. Whenever I think of Summer Vacation, I can’t help but think of those guys and how they come up with great things to do each day. Our days, however will probably not involve surfing tidal waves, creating nanobots or locating Frankenstein’s brain.  That could be fun though! 



I have given a theme to each day, so that we have some direction.  We have Movie Time Monday (go the library and check out books/movies), Terrific Tuesday (some sort of outing- park, zoo, etc. or a project) Wacky Wednesday (water play, some sort of sensory play) and this is also our day for chores and errands- like groceries, Theme Day Thursday (Pajama Day, Ice cream Day, Sixties day, etc.- we’ll do all sorts of things around the theme). We also have an ‘I need to find something to do’ pocket for those times when “There’s nothing to do!”  Goodness knows the kids sometimes need ideas on what to do at certain points in the day! 

 

There are several cards in each pocket with activity ideas. I’ll have the boys pull a card for each day at the beginning of the week, so I can get the things together in advance for the day. 

 

I got a lot of the craft ideas from Family Fun Magazine, which is such a great magazine. And I got most of the Theme Day ideas from Whittaker Woman. She does great Family nights with her family and I plan on using a lot of her ideas for our theme days. 

I was going to use cute library pockets, but I never went and bought them, so I used scrapbook paper. I think library pockets would probably hold up better, though. 

I know there are far more creative people out there that could take this idea and tweak it and make it better or cuter, but this is what we’re giving a shot this summer. D3 is very excited about it, so we’ll see how it goes! 

Summer Idea Cards

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Filed Under: Being a Mommy, Summer, Us? Organized?
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