Baking and milking a cow.

When I was growing up I desperately wanted an easy bake oven.  I loved baking with my Mom and still do today.  I am apparently not the only one who wanted one of these ovens but never got one.  A teacher at Mark's school always wanted one too and so her husband bought her one a few years back.   Cute right? After awhile she decided she really didn't need one and so she asked Mark if he wanted it and he brought it home for me  Lydia.  When we moved into this house I put it in the guest room closet downstairs to have it out of the way yet knowing it was there waiting for me Lydia.  Awhile back Lydia saw it and asked if we could use it and I said we could soon.  The day finally came this week.  In Lydia's Easter basket this year I got her 2 mixes that we could bake together. We pulled one out Tuesday and started baking.  She loved the miniature baking pans and tools and had fun mixing up her batter.  We put them in the oven and waited over 20 minutes for 4 little cookies to bake.  Electric light bulbs = not super fast at cooking. She mixed up the frosting to add to them and took bite and then said "these are good but not as good as yours." True story.  It was fun to take a trip down memory lane with Lydia and I know we will use it again soon but I am going to stick with real ingredients and a real oven.

Our theme this week in preschool was "farms." One of our activities was to "milk a cow".  I filled a medical glove with water and a little white paint and poked a hole in one of the fingers.  I placed a jar in a pan and told the kids to milk the cow.  They loved it!  It was really fun to watch them, they did not want to stop.  When Jared got home from school I told him about it and he wanted to try it and did it so much he almost filled the jar.  It is a really simple fun activity, go do it!

Great fine, small motor skills! 

April Fools Day:

Tomorrow is April Fools Day.  This is one of the few holidays I do not celebrate, but I am making a small exception this year.  My friend Julie asked if I would be interested in doing a prank on Jared and her son (one of Jared's best friends) Tyler.  They are in the same class together at school and are fairly inseparable. (It will be a sad day for them if they are not in the same class together next year.) She suggested we make identical lunches and send them to school with matching notes and food only we addressed the note to the wrong kid.  It is such a fun idea.  We shared different food items, came up with a note and she even sent a matching green spoon for their applesauce!  I wish I could be there to see their reactions.  It's great to have such fun friends. I hope they love it!

Easter

I love this printable I found online! 

And the bunny silhouette. Those are Jelly beans in the jars. 

 I will miss having decorations out. Our house always looks so bare after a holiday. Nad the last ones have been so close together. I mentioned thinking about when I would take this stuff down and Mark requested that it stay up for a good while. He was quite helpful with these banners, he's a keeper. 

Easter came up so fast!  We finished celebrating St Patrick's and went full speed into Easter.  I hope that they will be farther apart from each other next year.  Easter is a special time and I hope we can enjoy it more fully next year.  That being said we did get some great activities in. We did our Resurrection eggs, watched the Bible videos on the Atonement, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, listened to beautiful Easter music/videos online and went on a Easter walk/scavenger hunt that I saw online. We had some fun learning times, Easter egg hunts, traditional foods, egg dyeing and Easter baskets.

Friday I made our bunny buns and Saturday we woke up and did our family Easter baskets. Jared is at a point where we can get him anything Star Wars and he is thrilled, Lydia is much trickier as I don't feel like she has a "thing" that she loves.  The baskets were fun and the bunny buns delicious.  Lydia pretty much ate all her candy within the first 30 minutes of getting it, much like her stocking at Christmas. She was very concerned that Mark and I had not opened our eggs and kept bringing them to us.  When I put the eggs away I took Mark's candy from his basket and set it on the counter in the kitchen.  A few days later Lydia brings me a Ziploc bag with 2 unwrapped pieces of candy in it both with big bites taken out of them.  She bought me the bag and asked me to close it for her. I knew immediately that she had taken those bites out of Mark's candy.  Such a stinker! She did feel very remorseful.  She has such a sweet tooth! When I talked to her about it she did what she often does when she feels bad about something she did she sent herself to her room.  It was a sad moment for her to have to tell Mark what she did when he got home.

That morning we headed over to Greenleaf Park for an Easter breakfast potluck/Egg hunt I had organized with two other friends.  We had a great turnout with nice sunny weather.  I think everyone who came had a really nice time.  The park has some beautiful flowering trees and it was fun to hide the eggs and watch all the kids hunt for them.  That afternoon we dyed our eggs.  The weather was nice enough that we headed outside to our picnic table to dye them which really cut down the stress level.  Spill dye? No big deal we are outside.  Jared and Lydia enjoyed it.

I felt really clever hiding eggs like this. 

Maddie, Aprillee, Laura

Sunday we headed to church in our Easter best and then after church we went on an Easter Walk. I found the idea online HERE. We went over near UVA Research Park by our house and read certain scriptures and then each scripture had a correlating object to find.  Like something dead to represent Christ dying, something sharp to represent the crown of thorns and something alive to represent the Resurrection.  Jared and Lydia loved it.  It was nice to be out, reading the scriptures and having a hands on activity.  I am sure it will become a yearly tradition. It was not a nice Sunny Spring day so we had to bundle up to go but luckily were able to do it before the rain came.

Its all turning green again!

Find something Dark

Find something alive

We had our friends the Lenox's over for dinner which is always nice.  We had the traditional (for us) ham, rolls, funeral potatoes, green beans and broccoli.  I made my chocolate cadbury mini egg cookies and we had a great time visiting. We also met up with our friends the Shaw's and the Wooter's at Pen Park on Tuesday for an egg hunt.  Which Jared and Lydia loved and succeed in eating all the candy before we got home. Oh well, now its all gone which is great.

These swings are the coolest! I love them. 

Learning Time fun:

Feed the Bunny made a comeback. I think this is the 3rd year we have done this.  It has been fun to adapt it to their different learning levels.  This year I did teen numbers for Lydia and sight words for Jared.

This face!  I love it.  Side note: Jared lost his second tooth right before Easter too. 

Dissolving Peeps experiment: Water, Laundry detergent, Vinegar, Soda.  We were all surprised that the laundry detergent made it dissolve the most. It actually just left the brown eyes and nose.  What on Earth are those things made of? The soda made it look so disgusting, as if they are not already really gross.

Wobbly eggs: I hot glued some marbles in the bottom of the eggs and hot glued them shut so you could roll them and then they would pop back up. We had fun rolling them to see who could get it the farthest and just playing with them.

Onto some conference fun and then a nice break!  Its been a bit intense in 2016 so far.

Chris Greene Lake, lambs and Egypt reunion

As we were driving home from school one day we were admiring the fun popcorn trees and talking about the nice weather when I decided we should stop by Chris Greene Lake and enjoy the nice spring day. As we drove by the lake to the trail we saw a cute little sail boat out on the lake. It was breezy and it looked like a fun outing.  We enjoyed our little hike together and stopped by the dock to watch the sail boat.  It was so nice to be outside.  After the dock we stopped by the playground for a little bit and then hiked down a trail to the lake.  A woman was walking her dog and I asked her if the path made a loop around the lake and she said it did so I hope we can explore it soon. 

In keeping with the Spring theme we stopped by our good friends the Farnsworth's house to meet their adorable lambs.  They just got three baby lambs and they are really sweet.  It was fun to pet them and see them running around. Super cute. Lydia enjoyed the lambs and then had fun playing with Abigail. Jared did meet the lambs but was much more into exploring their property with Joseph and Peter. Our daffodils have also started blooming which we are excited about. We were not so successful in Colorado and weren't sure if there would be enough sunlight here but they are growing really well and it makes me really happy. 

We had plans today to attend an egg drop/hunt (they literally dropped 15,000 eggs from a helicopter!) in a nearby county but sadly had to leave before the eggs were dropped so we could attend a baptism. Jared and Lydia did enjoy the bounce houses/inflatables there but it was so cold! I was sad to miss the egg drop but we can try it again next year. After the baptism we drove to the temple to meet up with one of our favorite families from our Egypt days, the Barton's. They just got back from Ukraine and are moving out to Utah. He just retired from working at USAID for the last almost 30 years they lived in some exciting places and we lived getting to know them in Egypt. We really admire this family and were so happy to meet up with them.  We had plans to go to a nearby garden center but it was raining and pretty cold so we visited there for awhile and then went out to eat.  I am sure if we are ever out in Utah we will meet up with them again. 

 

Mark, April, Lydia, Jill and Jed Barton. 

Saint Patricks Fun

What a fun day of green we had!

When Jared and Lydia were little I always had fun learning activities planned and we did them numerous times throughout whatever holiday season we were enjoying. I still plan activities and we still do them but it seems they all end up being done on the day of the holiday.  I know Jared being in school is part of it, since I see him less; and preschool is also part of it, Lydia and I do quite a few things together in those 3 hours twice a week but I am not sure why I can't get it together to do them more regularly? Especially since Lydia and I have plenty of time at home together. Again I feel Jared being in school is a big part of it as when he gets home I just want him to have unstructured play time. And maybe my feelings have changed a bit about raising kids and I feel Lydia should go more at her own pace or maybe Jared just liked doing them more? Maybe I just didn't give him as much of an option, it was just "lets do a learning time activity!"where as I ask Lydia more if she wants to do one with me and she does not always want to.  I may never know.  In any case, we had a lot of fun yesterday.  These learning activities are still one of my favorite ways to connect or spend time with Jared and Lydia. I guess I also take our kids out to meet up with friends or go places more now too. We have more time to do stuff outside of home as well since no one is taking naps and Charlottesville has so many great things to do!  It's funny how different our life is now compared to when we were in Colorado. After re-reading this is appears I at least know some reasons why I do them less...

Back to our day.

Leprechauns came and made mischief and left a fun surprise for Jared and Lydia even though Jared set a trap to catch one in our basement.  It was a lot of fun. The rugs and toy boxes from Jared and Lydia's rooms were switched and books turned upside down.  Furniture was all moved around and pictures turned upside down. Our main floor got quite the make over. A trail of gold coins was left for them to follow to their own pile of "gold" (Rolos) and Jared and Lydia loved it all. We enjoyed Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops for breakfast with a green smoothie and made sure to wear green.

That Halloween decoration goes so well. 

He was pretty ticked at the note the Leprechaun left him. He also thought they had pretty bad handwriting. "He couldn't even make a C!" -J Next year he plans on using mouse traps.... I tried to discourage this, warning him that if he really ticked off a leprechaun he may not get anything from it or if he caught one before he left a surprise he may not be able to leave anything.  Also what if he really caught a mouse? I would not have been surprised if we were still living in our Colorado townhouse and that happened. 

After school we played outside for awhile and then came in for St Patricks Day activities.  Sight word reading and number identifying shamrock style, a little Rainbow math, Do a Dot dice games, a fun rainbow snack and a science experiment. It was a great afternoon. The kind I dreamed about having when I pictured myself raising children.  Fun snacks and learning activities together while I made dinner in the kitchen.  Good, simple engaged fun. Does this happen every day? Nope.  But I sure love it when it does.   

Fruit loops on a pipe cleaner with marshmallow clouds. 

Baking soda treasure hunt.  I placed some gold (pennies) and shamrock charms in this pan and covered them with baking soda. I dyed some vinegar green and then had Jared and Lydia spray it to uncover the treasure.  At the end I dumped all the remaining vinegar into the pan and it left a fun mixture to pay with. 

We had our traditional St Patricks Day drink of Sprite with Lime sherbet and I made Irish Soda bread which was fine but will not be a regular menu item. Such a nice day!