He won’t stop singing…unless I get out the camera

I don’t know what Tobin is going to end up being…but I have a feeling it might involve singing or dancing. He sings and dances without stop. Until I get out the camera, or someone comes over and we want him to do it. He has a song about avocados (which he loves, a child after my own heart), he remembers every word of the songs he learns in Sunday school, and then there’s his new favorite. He learned this from Anna, and came home singing it incessantly:

It’s been kind of nice to have a new song in the rotation, because for the past month or so, he’s been singing a song he learned from his brother (but foiling every attempt to record his performance…) Finally caught it on film, for your viewing pleasure.

(sorry about the poor quality…I had my mother in law’s camera (mine ran out of batteries at the wax museum) and it’s acting up…)

Neil Armstrong

I really love Luke’s school, and the fourth grade has been awesome. One of my favorite things they did this year was their research project. Fourth graders do their research on a famous person – a hero – and in addition to their paper and class presentation, they put on a wax museum. Each fourth grader dressed up as their hero, and parents and friends could come around and drop change in their container to turn the wax figure “on” – causing them to do a short presentation about themselves.

Luke studied and presented on Neil Armstrong…who wasn’t really the easiest person to come up with a costume for. Lucky for Luke (and VERY lucky for me), he has a grandfather who is a beekeeper, and a grandmother who is a GENIUS. Look what Grammie (Matt’s mom, Sara) came up with:

Amazing.

Assuming I can get it to load…here’s a video of his presentation, along with a look around the (very noisy) room:

Good job Luke!!

Neglect…

Eeek. I’ve been neglecting the family blog in favor of my college girls blog. Sorry.

We have been enjoying a lot of fun time outside, very happy that it’s FINALLY spring.

And we’ve started a weekly tradition of having a camp fire on Sunday nights. We got a fire pit from George and Renae as a wedding present and it sure is the gift that keeps on giving – we LOVE it!

 

Luke is having an awesome soccer season…either due to the fact that his team is really good, or maybe to the fact that we decided to wait another year before we moved to the competitive (v. recreational) league…

More coming soon :)

The DIRT party lives on…

T got a lot of AWESOME toys his birthday – and some pretty sweet clothes, which is super for Mommy & Daddy’s budget. But of all the awesome things he got, you know what he’s played with the MOST since his B-day?

That’s right: The construction cars we have had for years (boxed up – they are in a playset of Luke’s with small parts), the pan from his cake, and some black eyed peas I had in the cabinet. He’s played will all of his new toys as well, but the beans? Every day. I finally packed them up and put them away for a bit (because I was tired of cleaning beans off the floor…)

But he sure does love it…

Maybe my favorite thing I’ve made EVER…

Please come to my house so you can see the very happy wreath hanging on my door.

This may not be to everyone’s taste, but I think it’s about the cutest thing EVER.
The only things cuter are the ones I was modeling after.

Two of my very favorite craft blogs are http://www.littlebitfunky.com/ and http://tatertotsandjello.blogspot.com/

I have no idea how I found Crystal at little bit funky, but I feel like she’s my friend. Her website is so happy and friendly and we obviously have the same taste in colors. Looking at her site sealed the deal for me – I want to learn to sew!! She has an awesome Etsy shop as well, where she sells wonderful, beautiful, messy things, all of which I’d like 1 of, please. I especially love her happy Ho Ho monsters (but I think T is a little old to justify buying one…If I’d found her before I’d bought Bday presents for him, I probably would have gotten him one anyway b/c they are adorable.)

Anyway…When I first found her site, she had just posted this amazingly cute wreath. Much cuter than mine, but it was enough to inspire me to try it myself…

As I was gathering the supplies for the yarn wreath, I was also developing a fondness for burlap, which is being used in really cute projects all over the web, but especially by lovely Jen at tatertotsandjello. I love her burlap wreaths!

So I combined elements of both of these very talented ladies, and now I have cuteness hanging on my front door. LOVE IT.

T's Birthday...Build-a-Bear & the Dirt Party!

Many thanks to my awesome sister-in-law for taking awesome pictures with her awesome camera. I'm perfectly content with my little point and click until I see B's pictures side by side with mine. I want a digital SLR.

The most egg-citing part of the dirt party…

Cascarones. Cascarones!!

George & Renae (Matt’s dad & stepmom) had just returned from Texas visiting Matt’s Uncle Jon & Aunt Terry. Terry sent along a dozen cascarones for each of the kids (and one for Matt, because she knew that he would say, “Hey, where are mine?” And one for Betsy, so she wouldn’t feel left out. :D.)

What are cascarones?

The kids (big and small) had a WONDERFUL time. Our deck was slaughtered, and we’re all still probably finding confetti in our hair & clothes.

Wow. We have some cutie kids in our family. In my humble opinion, of course. :)

Thanks J&T! We love you!

I have a fun video of the cascarones craziness…but I’m having trouble loading it… If this doesn’t work, check it out here.

Dirt Party!

For T’s 3rd birthday I had so many fun ideas – I really thought we’d have a dinosaur party, since he’s practically obsessed with dinos right now. Plus we have the awesome dino suitcase…  But he wouldn’t have any of that business. Every time I asked him what he wanted to do for his party, he said, “I want to have a DIRT party!” So, a dirt party it was!

I thought the invitations came out really cute…and the cake was easy. I made The Pioneer Woman’s Best Sheet Cake Ever – just the cake not the frosting. Then I made whipped cream & cream cheese frosting (like is used on this cake) & frosted the cake with that. I also whipped up a bunch of extra whipped cream, which I mounded onto the cake to make a little mountain. I covered the whole thing with crushed oreo crumbs, added gummy worms, & part of our large and varied collection of construction trucks and Voila! Cuteness!


When I told Tobin what I was going to do for the cake (just that it would be cookies made to look like dirt, and that I was going to use his dump trucks), he made a special point of asking if the dump trucks would be full of dirt. Each kid (L & T, plus Anna & Ellery) got a dump truck or construction truck on their plate – they were very excited.


Super cute, am I right? And a VERY easy theme. Other than the invitations & the cake, I had sand pails for the kids** and they dug in the dirt/sandbox/rock pile in the back yard for an hour while the burgers were grilling, and the adults were gorging themselves on guacamole. Tobin has a shirt that has a dump truck & says “DIRT DIRT DIRT” on it, so he wore that :). Yay for easy party ideas!


** The sand pails ended up being a bit of a disaster. I bought them when Tobin wasn’t with me – they were $1 each, and I thought that would be a nice addition to the theme. I got pink/purple princess ones for the girls, and a Toy Story one for Tobin – he got a Toy Story Bike for his birthday, and has Buzz & Woody boots, a lunchbox, he loves those guys. He should have been thrilled, right? Wrong. He wanted the pink one. 10 minutes before our guests were arriving, he was WAILING away in his room that pink is his FAVOWITE color!
Coming soon: The BEST part of the dirt party (hint: It’s egg-citing!)

I'm linking up to Tatertots & Jello!

More KC Adventures (30 hours in Kansas City…)

After that we headed to our hotel to get checked in and settled. For dinner we headed out to Legends to go to the T-Rex Cafe, which was so much fun!! I’d been to the one at Downtown Disney when I was in Florida with my mom (for the Shuttle launch in May), but the boys had never even seen one.

It’s basically the same design as a Rainforest Cafe, if you’ve ever been to one of those. The boys LOVED it – every 30 minutes or so, there’s a “meteor shower”, when the lights dim and flicker, the lava screen (which we were right underneath) goes crazy, and all the animatronic dinosaurs move and roar. I wondered if that would be a little much for T, but nope. He held my hand and said, “What’s going to happen??” (his standard response to anything scary), then said, “It’s OK, it’s just pretend!”

In addition to yummy food surrounded by dinosaurs (and $1.99 kids meals on Wednesday nights, which was awesome for us), they have a dino dig and mine for kids to play in.

It was a great day!

But the kids’ favorite thing? Getting to sleep in the big hotel bed together:

The simple joys in life!

(In case you’re wondering what we did on Thursday…it was pretty rainy and cold, and we didn’t take any pictures. We had the free breakfast at our hotel, walked around the Plaza a little bit – just long enough to find a great castle and mini-kitchen for Tobin on clearance at Pottery Barn Kids. Lucky I had birthday money for him from my mom!  Then drove through Chic-Fil-A on our way back to Lincoln – always a treat!!)

Spring Break Adventures…

Unfortunately for our family, the university and the public schools rarely coordinate their Spring Breaks. That means last week, Matt was in Colorado all week with college students & I was home with the boys, living our normal lives. Then this week, for Luke’s Spring Break, we didn’t really plan anything because we have college ministry stuff going on, and I didn’t want to take the boys somewhere by myself, and be away from Matt again. On Monday I was a little whiny about Matt getting to have all the fun while I was stuck here entertaining the boys (lovely, right? It even included the phrase, “It’s not fair!”, which I hardly tolerate from my children, but apparently I’m allowed…)

Once I settled down (and because my husband is very sweet and all-around AWESOME), we talked it through and decided to drive to Kansas City (3 hours away) Wednesday morning, spend the night, and get back in time for Real Time on Thursday. We didn’t tell the boys – we woke them up Wednesday morning, with their bags packed and already in the van. Luke was SO CURIOUS! (T was just happy to get to watch a movie in the van – he asks every time we go anywhere, but we only do DVDs in the van on longer trips.)

It was a great time, and really good to be all together and for the boys to get some daddy time after doing without for a week.

We spent Wednesday afternoon at the Crown Center. We had lunch at Fritz’s, where you order by phone and your food is delivered by model train (please imagine the excitement of our now-3-year-old!)

 

Then we headed over to Kalaidascope, which is an AWESOME art studio next door to the Hallmark Visitor Center. It’s free, and they have all kinds of art projects around for kids of all ages to work on.

 

They even have a puzzle maker – you draw on a piece of cardboard, then run it through the puzzle machine. T would have done just that all afternoon if he could have.

The rest of our KC Adventure coming soon!