We love you Cozy Coupe

I got this little beauty at a garage sale this week for $5.  Christian runs for these whenever we see one at a store or at someone's house, so I thought I'd get it for him.  Little did I know what a hit it'd be with ALL my kids.  As Benjamin put it today, "If you hadn't bought this, we'd never be happy."  Of course, this makes it hard for the intended recipient of the purchase to get much out of it, but some how they all make do.  And it has been a riot to see how many ways they find to ride it.  Only a few scraped elbows to show for it so far.  Benjamin went flying off it once as it tipped and exclaimed, "Good thing I put my hands out when I fell or I would have been a cooked goose!"  (ie. "My goose would have been cooked."  We've now made it through the whole Junie B series and I love the little expressions he learns from that crazy girl, but I love even more when he doesn't quite learn them. :) )

You can see Christian's frustrated expression in the picture above.  He'd had about enough of them hanging on. So, I made sure to have a little distraction on hand so Christian could get at least a bit of time alone in the thing.

Bella even included the little car in her prayers last night.  It's the little things, really.

Happy Earth Day!

(Our back sliding door. Not too bad for some amateurs, huh? Amazing what you can do with coffee filters and paint. Thank you pinterest)

Couldn't let Earth Day go by uncommemorated, even if it was a Sunday and we were busy with church stuff. We have a forest at the end of our street in which we love to go on walks and enjoy nature, but there are certain parts of it where the local high school kids like to go to ditch class (the school also borders the forest) and they leave a TON of trash laying around. We decided that for earth day, we'd take some trash bags down there and clean things up.

We ate breakfast quickly and headed down early this morning. It was a lot of fun. I gave each kid some latex gloves and a bag and set them to work. Bella had a freak out over the gloves because "they aren't comfortable!" and she refused to wear them. I made her my "garbage finder." She went around pointing out the garbage which I then picked up and put in my bag. Benjamin was a champ. He filled three bags in no time.

Christian proudly toddled around with his one glove following us wherever we went just so happy to be part of the action. Then we piled all the bags into our bike trailer and put them in our trash/recycling bin at home. It was amazing how much better the areas looked after just an hour of cleaning. The kids were very proud of themselves.

Then I put Christian down for his nap and the rest of us made our traditional earth day muffins - whole wheat blueberry muffins with a bit of green food coloring so it looks like green earth with blue seas. (Picture off of Notimeforflashcards.com. Mine never turn out that pretty.)

Ugly or not, they were still super yummy, though. Would have loved to do a bit more on this special day, but we spent the rest of the day at church and that's a good thing too. :)

Spring Break

We went to Utah for Easter and Spring Break and had a wonderful time.

The vacation got off to a great start when the pilot of our flight to Salt Lake took a liking to Bella's crazy hand-made Easter bonnet and offered to let the kids sit up in the cockpit after the flight and play around. That was awesome. He answered all their questions and they had a great time.

We decorated Easter eggs at Mimi's. Bella was very serious about her choice of stickers.

It snowed the day we arrived, so Benjamin got to enjoy sledding down Mimi's front yard hill.

We spent Easter with cousins who have the back yard of every kids' dreams. The best feature of which is the gigantic waterfall and pond.

Of course we went on an egg hunt. So much fun. So much candy!!!

Woah!!!

Then the crazy backyard fun continued with RC boats in the pond.

Motorcycle rides from anyone willing. Benjamin made sure to get a ride from nearly everyone there, it seemed.

Everyone made sure to get in some time with Christian. Who could pass this little man up?! What a cutie!

Lest you think the backyard fun is over - there's the rope swing over the water.

The myriad different things to play on the tramp. Golf anyone?

Don't forget the wagon.

And the hammock

There were also bikes, scooters, swing set, etc. etc. but I got tired of taking pictures! Suffice it to say, the kids had a blast with their cousins and couldn't stand the idea of going home.

Since my kids can never have enough water to play in, I found a canyon with a river near my mom's house and took them there for a few hours too. Benjamin's face says it all.

Although, I did manage to tire them out, so I made Benjamin my photographer which kept him motivated during our walk back through the canyon to the car.

We also visited Discovery Kids at the Gateway Mall. The price had always scared me away before, but thanks to a generous Mimi, we splurged and finally went.

I love this one of Benjamin as traffic reporter. He had a blast in front of this green screen. He never wanted to give anyone else a turn and would often jump in on complete stranger's turns too, playing weatherman sidekick.

Here he jumped in with another family pretending to be an interviewer and started carrying on a fake interview with this "Utah Jazz Player."

I LOVE this picture of Christian's attempt at the green screen. If you look at the TV in the top corner, you'll see that he's so short that only his head shows. So adorable.

We also visited some friends while we were there. I had a couple kid-free days, thanks to Mimi during which I lunched and shopped with friends. So fun! But I also made sure our kids had a chance to get together. Here's Bella with my friend's daughter riding their princess coaches while Christian plays mechanic with his air pump ready to help where needed.

It was a great vacation and it was hard to leave. Can't wait to do it again!

Spelling Practice

Benjamin's Kindergarten teacher sent out an email a few weeks ago encouraging parents to help the kids work on their spelling. I've been good about working on math and reading, but spelling has been something I've focused very little on since he seemed too young to me. I figured it's best to get him reading and thinking about the sounds the letters make and we'll worry about correct spelling later. However, if he's going to be evaluated on it in school, I decided to begin some fun practice at home. To that end, we've done a couple spelling activities. The first is that I created some placemats with the kids which have spelling words and other fun words on them. I let each create their own word list, drawing from the list Benjamin's teacher gave us and whatever fun words they wanted to learn. Bella's included no, you, the, like, princess, queen, castle. Benjamin's included because, after, come, said, zombie, rocket ship, fireworks, monster. I wrote the words on a piece of cardstock and then they got to decorate all over it before I laminated it. Now as they wait for dinner, they pass the time by tracing over the spelling words with a washable marker and otherwise just doodling on their placemat.

  We also did some work on the backside of the placemat. I would say a word and they'd write it out. However, whenever the word included an "O" (which they all did), they would put a cheerio in that spot. If they spelled the word right, they got to eat the cheerio. I guess you could use any O shaped thing you'd like, but Christian was with us too and he was gobbling them up lightning fast so I couldn't use anything too crazy. In the end, it wasn't a ton of practice, but I feel like I did my duty for the week on spelling. :) It's really fun to see Bella's new enthusiasm for letters, and school work in general, lately. She's really such a smart girl and a hard worker when she's motivated. At the beginning of the school year she was completely uninterested, but now it's really taking off. Our buddy Shade was over this week and out of the blue they all start making human letters while in the tent which we'd put up for General Conference. "Take a picture of our H!" they yelled to me. So I got several pictures of their letters through the mesh of the tent, hence the awful photo quality. I love Benjamin's lower case i, complete with dot. The backwards N is also very cute. Such funny kids. Finally, we are very excited for Easter! I did a numberline learning activity today using plastic easter eggs and after that the kids wanted to be bunnies. So we got out our bunny masks they'd made at the library and they started to bounce around the house. I wanted to take their picture but they were so bouncy they all ended up blurry, so I said, "Hey guys, stop bouncing for just a second so I can get a decent picture!" The result - Bunnies at Gunpoint. This picture makes me laugh so hard. They both immediately held their hands in front of them and gave me identical stoned faces. Not really what I was going for! After that I just made a movie of them bouncing because that was much more fun. We're off to Utah for Spring Break all next week! So excited! Please let the weather stay nice!