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!

Blogging Vacation

Do you ever get sick of blogging? I did for a little while and then before I knew it, a month went by! Wow,time flies when you're busy doing something else. So, a quick recap of March.

Enjoyed the wonderful warm weather!!






Spent lots of time with friends.


This little girl lives behind us and has for years, but we just met her this month when she came up to our fence and screamed through the trees which provide a privacy hedge between our properties, "Hey, over here!! Hey you guys!! Come here!!" We all stopped in our tracks and looked at each other with the thought, "huh??" Then we shrugged and went over to see who was yelling. Since then she's jumped the fence nearly any time we're outside and it's been Bella's dream come true. A girl just her age whose as girly as she is. The first thing they do EVERY time she comes over is put on their princess dresses. Here the princesses are bobsledding. You can tell Bella's not as in to it at that moment. I think she really wanted to go to the Prince's ball, but the "prince" decided bobsledding would be more fun.



Christian has also started playing more with little friends. This is his best buddy CJ. They are adorable together. When they are in the car together, they will jibber-jabber back and forth and laugh at each other like they're actually having a conversation....I guess I shouldn't say it that way; maybe they are! In any case, it's the cutest thing you've ever seen.


And I realized as I looked through my pictures from March, I didn't photograph a lot of our crafts/math games/science projects from this month for some reason. I'll have to be better at that again. In any case, here's a few that we did:

Made a math game with cars. Math problems in the parking spaces, answers on the cars. Drive the car with the correct answer along the road and park it in the space with the corresponding question. I included addition and subtraction up to 3 digits w/regrouping and multiplication. Didn't include any division, but Benjamin got 100% without help and had a lot of fun. I was very happy. For Bella I adapted it to be a matching game between upper case letters and their lower-case equivalents. She had a great time feeling like she was doing "kindergarten work."


In honor of spring and easter, we did several egg and plant experiments, but the only ones I have pictures of are these:


Cool osmosis and equilibrium experiment. Remove the egg shell of 2 raw eggs by soaking the egg overnight in vinegar and rubbing the remaining grit off with a cloth under water. This way the membrane is still intact. Then put one egg in pure water and the other in a concentrated water-sugar solution. (Sidenote: also got to talk about density in observing why the one in water sinks but the one in sugar water floats - always cool when one experiment teaches lots of different things.) The one in water absorbs water and swells. The one in sugar loses water and shrinks. Really cool to see how big the egg gets compared to the other. Had planned to let them go one more day and then switch them and watch them change in the opposite way, but of course, this experiment required lots of patience, something my 5 and 3 year old do not have in abundance. So after waiting 24 hours for the vinegar to do it's thing and another 24 for the water/sugar glasses to do their thing, my kids were anxious to smash the eggs and get messy not wait for further changes. So no later stage photos on this one, but FYI, if you poke the water egg with a sharp point, the absorbed water shoots out like a fountain. Very thrilling. :)


Ever get tired of waiting for your plants to appear from under the ground after you've planted them? My kids do, so we did this instead. Put the seeds on contact paper and cover with a wet paper towel. Then stick it to the window and surround well with painter's tape so the water can't evaporate out. Within a day and a half, we had roots growing out of the seeds. In 4 days it went from nothing to busting out of it's space. The kids LOVED seeing the rapid progress. Then we could put them in dirt and let them continue to grow. We did this with sunflower seeds because my kids hate peas, but I've seen other websites where they did it with peas and the shoots grow upwards too, not just the roots going down. Sunflower seeds are harder, so the leaves were just popping out of the seed the day we took them off the window. The kids loved it regardless.


So there's March. Today we're living in our tent in the living room as is our tradition during General Conference. I printed out tons of coloring sheets and activities and had all sorts of ideas for what do to, thinking it would be so great. They finished everything I prepared during the first session and couldn't believe we had 3 more sessions to go. The second session was a struggle. I will have to change my plans for tomorrow!