Onesie Upon a Time

My sister-in-law, Sarah, threw me a car-themed baby shower for Jack. It was at a local bakery called Rao's. During the shower she coordinated a drawing activity for the guests. Each guest took a blank white onesie and decorated it (some decorated matching socks, too). I then had to choose a winner for four different categories: Most Creative, Sweetest, Funniest, and Best Over-All. I had a hard time choosing winners because they were all so darn cute!


 I couldn't wait to get pictures of Jack in each one!  Thankfully

A Bowl Lotta Fun

The summer break is in full swing.  Halle is out of school, and I have been searching for ways to keep my munchkins occupied.  My friend, Debra, found out that kids can bowl free all summer long at certain locations.  I'm not a bowler myself, but I knew my kids would have a blast.  We immediately signed up and headed to the bowling alley with our friends.  The three little kids bowled in one lane and the four bigger ones in another.  They had a great time hap hazardously

Climb like a Fish and Swim like a Monkey

We are now smack dab in the middle of swim team season for Halle.  This is her third year to be a part of the Prestonwood Flyers in our neighborhood.  Woohoo!  Go Flyers!  Swim team is a very high commitment activity.  Thankfully the pool is just a few houses down from where we live, so Halle can ride her bike to swim practice.  During April and May she practiced Monday-Friday right after school.  Now that summer break started, she's practicing at 7:30 am.  No sleeping in for her yet! 



Halle in her swim get-up

A typical swim meet Saturday goes like this:  wake up at the buttcrack of dawn (Brian's terminology), pack up swim gear, snacks, drinks, cooler, pop-up canopy, chairs, games, activities, and diaper bag.  Don't forget the kids!  Get to the pool at 7 am.  Set up for the meet.  We hang out until the races start.  Then the heat starts to set in.  It is HOT!  We stay all morning and afternoon.  Halle swims 5 races each meet out of about 500.  Therefore there is a LOT of downtime.  We spend this time playing games, eating, talking, whatever we can to pass the time.  The meet usually ends around 2 pm, so we are at the meet for about 7 hours.  Take everything down, pack up, and go home.  Finally, we walk into the house and collapse on the couch, thankful for AC!  We enjoy going, but it is extremely tiring.

Even Arden thinks its too early. She needs her coffee, lol

Brian is one of the timers for the races.  He's purposely making goofy pictures while I'm trying to snap a shot

Jack and Brian hanging out at the meet.  Jack must be mad that he can't get in and swim. 

Halle is pretty darn fast. She is way faster than I will ever be.  She has tried many times to teach me the correct swimming motions and breathing techniques, but the only thing I'm good at is tanning on the side of the pool!  She has been a little fish since she was three.  She never tires of playing and swimming.  Even after she has swam all week for swim team, she will still beg me to let her go to the pool.  It won't surprise me at all if her first job is lifeguarding.

  

Halle on the ready bench waiting for her race

Halle on the starting block

Halle competes in all swim strokes: freestyle, backstroke, butterfly, and breaststroke.  Her favorite stroke changes about once a week, but I think freestyle is her favorite at the moment.  This year is the first year that her age group swims the IM (individual medley.) This requires a lot more stamina than what she is used to, so she is really working hard to improve.  Here's a video of her coming in 2nd overall (out of 9 girls) for the Girls 9-10 100 meter Individual Medley .  We are so proud of her!

In addition to swimming, Halle also participates in rock climbing class once a week at our neighbors' indoor rock climbing gym, Stonemoves.  This class is for 2 and 1/2 hours and requires a lot of strength and endurance.  Her hands are now very calloused from repetitive cuts and blisters that the climbing induces.  She's actually very proud of how bad her hands look. They're like battle scars!  Her coach not only makes them climb, but workout too.  They do push ups, pull ups, v-ups, any other kind of "up" you can think of!  Her upper body is thinning out and becoming muscular.  Pretty soon she's going to be ripped!  She is the youngest in her class, but she can hang with the older kids (no pun intended.) 

Halle showing off her callouses

The rock climbing is complementary to her swimming.  Pulling her body up the wall works the same muscles that's required to pull herself through the water.  The upper body strength she is gaining from climbing improves her stroke and vice versa.  She will start competing in climbing soon. 
Both sports are formatted the same way in that she competes as an individual, continuing to improve her personal best, but also scores points for the team.  These types of activities mesh well with Halle's personality.  We are excited for her potential in both sports.  She's got the determination to better herself and kick booty.  Unfortunately I don't have pics of her climbing, yet, but here are a few more pictures of the fam.

Arden dancing and clapping to the DJ music

Sarah and Jack

Preschool Fun

Since I've started staying home one of my favorite things to do is teach Arden.  She loves to play with letters, numbers, and do any game related to learning.  Many times she just works on preschool workbooks or plays learning games on my IPhone, but with the help of Pinterest, Montessori principles, and a bit of creativity we have done a lot of activities, too.  These are some examples of the things we have done.  I only have pictures of a few of the activities. 

I made up a "game."  It really wasn't a game, but if I call it a game then Arden thinks is fun.  My goal has been to use things around the house for learning rather than buying a bunch of expensive learning tools.  So I cut up some yarn, pipe cleaner, and paper into about 1/8" pieces.  I put them in a small bowl and put another little bowl beside it.  I then gave Arden my tweezers.  She worked on picking up each piece from the bowl and transferring it to the other.  This was meant to work on her fine motor skills.  This kept her busy for a good 1/2 hour.  She was clumsy at first, but about the fifth time of playing the game she had pretty much mastered the task. 

Other fine motor skill activities we've done have been stringing pasta and cereal onto yarn, and gluing pasta onto paper.

Another game we played was "walking the line" which works on balance and coordination.  I took about a six foot piece of masking tape and taped it to the floor.  We took turns walking on it like a balance beam.  Then we walked it on tip-toes, backwards, and with our eyes closed.  It was harder than it looked!

For a color activity I took a cookie sheet and put shaving cream in it.  I then let Arden put food coloring in it and mix the colors together.  She learned about how two colors mixed together can make a new color.  This was also a sensory activity since she got to play with the shaving cream.  We also put the shaving cream on a balloon and I let her "shave" it off with a butter knife. 

I took all of the coins from Halle's piggy bank out.  I let Arden sort them into pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.  She then got to put them back one by one into the piggy bank slot.  It took her about an hour to do this, and she had fun the entire time.  This was a great game because she learned about money, worked on sorting, and she also worked on her fine motor skills.

This activity required a medicine dropper, baking soda, vinegar, and a pan.  Arden and Halle both had fun with this.  They spent an hour dropping the vinegar onto the baking soda making colorful eruptions.   

Letters: I borrowed this particular letter game from my neighbor.  She took her left over plastic easter eggs and wrote the alphabet on them.  On one half of the an egg she wrote a capital letter and then the corresponding lower case letter on the other half.  For the game I broke up all of the halves and mixed them up in a pile.  Arden then had to match the uppercase and lowercase letters together again. 

Numbers:  I wrote 1-10 on a piece of paper and gave Arden cereal.  She had to put the correct number of pieces under each number.  At the end of this activity her reward was eating the cereal!

This has been a lot of fun for both of us.  I love the look of excitement a little one gets when they are having fun learning. 




 



 

Mother's Day

Birthday and Mother's Day Cards

Happy Birthday to me

I was born on Mother's Day. I was the best Mothers Day gift my mother could ever ask for! Just kidding. No, really, Mom was probably mad that her fifth child was born on Mother's Day since my brother was born around her birthday and my other brother was born around Christmas. Anyway, that's beside the point. My point is that my birthday and Mother's day are always on the same day or just a few days from each other. Therefore, I LOVE the second week of May! It's my favorite time of year. Me being the spoiled person that I am, I made sure that Brian learned long ago that these were each special and SEPARATE occasions, not to be lumped together into one celebration. Heehee. I'm just kidding again... sort of.

I had a great weekend. My birthday fell on Thursday this year (May10th.) I was woken up at 5:30 A.M. by my entire family. Arden was still in her pajamas with bed head, but she had shoes on. Brian told me to put on some clothes. I asked him if I had to put on a bra and he said yes, so I knew that meant we were going somewhere. We drove to IHOP for breakfast. YUM! There were suppose to be balloons on the table when we got there, but the manager didn't speak very good English, so he didn't quite understand what Brian was requesting on the phone the night before. So no balloons, but we got a free OJ, though, ha! Crystal then came over and spent the day with me. She got me a Groupon gift to paint at Vino Artino. She is a Groupon queen! That evening, Brian made dinner and Sarah and Adam came over for cake. Sarah made a diet cake since I'm trying to shed my baby weight. The cake was basically red velvet cake mix and coke zero. Very good! For my gifts I got a gift card from Brian to Fleet Feet. I love Fleet Feet because they will let you try on a million running shoes and even let you run on a treadmill in them to see if you like them. I need new running shoes since I'm going to train for the 1/2 marathon in November. I also got a fancy new blow dryer and hair straightener. My blow dryer started smoking a couple days ago, so I guess that was Brian's cue to shop for one. Sarah got me a gift card to shop for new clothes, and a bunch of small goodies like a candle, bracelet, etc. I love all of my gifts!

Friday I went shopping for a couple of new dresses with my gift card and headed downtown to House of Blues with Brian, Sarah, Adam, Nik, and Crystal. I'd never been to House of Blues before. It is a restaurant downstairs and a concert venue upstairs. We had a nice dinner there and then walk down the block to Pete's Piano Bar. I love piano bars! The pianists play just about any song that you request. It's so much fun. They made me get onstage a few times since it was my birthday. The first time I had to do the Chicken Dance. The second time I danced to Let's Twist Again. It was a crazy fun night.

All in all I had a great birthday weekend. It made turning 31 not so painful.

Toothfairy Fail

Saturday evening was the first time since having Jack (8 weeks old) that Brian and I hired a babysitter to come watch the kids. We were invited to a going away party for Brian's step-brother, Ryan, who is moving to Atlanta. The party was at night at a Midtown pub.

All day Saturday Halle had been wiggling one of her baby teeth. Being 9 1/2 years old Halle is a veteran Tooth Loser, but it's been a long while since her last tooth extravaganza. She was terribly excited to be losing another baby tooth, another step toward being a grown-up. So while we were on our way to the party, Johnna, our sitter, sent a text happily announcing that Halle's tooth fell out after chewing on peanuts. I sent a text back reminding Halle to stick it under the pillow for the Toothfairy. Now Halle knows that the Toothfairy is actually me, but we like to play the game anyway. It's more about seeing if I can play the Toothfairy without being caught in the act... and for Halle to add money to her piggy bank.

We got home from the party right at midnight. I was exhausted because we were at a Volleyball Social at our church all afternoon. I still had to nurse Jack before calling it a night. I finally went to sleep at 1 am. Six hours later I hear Jack crying on the monitor. Although still half asleep, I was so grateful that Jack had slept that long and immediately went to nurse him. While I'm sitting in his room Halle walks in and says good morning. She has a solemn look on her face and says, "The tooth fairy didn't come last night." The blood drained from my face and a number of curse words went through my head as I realized that I had failed as mom and tooth fairy. I had always come through in the past and I felt horrible. The tooth crossed my mind not once since Johnna sent me that text. I immediately did the math in my head as to what time in the morning it currently was (which was very hard to do since I was still half asleep.) Ok....1 am + 6 hrs makes it at least 7 am. Crap! I couldn't make an excuse that it was still night time and the tooth fairy just hadn't had a chance to come by yet. So reluctanctly and defeated I told Halle that I was sorry that the toothfairy didn't show and she would definitely show up that night. Being the sweet girl that Halle is, she cheerfully said ok. She then showed me her tooth and it had a cavity in it. Oh no! Another fail as a parent. I should have taken her to the dentist to have her teeth checked. Strike two. Ok, I said to myself, I haven't traumatized her childhood just yet. I have a chance to redeem myself! The Toothfairy will show tonight!

That evening (yesterday) I was determined to not forget. It happened to be about 11 pm and Brian and I were still awake. I was scared to go in just yet and make the exchange since she had only been asleep an hour. But I was also scared that I would sleep through another night and forever be considered the worst toothfairy in history. So what do I do? I send Brian in there of course. Let him get caught and not me! Armed with his two dollars he goes into the room for the transaction. I'm peeking in from the doorway. As he nears her pillow I see Halle open her eyes, sit straight up in bed, and start mumbling! Dang! Busted! I rush in as a distraction to talk to her so that Brian can get the mission accomplished. She continues to mumble and I realize that she is sleep-talking. Great! She has no clue that we are even there. (Halle's sleep talking is hilarious and one of my favorite things to watch her do. It is deserving of its own blog post.) Tickled by the fact that I got to see her sleep-talk and relieved that Brian successfully acted as toothfairy, I went peacefully to sleep.

This morning Halle was getting ready for school and I greeted her proudly with , "Good morning! Did the tooth fairy come last night?" She bluntly answered, "Yes, but she FORGOT to take my tooth..... and the money was on the edge of my pillow, not IN my tooth pillow." Strike 3. Dang it Brian! I immediately started blaming it on her dad, "Daddy was the toothfairy, not me!!!!" Halle marched straight to the kitchen where Brian was making coffee and called him out on his toothfairy incapabilities. Realizing his blunder and scrappling for a comeback he blurted, "Well that's because the Toothfairy rejects teeth with cavities!" hahahahaha! So what have I learned? Brian and I both suck at being Toothfairy. Oh well....We still have two other kids. Maybe we'll eventually get it right.

Below are pics of Halle, the cavity in her tooth, and the toothfairy pillow (which was Brian's when he was a kid.)