Pink Princess Tea Party

Remember the "Ok Mommy bucket"? Well, we've officially retired it until possibly next summer, but we still have had some rewards owed to the girls. Becca pulled out the ever coveted 'pink princess tea party' prize a few weeks ago. She helped me plan it out and we invited cute Clara and Alice (sisters) to come over to join our girly party time - oh, and Becca was also nice to invite Emma. :) You may wonder when I have time put together a tea party - well, Ben has been working overnight at the hospital every third night for the month of August (miserable!), so the night before our tea party, Ben was gone and the kids had gone to bed (including Claire- yay!), so I spent my evening making tissue paper pom poms, putting together little cookie bags for favors, and setting the tea table. Other resident wives I know spend their alone evenings reading books, or sewing, but I guess I find joy in preparing tea parties - haha.



I only wanted to make a few purchases to put this together, which included tissue paper, and a couple spools of ribbon... so I made good use of the ribbon, including hot gluing pink ribbon around the handles of the tea cups. I got these white tea cups from my grandma when Ben and I were first married - at the time, I didn't know if I'd ever use them, but now that I have all these girls in my house, I've found that I've used them quite a bit! Little girls love tea cups! :)

The little pink bucket was filled with slips of paper with princess related trivia and conversation starters, such as "what would be your favorite color ball gown?", or "what princess lives with a talking teapot?". From this exercise, I learned that girls know everything about princesses. I guess I can only blame myself for making sure the girls have seen every single Disney princess movie. :)


After enjoying our "tea" (pink crystal light), sandwiches, strawberries, and cookies, the girls decorated little princess wands, and then got a manicure of pink nail polish and girly nail stickers.

I'm so happy I have girls! :)

My favorite sister!

Yay! My wonderful sister came to visit!! I really love when Sarah is here. She is fun to hang out with, the kids love her, and she's the BEST help. Truth be told, I'm kind of a mess right now - since having Claire, I've never been so behind on cleaning tasks, or laundry, or errands, etc - and it was a huge relief to have such a great helper around the house. She cleaned, she did dishes, she put away tons of laundry, she entertained the kids, and was an all around stellar sister. Thank you Sarah!!

In addition to working around the house, we tried to do plenty of fun stuff too... We watched LOTS of movies... mostly just old movies we have in our dvd library (like Sandlot!), and we played some games too (quirkle!). I enjoyed the downtime hanging out with my sis. We even got to have a great girls night without all the kids. Ben was working overnight on Friday at the hospital, but Grandma Dangerfield wanted to keep the kids at her house for a sleepover. So we dropped off the kiddos and went out to dinner at Joe's Grill and then explored some girly stores (Charming Charlie is so fun!). The next morning we went out to breakfast at Paradise - I think we definitely took advantage of our time away from the kids.

This past week the temps reached to 117!! AHHHH!! But I didn't want to be cooped up in the house even though it was deathly hot outside... here's some more of what we did to stay busy and cool in this crazy heat...

Reading books at the library-



Phoenix Children's Museum-

Jake up in the HUGE climber - I wish I would have gotten a picture of the whole structure from outside of it - it's really amazing. It's 3 stories tall... the girls were both quite scared to go up very high. A lot of the climber has grate-like floors, so you can see through to the levels below your feet - Emma ended up going to the top with me, as long as I held her hand through it. :)





Becca and Jake getting artsy










MacAlpines Soda and Ice Cream Shop-

Don't interrupt Emma eating sweets... haha

Becca ordered "Bears at the Beach" and she spent the first 10 minutes playing with the gummy bears and placing them carefully under the umbrella. :)

Splash Park-

We stopped for slurpies before heading to the park - Jake loves slurpies!



It was so hot outside that Sarah and I both jumped in to get wet several times - we would get mostly soaked and afterwards we'd be dry within minutes... then we would go out and get wet again. No swimsuits needed! :)

After Emma got home from school on Monday, we made thaumatropes, or "magic turners". You draw part of a scene on one side and the other part on the other side of the circle... then when you spin it, both images come together. Very simple and very fun!







Side A

Side B

Sarah did a lot of cooking while she was here - here the girls are anxiously awaiting Sarah's delicious chocolate chip cookies...


On the way to the airport for Sarah to go back home to Utah, we stopped at Yogurtology for a last minute treat (it seems we ate a lot of goodies while she was here!)...


Thanks for visiting Aunt Sarah. You are already missed!

FIRST Grader!

Emma started 1st grade yesterday! I can't believe it! She's gone ALL DAY and it feels crazy long. She's riding the bus like last year, but it's no longer just half-day Kindergarten. She told me her favorite part of school today was eating lunch. :) I love my big grown up girl!

Creepy desert creatures and the End of Summer

oh wow! summer is over! I wish the 110 degree heat was over too. :/ The kids have enjoyed cooling down in the kiddie pool... it's pretty big for a "little" pool and we discovered there was room to float around on their tubes in it...


We finished up with our final 4 days of Back to School countdown activities. On Thursday evening we went to the Desert Botanical Garden for their flashlight tour. Ben and I agreed that this was really well done and a great experience for the kids. The focus is teaching about the desert at night, so we got to see lots of creepy crawlers, turtles, lizards, snakes, and frogs. The kids loved it! When we first got there, the sun was setting, but it wasn't dark yet - it was beautiful to be in the cactus gardens at that time of day. Once it got dark the kids really loved using their flashlights to light the path - definitely a great night!







Getting a close-up view of the tarantulas and scorpions... ew.

Pitch painting- Native Americans would make ink using pitch (a resin from plants) - the kids got to use it to paint designs to create a necklace.





Searching for bullfrogs

Making spiders






On Friday night we changed up Family Movie Night and created a little drive in movie theme. We had planned on going to the actual drive in theater... but the only kid movie showing there right now is the Smurfs. I really didn't want to see the Smurfs movie and the drive in movies don't even start until 8:30 and we were tired, so we decided to do a drive in movie at home!

The kids each got 8 plastic coins - they needed to use one to buy their movie ticket and then they could use the rest to 'purchase' treats and drinks from the concession stand. They probably loved this part of the activity even more than actually eating the goodies. Becca was the most clever and opted for water over soda so that she'd have more money to buy the most amount of candy. :)

The kids made these cars earlier and for the most part they actually watched the entire movie sitting in those things. It was a fun movie night! And btw, if Emma is in the middle of eating something yummy, she will NOT stop to smile for a picture

On Saturday Ben was working all day and overnight, but I still had back to school shopping I had to get done - most importantly, Emma needed new shoes and a lunch box, plus a couple other clothing items. So, all 4 kidlets and I ventured out on a crazy busy shopping day. And 5 stores and FOUR hours later, I had crossed everything off my shopping list. We were exhausted, but I had promised we would go to the splash park afterwards, and the kids were rather good on our shopping adventure, so I decided I better not renege on my promise. Even though I was crazy tired, it ended up being a really fun ending to our busy day...









Ice cream!

So, on Sunday, the last day before school, we made bubbles and bubble wands



We used up the last of our pipe cleaners (leftover from Becca's ladybug party) to make the bubble wands. The girls liked that they were heart shaped :)


Happy End of Summer!