Felt Pizza and Apple Day!

Jake and I made a shape pizza this week. The blog I swiped it from (see link) used colored foam pieces, but I decided on using felt instead since it's much cheaper. :) After we were done playing with the pieces and talking about shapes, I put it all in a ziplock bag and put it in the little kid kitchen - the girls have been in LOVE with making felt pizzas when playing cooking.





Surprisingly, Jake was very orderly in where he placed his pizza toppings. :)

Not surprisingly, he rolled it into a burrito and pretended to eat it.

I know you all think I'm crazy 'cause we do a lot of random activities at this house (I guess so I don't get bored with the day to day mommy routine) - but we had Apple Day yesterday!.... much scaled back from last years apple festivities, but still really fun. :)

In the morning we made handprint apple trees...









Emma made one later when she got home from school

Then after lunch we made apple lacing cards...

They colored the apples, then I glued them to some cardboard, cut them out, and punched out some holes




Lastly, after Emma got home, we made mini caramel apples (but substituted chocolate instead of caramel, since the kids aren't so into caramel)...







This afterschool treat was Jake-approved!

Paint, Pudding, and Paper dolls

Our latest Jake preschool activities-

Paint bag writing - we did some shape practice... Jake can only seem to draw a circle, so I drew shapes and then asked Jake to find the square, or the diamond, etc, and have him 'color it in'. He used a q-tip, but then also discovered his fingers worked alright too.

Pudding writing... this ended up being EXTRA messy, but fun! All I had was vanilla pudding in my pantry (what a shame!), and I thought that chocolate would be best, since the writing would show up better, and chocolate is just all around more delicious. So, I added a ton of chocolate syrup to the pudding mix before it had set... this ended up making it much runnier than it should - but oh my, it was tasty! Kind of like a melted frosty! :) It still worked alright for some more shape practice - at first, Jake didn't want to practice shapes and just wanted to eat it (can you blame him?)... so I had to get sneaky - I would pull the platter away from him, draw a shape in the pudding, and tell him he had to tell me the shape before he could eat some - so he would say "triangle!" and I would slide the platter to him and he would say "I eat triangle!" and then he would take a big glob of pudding to his mouth. This was an all around good time! :)

Mickey Mouse colors- we made a stop at Home Depot to snatch up Disney paint samples. Jake LOVES Mickey Mouse, so he was in love with these colored Mickey cards! We practiced naming and finding colors, then we tied them together for a little color book. Jake kept quizzing me throughout the day- "what color is this mommy?" and I'd tell him and then he'd say "good job!". haha. And also, notice Jake's black eye? He bonked his nose a few days ago, and every day his eye is a new color - today it is a lovely yellow.


We made paper dolls after school one day this past week - the girls really enjoyed it. I didn't get a picture of Emma's but she really took her time and colored pretty dresses and faces on all of them. I made Jake some paper soccer balls instead of dolls. He colored them and they are currently taped to his bedroom door. :)

My cute Claire and my crazy Jake

My sweet Claire is FOUR months old today! She's no longer a newborn and has moved on to 'baby'. She's so cute and I love her smiles and her hand sucking and how she's always fiddling with her feet and toes. She just makes me so happy... and she'd make me even happier if she'd start sleeping through the night. :) She had her 4 month doctor visit today - she weighs just over 12 lbs (20th%) and is 24 inches (50th%) in height. I looked back at old posts to see what my other kids were at this age - Jake was 14.5 lbs and Becca was a little over 10 1/2 lbs. I'm not sure what Emma weighed - I wasn't as good at writing that stuff down back then. :) Anyway, I'm still solely nursing Claire, which I'm happy to do, and hope to do as long as I can manage... but I am constantly paranoid about whether or not Claire is getting enough... ever since my experience nursing Becca 4 years ago, I'm always worried my little ones aren't getting full enough. I pre-emptively jumped the nursing ship with Jake at 3 months old. Hoping to do a little better this time around with my Claire, but I have a feeling that I'm sinking quickly - she just doesn't nurse nearly as long as she used to a month or 2 ago, but she usually finishes up eating with a smile on her face - but I remember thinking that with Becca and it turns out she was gradually dropping off the growth chart and when I decided to start supplementing per doctor orders she would down formula bottles like crazy after I would nurse her. Sigh. Can you tell this has been on my mind lately? :)



Claire had her first try at rice cereal today - she liked it almost as much as her fingers :)

I've been getting a little more organized with preschool time for Jake. We do it 3 times a week, while Becca and Emma are both at school. Jake preschool only lasts about 30 minutes... his attention span isn't very long. :) In that 30 minutes, we read a book together, do some sort of learning activity, including 5 minutes doing his sound book, eat a snack and then I make an effort to actually play with my cute boy. How sad is it that I have to plan for playing with Jake in order to make it a part of my day? I just don't get on the floor and play with my kids as much as I should. So, this is a bit of guilt release for me... we've played in the little kitchen (Jake made me a sandwich and a drink), we pretended to be robots (we both wore boxes on our heads), and we played with trains. I have a fun boy! So, we've just been doing pretty random activities for our preschool time together - but maybe at some point it'd be fun to have some themes... and our book, activity and snack could all coordinate. Aw, that'd be cute. :)

"Parking lot" numbers - idea from here. We put stickers in each of the sections to make the numbers a bit more visual. Jake liked this activity quite a bit.


The pictures below are actually on a different day... but for some reason I guess we were rockin' the red shirt and overalls theme this week or something. haha.

Animal alphabet coloring.... I discovered from this activity that Jake doesn't really like coloring. Unless, of course, he's holding 8 crayons at once. Boys are SO different from girls! Emma and Becca took coloring seriously from a young age... this Jake is crazy. haha. :)

Job jars and Jake "preschool"

I feel like every 6 months I'm needing to come up with a new chore motivation system for the kids... they just get bored and need something different. I guess I'm the same way! :) Since our last chore system was in a list form, I thought we'd try something a little more hands on this time. I liked these 'job jars', so I just tweaked that idea a bit to fit what my kids needed...


Each of the kids have a jar (even Jake!)- they have their daily chore sticks (colored yellow) and their weekly chore sticks (colored red). Their daily chores also have M, T, W, Th, or F written on the ends. When they get a chore done, they turn the popsicle stick upside down. At the end of the week on Friday or Saturday, we still do Family Movie Night as their reward for completing all their chores. By Friday evening, all the sticks in their jar should be turned, colored side down. Jake's jar is more for practice... I don't really care whether he does them or not, but if the time is right, and he's in a helpful mood, he pulls a stick from his jar and I encourage or help him complete it. There are also "Extra Jobs" that can be replacements for missed daily chores earlier in the week, or they can be completed and redeemed for a couple pieces of candy to have during movie night (although we always still have some sort of big treat, like cookies, or popcorn). The Star Sticks are for me to put in the kids jars for various good deeds or positive attitudes when doing their chores, or whatever I want. Since we're not doing the OK Mommy bucket anymore, these are another way I can choose to physically reward the kids for being proactive, obedient, or working hard. Just like the extra chores, they can exchange their star sticks for pieces of candy at movie night. The girls chores are mostly the same as before on our chore lists - Jake's chores include things like putting silverware away (which he did yesterday and didn't even need my help!), emptying the downstairs little trash can, putting his trains away, dusting the coffee tables, etc.

On the back of the girls job jars I've also taped on a "Don't Forget!" list - we are trying to improve our habits so there are 3 things we're currently working on-

1. Rinse your own dishes and put them in the dishwasher
2. Put your dirty clothes in the hamper
3. Pick up after yourself (toys, books, papers, etc)

So, ya, pretty basic stuff - life skills really- but things that even us adults aren't always quick to do (maybe even me! oh noes!). I've been watching for these 3 things in particular when giving the girls star sticks.

Switching gears... we bought a Groupon to go to this indoor amusement park in Phoenix... I had a discount off the groupon as well, so it was super cheap - 15 dollars for our whole family to go. So on Saturday afternoon we tried it out... it felt like a mad house there... they had a rather large stack of groupon papers at the front register - so it was probably abnormally busy because so many people were just there because they bought this deal. All I can say is that the kids had fun, but I think you'd be crazy to pay what the normal price is to get in - it's usually 15 dollars PER person. In my opinion, not worth it for this place. But like I said, the kids LOVED it, so maybe I shouldn't be such a bummer about it. Emma did really love the laser tag - she got 2nd place!










I decided I really needed to get my act together and start doing some more teaching activities with Jake, especially now that Emma and Becca are back in school. I feel like I've been so disconnected from understanding how well he knows his colors, numbers, etc - for example, he counts all the time, but it's not really consistent... a few times I've heard him count to 9 correctly, but most times it's more like "1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 7, 2". haha. Anyway, same goes for his colors - I've been working with him casually on these things, but I'd like to start a more structured "preschool time" with him while the girls are gone. When it comes to one on one teaching time, each kid has gotten less and less of it. Lucky for Emma and not so lucky for Claire. :) But in an effort to begin to redeem myself, for our first attempt at 'Jake preschool', I made simple little color sacks, and then we gathered a basket full of small toys that are a solid color. He sorted each item into their correct bag and we talked a lot about colors along the way. It was fun afterwards dumping out each of the bags and seeing our rainbow of items! How pretty. :)







Jake's played with these bags and the basket of items a few times since- and even Becca loved sorting the stuff too. From this I'm left still a bit confused on whether or not Jake knows his colors well. A few times during the activity he was able to tell me the color name of each of the bags when asked. But other times, he would say that the red was blue and that the yellow was green, or whatnot. I'm thinking that he just gets lazy sometimes in his answers, but otherwise, he knows all his colors pretty well. Next up for mommy-jake preschool is numbers! :)

Our Camping Adventure

We spent our Labor Day weekend camping at Jacob Lake. It's about a 5-6 hour drive for both us and my family in Utah, so we met there to rough it in the wilderness for a few days. This was the first time we've camped for 2 nights with the kids (we always just do one) - I was apprehensive, but I'd definitely do it again! Camping for just one night is a pain because you spend most of your time setting up and taking down camp with not much time for play in between. So, 2 nights was much more worthwhile. We had a GREAT time - we ate delicious dutch oven meals, played lots of games in the evenings (like bananagrams, BANG!, mafia, poor man's cranium), chatted by the fire, explored the wilderness, rode horses, took a field trip to the Grand Canyon, etc, etc... it was so fun! Aaron took the family pic of us above while at the Grand Canyon - this was on Day 2, and none of us had showered - I'd say we were still lookin' pretty cute. haha :)

Some sights on the drive up...

Ben told the kids that when he was little he always thought these sand formations were hiding sleeping dinosaurs underneath :)

Driving through the Painted Desert and Indian Reservation is beautiful

When we reached the campsite, Claire took a little outdoor nap - she seemed to really enjoy the breezes and nature sounds - she napped great! :)



Dad and Aaron having a riveting conversation about propane lanterns

Our campsite was right next to a horse pasture - the horses would come right up to the fence and the girls loved to pet them - Emma even named them... Dot and Starlight...




The horse pasture is also home to the actual Jacob Lake that the area is named after. It's not much of a lake, but it was very picturesque...


Exploring the surrounding woods...








S'mores!




Claire comfy and warm in her bear outfit...











Uncle Aaron helping Jake put caps in his cap gun



The Kaibab squirrel - these white tailed squirrels are considered endangered and they only live in the Jacob Lake area and North Rim of the Grand Canyon - this guy and some of his friends kept making appearances in our camp. :)



It's always a good time for silly YouTube videos... we may have been camping, but we had great internet reception! :)


The North Rim of the Grand Canyon was about a 45 minute drive from our campsite, so we made sure to make a little trip to see it. I've only been to the Grand Canyon once before when I was younger, and that was to the South Rim - this was my first time to the North end. The Grand Canyon is amazing and frightening - it doesn't even look real when you are right there... it looks like a painting or something. I'm definitely afraid of heights and the whole thing gave me the heebie jeebies.... but it was gorgeous!


















One of our camping activities included making marshmallow shooters followed by a big mini marshmallow war...






Emma, Becca, and Jake all got to ride horses at a local ranch. They were so cute up on those big horses!












Mom went out horseback riding as well... she looks good on a horse! :)



Delicious dutch oven cornbread and chili with fire roasted corn on the cob - oh my yum!

On our last day before heading out, the kids did a simple little nature scavenger hunt while we worked at taking down tents and packing up...







"Don't forget that I was here too!" -Claire

By morning on Day 3, I was especially thankful that we were all able to shower the night before - bonus points for finding a campground with showers! On the way home we stopped at Lee's Ferry - we bought some Indian jewelry, and crossed the bridge and enjoyed the view...








We also stopped in Cameron for lunch and ate some huge Navajo tacos. :) What a wonderful trip!

My brother Aaron is a really great photographer and he took a bunch of awesome photos from our trip - they sum up our wonderful weekend quite perfectly...