Cave Exploring...

Ben had a medical conference to attend and present at, so we got to go to Tucson for a quick overnight trip. Before checking into our hotel, we had a little adventure at Colossal Cave just south of Tucson. We had a couple of ideas for activities to do while in Tucson, and the cave was one of the options - we let the kids choose what they would like to do, and surprisingly the girls were both excited about exploring a cave. They did get nervous during parts of it, but they both said they really liked it afterwards. :) Jake was the bravest of all, and didn't seem to care whatsoever about walking through dark passageways and past bats.

Waiting for our tour to start, at Colossal Cave Mountain Park...





Jake saw this statue outside of the gift shop, and for some reason he tells us that it's Jesus. We have no idea why he thought this, but we laughed hard! :)

The cave entrance...



This cave is dormant and dry and the passageways are very 'museum like' with staircases and railings and some lit display boxes and added lighting, but the tour was interesting and the cave formations were awesome!








The kids were excited to get settled into our hotel room - they get so excited about hotels! Soon after checking in, Ben had to leave for a couple hours for the conference he came for, so we entertained ourselves with tv, swimming, and coloring :)....










After Ben got back, we all headed to dinner. We ate outside on the patio of the restaurant along with a large group of Ben's coworkers and their families. We were out late, but the food was good and kids were surprisingly well behaved- whew. The next morning we enjoyed a rather large buffet breakfast at the hotel, and then headed home, with a stop in Gilbert to spend the rest of our Sunday with Ben's family, to enjoy General Conference and have some fun family time.

Claire and Caroline hanging out during the afternoon session of Conference. I love these babies!


So, the night before our Tucson trip, Ben wanted to have a date night - it was a last minute decision and I was unable to snag a babysitter, so we decided on a night in. Ben picked up stuff for a fondue dinner on his way home from work - so we got the kids to bed early and we had so much fun preparing and eating our fondue goodies. :) Ben made a cheese sauce and we had asparagus, sourdough bread, Italian sausage, and prosciutto wrapped apple slices to dip into it. It was so yummy and fun! Then we really kept with the fun fondue theme by watching Jane Eyre (haha). During the movie we had dessert fondue - marshmallows, strawberries, and homemade pound cake dipped in chocolate sauce. :) I love date nights with my Ben, even if it's just a date at home!

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! :)