One Sunday in November I took a day's worth of pictures. I didn't plan anything special this day, it just sorta happened. It was a busy day looking back on it, but I have a feeling that everyday would seem busy if I actually took pictures and documented everything we do. I didn't start taking pictures until mid-morning, so I will describe that morning until that point.
I awoke to The Girl playing multiple instruments on my bedroom floor. We are talking drums and
tambourines and singing... it was great. Really. We did breakfast, which I think was pancakes and then we settled in to cleaning up the house and living the standard Sunday morning. We attend church on Saturday night so we do not have the typical Sunday morning church routine.
As I was cleaning the kitchen, the kids started pulling out projects and things to do.
The Boy pulled out a kit to make window clings and decided on a turtle. First he needed to outline it all in black and wait a few hours and then color it all in.
On the other end of the table, The Girl started this project. These little guys are like packing peanuts and are actually just like the biodegradable ones that some companies use. They sell these at expensive kid stores for crafts. I got mine for free from someone who was getting rid of their stash. You simply wet them slightly and they stick together. She was making a wall here.
This is the caterpillar that The Boy made.
After a bit the
Aquadoodle was pulled out. I love this thing! Art with painless water filled markers! Who ever thought this up deserves a gold medal. We practice spelling words on this too, but that is another post.
Back to the kitchen and a bit later, this is the outline done on the turtle. It is now drying.
In the meantime, I am checking out this magazine. Look at those cookies! Yum! I love the detail of that one with the snowman and the boy and I actually got on
ebay and checked out the molds that are used to make cookies like that. I was just so impressed with the look of it.
Yet another item was pulled out of the laundry room. This is another favorite. I found this toy at a
yard sale on base at our last station. It is from Germany and that becomes obvious as you look at what this toy does. You get to use a little hammer and real tacks. You see in Germany they can sell fun toys like these because people are not as sue happy there. They know that if a kid swallows a tack that they as a parent are to fault, not the company for making a toy. My kids love this and I think I paid a dollar for it. Great fun!!!
This is the overall look of the table as all of this was going on at virtually the same time. My table nearly always looks like this though.
I tell people we just have the
privilege of eating in a classroom.
The finished hammering project. Nice standard little picture there... now we can all collectively sigh at the happy little domestic scene.
Time for music!!! Singing and making up songs about virtually nothing! Can it get any better?
The instruments were put away and they collaborated forces to build a fort to fight the bad Tigers. No kidding.
The cushions are off my sofa again.
They made arrows and spears out of
K'nex. They had to fight off the bad guys from their fort. Guess who had the
privilege of playing the bad tiger? Yup... that would be me! See what getting half your college education in Drama gets you?!
After some grand battles we stopped for lunch. That consisted of amazing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Yum. We had a few other things with that but I can't really remember what right now. Probably some clementine oranges. We love those guys!
After lunch the turtle was finished and it currently resides on the window of The Boy's bedroom.
The colored portions become more clear as they dry and look like a sun catcher type thing. It will stick right on the glass until the sun will slowly over the time of about a year disintegrate the material and you get to scrape it off the glass with a razor.
I checked on the bedrooms and what was going on up there. It looks like the dollhouse people are having a picnic. Notice the composed dad and the family dog. Now, look at the mom's wild and disheveled hair. Should I be fixing my hair more often?! What is she trying to tell me?!
The kids are playing here having great fun in the tree house and enjoying the picnic.
Ah, now next door in The Boy's room we have the
K'nex mess. This mess shows up way too often around here. He loves these things though. They can be so many different things and he does use them to build things with the kit instructions but he also builds tons of different things. Like arrows. Spears. Guns. Such things that are so worthy of a little boy's time.
It was right about then that we went outside and The Boys started doing this.
The girls started doing this. It was time for the garden to get winterized. Mushy pumpkins were getting buried so they could make yummy dirt to plant things in when spring hits us.
The boys continued doing a bit of this...
The girls did a bit of this...
Then it was time to get ready for kid's choir practice. I washed up the kids and got them into appropriate clothing and ran to the commissary because I forgot that it was The Girl's turn to bring in snacks for her class. We picked up some of these guys for the kids. They are safe. No milk, no peanuts, just issues for those with wheat allergies and she has none of that going on in her class. She has developed a dairy allergy, but that is a whole '
nother post. I have found it is just easier to bring in snacks for her myself more often then not. If I don't bring snacks then they end up trying to serve them goldfish, or ritz crackers and she can't have either of those things so then I have to run next door to the store and grab her a different snack.
I stayed to help out some in her class cause there are tons of kids and we got all the juice boxes ready. I pulled up the "wings" so that the kids could grab those and not grab the box and squirt juice everywhere. They still did squirt some juice around. God bless janitors everywhere. They need it.
I took a fuzzy picture of her class on purpose. I do not post pictures of kids on my public blog at all, but I wanted you to get the overall impression of her class. Lots of kids, lots of fun. She is the one in the red dress on the right side of the picture.
The Boy's class was practicing for the musical they did for Christmas. Another fuzzy picture for you to enjoy. He was up there on the left side somewhere. I made this one too fuzzy for me to even tell where he was exactly.
For dinner we had tortilla soup. I made up those little yummy tortilla strips in the skillet too. Yum. I did take a picture of the soup, but the lighting was not working for me, so I will subject you to my fuzzy kid pictures but not to bad lighting pictures. I have my standards.
Yummy ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. It is a tradition. We do not always go out for ice cream, more often then not we have sorbet here at home, but we always do Sundaes on Sundays. It is something that we picked up on from some of my dearest friends at our last duty station.
The Boy broke the norm and had mint ice cream. He ALWAYS has sorbet so this was something new for him. He ate half of it then he dumped out the ice cream and ate the cone. He just isn't an ice cream lover.
That was our day. I am sure that somethings were left out, like how I fell over once the kids were in bed, but you get the gist of it. I will have to do this again sometime in the future as well. It was fun to see our day from later looking back. It made me realize how much we actually do in a given day and most of our time was spent at home just messing around.
I hope you have an amazing weekend and time with your family as we prepare to celebrate this amazing season!
