Tuesday, July 29, 2014

3rd Annual Lake House Trip

Year One 2012
Year two was a little all over the place. The Jenson's went for only Friday. We went for Friday night and all day Saturday, and the Edwards came for only Saturday. I don't think a group picture was taken that year.
 

Year Three 2014
We have multiplied.......alot
 we love our time each summer where we get to spend the weekend at our friends lake house
we went swimming in the lake, off of the dock
 
did some tubing
little girl even went (and fast)
I didn't have my  camera then
 
played some cards
 
watched the sunset (twice)

even the kids joined in on the sunset watching
 
Golden boy woke up on Saturday morning and came and cuddled up in this chair
He had the right idea
 
Mr. Robert had a kid pile up when they were deciding which movie would be watched while breakfast was being made.
 
a tiny fish was caught and all the kids were amazed. Little J.Crew even reached out and touched it.

Some coloring while dinner was being prepared

All made for an exhausting but extremely fun Lake house weekend
Thank you McInnis Family for a fantastic time and lot of fun and memories
Friends lake house trip
watch a sunset

Monday, July 21, 2014

Frozen Party

As always, pinterest is just overflowing with ideas for themed birthday parties. After seeing the movie Frozen this past winter I was sure that was the theme we would be doing for my daughters birthday party. Last year we did a combined Mickey and Minnie birthday party for my son and daughter. My hubby convinced me to do a combined one again this year. I didn't think Frozen would fly with my son who was turning 7 so I resigned myself to just going a simple pool party. sure I would probably cutesy it up some but I was going to go simple. Then one day while taking my son to school he asked me if he and little girl were having a birthday party together this year. I told him yeah that they were. he asked me what kind of birthday party? I told him a pool party. he said no mommy what kind? I said, like a theme? he said yeah. I asked him what would he like. he said, Frozen.  and so here is my attempt at a frozen birthday party.

The entrance to the party.
I saw this idea here.

 
Sven's Antlers (and snowballs)
found this idea here
and if you open up the link you will also see Kristoff's Ice. I had the blue jello all ready to go and left it at home.
 
Snowman noses were found here and we have cucumbers in our garden so I added those to the table as disc sleds  
 
 
we always have a form of lemonade at the kids birthday party (pink or yellow) I decided to sitck with the yellow and call it melted yellow snow to have a little bit of that boyish humor into the princessey party. 
 


 
these two cousins. glad they have so much fun toghether
 
is he not the cutest little guy every. he plays shy with me......a lot. but I think that he really likes me.

my awesome mom took come cute pictures of the cakes. really she took pretty much all of the pictures. my mother in law brought the kids their gifts in these reuseable bags(which are awesome) and mom set them behind the cakes as photo backgrounds. i love it.
I wish I had taken pictures of the insides of the cakes. this one is little girls and it looked like this on the inside.  i was trying to go somewhat with this look for the top. i am happy with the way it turned out.
 
for Golden boys cake I came across this pin and thought it was so cute. I got the figurine set on ebay. Kristoff's Ice was going to go in a bowl right next to him. (can you tell I am still a little sad that I forgot it?)


 
my sweet niece
 me and my girl




 
the party invites I found here and loved the way that they turned out.
and while we didn't do favors this year I saw this and thought that I would write it on the driveway as people were leaving. I am a terrible speller and my 2nd grade, super smart niece helped me when it came to spelling coming. (I had to m's in there, ugh)

I thought about making these magic wands
but in the end I kept telling my self simple and easy and that is they way it ended up. we had a great time and so did the kids.
 
 


Sunday, July 20, 2014

Map it Out

 my husband loves maps. we don't have a gps for the cars.......sure our phones have them but we rarely use it. he loves to sit down and map out how to get places. when we moved across the country years ago we had AAA books and lots of maps to get us where we needed to go. same way when we came home three and a half years later.  when we had Golden boy we did his room in a safari theme. my sister came and helped me paint this monkey on the wall, as well as a gator and a giraffe. now that he is 7 (YES 7, I can't believe that is even possible) we were wanting to update his room and make it more of a big boy room. that process has been going on for a little over a year now. we didn't want to paint over the animals we just wanted to incorporate them into the theme. I guess the theme is ADVENTURE.  I found the quilt at target on line. it came with the two pillow shams.
 so my husband found this great US map at a yard sale for like $2 and we hung it up in Golden boys room. only problem is that we couldn't get it to stay up and it was way to big to have frames. so guess where I went to look for an idea on how to hang it? Pinterest. You got it. I came across this, this, and this pin. I ended up going with the last tutorial to hand the poster. Golden boy and I stopped at home depot one afternoon, picked up two dowel rods and brought them home to hang the map. I had to use some push pins on the back side and gravity was working against me on the bottom so I had to take it down and use some hot glue to get the dowel rod to hold on but all in all I think it came out great and we really like the out come.
 
thanks for the great tutorial Crystelle Boutique

Friday, July 11, 2014

The Library

I never claimed to be much of a writer. so that fact that I have a blog......I am not quite sure how that happened. but it did. a long time ago. before I had the two little people that reside in my home and in my heart. it was just me and my hubby and we were taking on the world (or so we though)
I am not eloquent in what I have to say, I don't always capitalize where I am suppose to or use punctuation where I should, I know that I spell works wrong all the time.......even though there is spell check.  all that being said I lay in bed last night thinking about this post this morning. a simple post about the library. my brain went through the whole process and the whole post on what I was going to say and last night as was constructing it, in my head, it sounded great. now here I am this morning and I have not clue what exactly my head was thinking last night. here goes though. at least an attempt on what I think I was going to say.

the library. I could walk the aisles of the library. browsing books. checking them out. oh how I love the library. Be still my heart. I mean really the next best thing to it is a book store. no particular book store either. really just anyone. so now I have these two little ones and I love reading and I hope to pass my love of reading to these two little people who live in my house and my heart. these two though........they are not me.......they are rarely like me.......I love that about them but it makes it hard on a trip to the library. a place of quiet and calm. those two words rarely go with my two. that's ok with me, usually.

I braved the library with them to hopefully get them some books that they like and that I could read to them. Golden boy started looking through the books right away and found a stack of them that he was interested in. it seemed like over half of them were about Christmas time, which I thought was funny. I went through them and added some readers to the sack too.

 little girl came with her stack. much smaller than his but it was all fine. in fact I think the only one she picked out was the Romeo and Juliet one. (we have the Pride & Prejudice one and she loves it. when I saw the Romeo and Juliet one I thought she may get it. there was also a Wuthering Heights one and many more) Golden boy handed her the Alice in Wonderland one and the Dr Seuss one and I got the Do you know which ones will grow one. she prefers roam. I try to make sure her roaming it close by and where I can see her. but she is constantly on the move and is back and fourth between the computes, book and puzzles. on top of getting all of these books for the kids I had two on hold for me and as we made our way into the kid section there was a book sitting on the end cap of an aisle and it looked familiar, like one that I had came across on pinterest as one that I wanted to read and pinned to my books worth reading board
 when we had picked out all the books that we were going to check out I handed each of them their stack and we headed to check them out. it was hard enough to get them to the check out station with the books and they didn't want to have to carry them anymore. so after checking them out I piled them all into my arms and we headed out the door. it was then that we ran into some of our friends headed into the library.  I probably looked like a crazy person ushering the kids out the door carrying all the books. I hope I just looked like a person that look like she loves books. As they were walking in she showed me a cute bag, that she bought on Etsy, for her oldest, that had a plastic badge holder on it to keep his library card. brilliant, genius. the next time I was I walmart I located the area that had the badge holders. they come in a pack of......well I don't really remember but way more than I needed. really I only needed two but a $1.88 for way more than I needed.......SOLD! (that being said local friends.....if you need a badge holder for your child's library card give me a shout out I have one for you.)  I knew that bag I would probably use for Golden boy but wasn't sure about Little girl until I got home and remembered this beauty. it was mine when I was a kid. my nanny painted it for me, my sister has a blue one that I think has balloons on it. I knew it would be perfect for Little girls library bag.
 I located the zip ties that I had left over from our Disney World trip and attached the library card to the bag. Yeah for library bags! Yeah for card holders! Yeah for friends with great ideas!
 Here is Golden boy's bag.  it is just a reusable grocery bag that he got from my mom......I mean Tinderbell. His Tinker-gifts in Disney showed up in this bag every morning.
Go to Library

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Our Fourth of July Celebration

it is pretty nice when the fireworks that are shot off in the city is happing right across the street from the neighborhood that you live in. for the post three or four years we have walked up to the front of the neighborhood and sat in a parking lot there to watch the firework show.


 the darker it got the glow sticks came out. always a fun thing to have when it gets dark outside.

 then the magic happens
mesmerizing and spectacular
fireworks, one of my favorite things

 and of course another item that was on our 2014 summer list to check off
Fireworks


Saturday, July 05, 2014

The List Keeps Dwindeling

we have been making our way through our 2014 summer list and it has been lots of fun. with only like three or four weeks left of summer it seems like there is no way that we will every make it through it all. in fact I am pretty sure that we won't get to everything before school starts but school starts early this year so some of our summer activities take place once school has stated. I am ok with that.

last week was VBS
do you see it VBS.
anyway, I got these pictures of the kids at home before VBS one morning. I didn't take my camera with me to VBS. it was just too busy but lots of fun. Workshop of wonders was such a fun theme and we had a great time transforming the church into a workshop for painters, carpenters/builders, and scientist.

 
nothing says cute like a couple of goofy faced kids. it was my way to get them to post and do what I wanted them to do for the pictures above. you do what you can to get results, right?

here is another one of the things on the list that we did.
Watercolor
I found two picture that I thought the kids would like and printed them and used our water color paints. Golden boy wasn't all that crazy about painting and ended up coloring. he wants things to be in the lines and the exact color they are suppose to be. note to self: next time give him something more abstract that he can color whatever. not peter pan where he wants him to look a certain way and can't get it that way......or a minion.  it just wasn't working for him. little girl on the other hand loved it. the flower that she is painting is actually the second picture that she painted. the first was a castle.

 
 our sweet neighbor saw the kids playing outside with the hose and came over with an extra sprinkler that she had for us to use. they kids had a great time running through it.
 
last was a fourth of July craft. this wasn't on our summer list but something that I pinned and thought would be fun. the only thing that I needed to purchase for this craft was the blue beads. I hadn't the bakers twine (but really you could use yard or ribbon) and I had the red striped paper straws as well. I think I cut two of them. this was the pin that I found and it links to this site that gives you the tutorial on doing it. great idea and lots of fun.
 I didn't think that my almost seven year old would want to make a necklace. when we were in home depot the day before he saw an American flag that he wanted. I told him that we could go home and make one. when he saw my version of making one he wasn't thrilled with it but he was a trooper and finished it and later on he got a real one.
 
and finally nothing says summer like a little ice cream treat at the new old mc donalds (that would just be Mc Donalds to everyone else but Golden boy has always called it old mc donalds) that the kids have been watching being built. who knew they would be so tired though. this is how I found them when I went to sit down. they did hope up to gobble up their ice cream.