Monday, February 9, 2015

Relax

This is just a video of life on a relaxing warm February afternoon :)


In other news Connor still only has one tooth! He can get up on his hands and knees while on his tummy and he is learning to clap his hands. I call him a sea lion because he is also working on his 'o' 'o' sounds :)

Are we sure it is only February?

January ended without a hitch, except that Gunnar and Connor have contracted some cough that lingers. Bryant had to put up with it for a while so I imagine it will take another week before the two little boys will be able to kick it out of their systems. I'm sure hoping that we are all healthy for our vacation in a week!

We have been loving the warm weather we have been having lately. There was even a day last week that I wished I was in shorts and flip flops outside it felt so warm! Of course I realize that my Mesa, AZ family would have still wanted a light jacket because 65 degrees might seem a little chilly to them. 

Here is a picture of Gunnar running around outside without shoes and in shorts and a short sleeved shirt. We rarely get to play outside in February.

Tucker turned 7 on Friday! He knew that he would not be having a birthday party with friends this year and I have instilled in them all that they can choose what they get for their birthday, whether it is a gift, a family dinner at a restaurant, or to go somewhere. Tucker has chosen to go to Discovery Gateway Museum in Salt Lake for his birthday. This meant that he didn't have any present to open on his special day so I tried to make the day special for him still. I made a boxed lemon cake with lemon icing/glaze (powder sugar and lemon juice to consistency). I was originally going to make cupcakes but I only have one tray and didn't want to have to wait for them to cook twice so I made to round cakes and dropped some food coloring on the top and swirled with a fork before cooking. Apparently, they were super awesome! who knew? After Tucker got home from school I brought the cake outside and all the neighbors sang to him. We have been having such amazing weather for February (it feels a lot like April) so everyone has been outside playing in the afternoons. Plus I was babysitting one of his friends like I do every Friday after school for an hour or so. 


After the cake and after I was done watching his friend we went to 7 eleven and got everyone a slurpie. Hunter received a coupon for a free slurpie from his school so he was able to get a medium and Tucker got a medium too because it was his birthday. I was amazed at how thankful each of my children were at being able to get a slurpie! They each  told me thank you without prompting and Tucker told me thanks twice that he was able to get a medium instead of a small. My tight wade nature is clearly being realized by my children... Our next stop was Toys R Us for a free balloon, crown and to let Tucker buy a $3 toy with his gift card that they sent him. Thankfully. Toys R Us has a section of $1, $2, $3, and $5 toys so Tucker was able to find something that he really likes :)

Do you ever wonder what goes on in your house while you are trying to sleep in on a Sunday morning after 3 nights of really bad sleep? Someone will pull out the school stuff box and everyone will have fun in a chaotic and mostly quiet way!

Here is the monster Hunter drew on one of the white boards

This is Tucker's monster 

This is the job chart Tucker made. Hunter's job is to play video games, Brylee's job is to watch TV, Tucker's jobs are to play video games, watch TV, and play at Samuel's house, and poor Gunnar has the job of cleaning the whole house! I made them all work hard on Saturday to get the house clean, it was so nice to have it cleaned up and not to do it all myself. Amazingly, it has lasted through to today. Normally, the house seems to fall apart on Sundays because I don't care to do a lot of picking up, it is my day of rest after all!

Brylee's Birthday

Brylee has been looking forward to her first friends birthday party since Tucker had his a year ago! Seriously! With her birthday being December 21 and most of her friends belonging to a student families, no one was here near her birthday. Well, while I was working on things for a bridal shower she reminded me that she needed to have her birthday party with friends. She was set on it being an 'art' party like Tucker had last year and that she wanted the same cake. Well I realized that I had to throw her party that weekend (5 days away) if I was going to do it because I had the bridal shower the weekend after, and then Tucker's birthday the weekend after that! So we invited the friends knowing that some sort of craft would be involved. Come Wednesday I was able to get her to agree to a pirate theme and have everyone decorate treasure boxes. 

Here are friends at the table gluing jewels and coloring their treasure boxes (candy boxes from JoAnns)



Everyone got to decorate their own pirate hat and they all sat while I read "Pirate Pete's Talk Like a Pirate" to everyone. 


After the story we needed to go on a treasure hunt but first we had to find the pieces of the treasure map amongst all the cannon fire from the enemy. 

In this first video Tucker helps me realize that the wooden chair needed to be moved to make popping the cannon balls (balloons) safer, poor kid. Thankfully, it only hurt for a moment and he went back to popping more ballons.

I eventually had to hold a pen to the balloons while the kids tried to sit on them and pop them because some of them just don't displace the air well enough

And then they headed out the door for the hunt. Tucker was the leader and it was a little hard for the 3 and 4 year olds to understand exactly what the they were doing but they were all glad to find the treasure. 

Inside the treasure box was REAL money. The children each got a turn to hunt for the money among all the beans with a blindfold on. It turned out to be rather tricky. The bigger kids tried to go too fast and dropped tons of pennies while sifting through the beans. Brylee seemed to get it pretty well and made out with 10 pennies :)




Then we all ate pizza...


and ate cake. This is a treasure chest cake and looks the coolest from the front :)



Finally she got presents. I'm thinking after this party we will tell kids to just come have fun and not bring presents because really my kids don't need more stuff. (I let them bring Brylee presents because she has seen her brothers get presents and was kind of expecting it for her first party, hopefully Gunnar will have a different view when he turns 4 in a year and a half)



The Zoo!

Since I didn't have any pictures from the last time we went to the zoo in November (as a result of losing the camera) I took the kids again. I thought the free zoo day was the 3rd Wednesday of the month but it is really the 4th! So we showed up to an almost empty parking lot. I decided that we should just pay to go through since we drove to get there and would be spending a fair amount of money in gas if we drove home and then back to the zoo again a week later. When we went to pay we even got their discounted winter rates so it really wasn't too bad! It was so nice to have the zoo to ourselves! No one got lost :)

Here is Hunter having climbed on the wall next to the entrance

Here is Tucker with the Giraffes

The Zebras were at it again and the children had fun watching them 

Hunter also successfully climbed into the Lion drinking fountain's mouth



We got to see the male lions today instead of the females and they were active and making sounds. Brylee was not too fond of it and tried to hide behind the stroller.


Brylee is at the stage of making silly faces for the camera so here she is on the trunk of an elephant statue.


How many kids can fit on the back of the rhinoceros. 


Here are my little eaglets :)

The Sea Otter cage was being cleaned this time around so the kids didn't get to see them jumping and playing. This was a favorite stop last time we were here but they enjoyed the otter statue nonetheless.

Brylee was getting a ride from the sea otter. 

And Tucker is giving him a hug.

Polar bears are so much fun!

Everyone wanted their own pictures with the tigers




And our final stop was the atrium (I think that is what it is called). It was nice that there were not lots of other kids around making it hard to see all the spiders, frogs, snakes, lizards, etc. The children really wanted me to video everything!

This was Tucker's favorite bird. He loved the brilliant yellow color. The bird however did not want to be photographed. Every time I pulled the camera out he would hide in the crack and clean out his house!

It was so fun to go and see all the animals. Most of them were active in the morning having just eaten or still eating as we walked around. It was also super enjoyable to not have tons of people so that the children could just explore without me stressing out. We ate our lunch inside the sea lion and harbor seal exhibit where it was warm, which was only possible because hardly anyone else was there. The children were able to watch the sea lions be fed and perform a few tricks for the zoo keepers too. I am debating whether or not I want to take them to the zoo again the last week of February for another free day or not...