20110128

The brave ones

A few of the kids were brave enough to play outside yesterday afternoon. We have so much snow that it is actually kind of hard to play in. It didn't stop Trevor, Natalie, and Abigail from climbing the mountains of snow and trying to dig a fort.




Here is Abigail standing on our wall of snow that is almost three feet high.

All this snow makes our bird house look really short.

20110127

Auntie to the rescue!

I was chatting with my sister this morning and trying to figure out how to keep all of us from going crazy with our fifth snow day in three weeks. She had seen a cute Valentine craft idea and sent me the link. Since we don't have any Valentine decorations I figured this was a perfect idea. After the kids got their chores done we got ready for some craft time.

Poor Emersynne always gets shoved in her chair with some token craft like stickers or playdough



Everyone got right to work shaving crayons onto wax paper and it was fun to see the color combination everyone picked. I think the part everyone enjoyed most of all was getting to use the iron. Silly kids. Maybe I will have to put them to work so they can use the iron more often!

The finished project hanging in our dining room windows where the sun catches them. Even though Emersynne was not happy to be stuck in her chair during the project, she was impressed with the pretty hearts.
http://www.marthastewart.com/good-things/crayon-hearts

More snow!

What a winter we have had so far. It is unbelievable! When we made it through most of December before having our first snow storm the talk was all about a mild winter this year. No such luck. We have more than made up for the snow we didn't get in December and it just keeps coming. I don't even know where it is all going to go.

For the third week in a row I have children home from school for a snow day. Maybe we will work on valentines to keep us all out of trouble.


20110124

It's amazing!

About a week ago I took the plunge and pulled Emersynne out of diapers. This is the stage that I most dread but I thought that if I started now maybe, just maybe she would be potty trained by the time we moved into the new house in two months.

That first day was rough. I followed Emersynne around all day cleaning up accidents and the only way to get her to sit on the potty for any length of time was to give her my chap stick or "yips" as she calls them. I figured having my chap stick ruined was probably a small price to pay especially if it meant I didn't have to buy diapers anymore. At the end of the day I was frustrated and wondered if she was really ready for this. I certainly didn't think so.

The next day was sunday and since most of our day is spend at church I tried to have regular times of putting her on the potty but she spent most of the day in diapers.

Monday came and since I was planning to stay at home cleaning and doing laundry I decided to give Emersynne another try. She had a few accidents but by the end of the day Emersynne was telling me when she needed to go and Tuesday morning she found the princess panties in the drawer and didn't want anything to do with the training panties. There was no looking back now and things just got better. No more accidents and I didn't even have to watch the clock to make sure I put her on every few hours because Emersynne would come tell me when she needed to go. I went to bed so excited Tuesday night and still not really believing how easy it had been. What I thought would take me two months or more was accomplished in four days. Way to go Emersynne!


Crazy weather!

My kids have had so many days off in the last two weeks that we have forgotten what a normal school week is. I was hoping that we could start off this week going in the right direction but instead woke up to find that we had a two hour delay because of extreme cold. It is now 11:30 in the morning and we have finally reached zero degrees! It was -8 degrees Fahrenheit this morning with the wind chill factor making it feel like it was -25 degrees. Not the kind of winter weather I enjoy. So, in two weeks my kids have had 4 days and 4 hours off due to weather and another bad storm is coming in Wednesday night. So much for getting out of school in early June.

20110120

A good talk

...so I hear.