Our Week: November 9-15

This past weekend Paul and I went out on my "birthday date".  We stuffed ourselves silly at one of my favorite restaurants for burgers, fries, and delicious malts and then went to the Mall of America for kid-free shopping :).  I love spending time with my hubby!  My parents had the kiddos for the evening and took them to Chuck-E-Cheese for their first time.  The took a lot of video and pictures on their phone, but I'll share my favorite video-- Colton driving the car game with Grandpa..as well as a couple pics....

Thanks Grandma and Grandpa, for taking great care of our kiddos while we went out on a date :).

Here is a video of Paul playing football with the kiddos....love Summer's giggle and Colton's  little hands trying to catch the ball...




During the week we had a pretty normal week.  We got to meet Summer's friend Addison's new little baby sister Tenley, which was a highlight!  (Only I was having such fun holding her that I never took a picture!)  Here are a few other random pictures and videos from the week....

Colton sat down and propped his feet up on the stool.  I thought it was so funny!

Summer continues to LOVE gymnastics!

Watching the big kids at gynmastics

Park date with our naighbors

Making a "train" on the slide with our neighbor girls

Making a "book" road for Colton's cars to drive on

 I have seen and loved these dot markers for a while, but haven't been able to find them in the store, so I finally ordered them online.  They came this week, and we made good use of them!  The kids (both of them) love using them.  With Summer, we practiced writing her "hard to write letters" (K, X, and Z), we made two number books (1-10 and 11-20), and did addition.  With Colton we practiced colors.  He loved putting the caps on and off too!

Dotting mommy's "Z"

Making blue circles

Amazing how well they both sat and loved the dot markers!  (Perfect for a 21 degree day!)

Number book #1 "in process"

Our creations on the counter ready to show daddy when he gets home

Summer's number books: She would dot over the numbers I wrote and then make the corresponding number of dots below.  She did all of them completely by herself  and then I checked them.  She did them all correctly except 15 (I had to cross out two dots), 16 (I had to add a dot), and 20 (we needed help counting).

Our first dot addition worksheet

She likes writing 8's the best, so we did one page with the answer all equaling 8 :)

This was this past week's verse of the week.  Below is Summer saying it from memory.  I am loving doing these because in order to teach it to Summer, I have to memorize it too!  We all have fun quizzing Daddy at dinner (and Summer loves "helping" Daddy learn it!)

Summer's verse of the week:


At library storytime, they not only read books, but they sing songs and do different rhymes.  One particular rhyme works on numbers and counting. Here are the lyrics:

Five little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

And so on it goes until there are 0 monkeys left.  Of course there are fun actions to make when the alligator SNAPS the monkey out of the tree.  The kids played "crocodile" with this song for the longest time while we were doing the dishes one night so I snapped a little video....





Here are some videos of Summer's swimming lesson this week.  The first is her putting her head under all by herself (new in the past 2 weeks) and the second is of one of her favorite parts of swimming lessons: "walking on the moon".





That is all the pictures and videos I have of this week,but I should add that Colton's talking is advancing rapidly.  I really should catch it on video sometime so I can remember it, but he is often stringing together 2 and 3 words now and communicating so much verbally.  He still loves to do everything "self" (by himself)!  He is very excited that he can take the grapes off the stem and eat them just like Summer does. :)