Well, its is OFFICIALLY winter in Minnesota! IT is FREEZING here! It is currently -1 degree windchill as I write...and its only November! Yikes! Anyway, here are a few things we have been up to this week...
First Snow
Swimming Lessons
Video: Colton is now getting his eyes wet all by himself!
Video: Colton used to hate swimming on his back and would squirm out of it each time. He is doing so much better!
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| Larkyn watching her siblings swim :) |
Art Projects
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| Making new place mats (laminated posterboard) |
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| We have used these placemats for almost a year at every family dinner...and it was time to update! |
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| Here are the kids new creations |
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| With it getting dark by 5 now, and we don't eat until Paul gets home around 6-6:30, we often do some sort of art project before dinner to help pass the time in a fun way! |
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| Painting |
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| Painting |
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| Play Dough |
Baking
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| Kids "hammering" the Oreos into Oreo powder |
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| Rolling the Oreo cream cheese mixture (before dipping in candy coating) |
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| I rolled the balls, Colton rolled them in cinnamon sugar, and Summer added white chocolate chips on top. No egg in the dough so its delicious sampling ;) |
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| The kids and I had quite the adventure making these peanut marshmallow bars...after the first layer was in the oven we realized we were 2/3 cup short on corn syrup because we doubled the batch!! We had quite the adventure calling neighbors and running around in the snow to get the remaining 2/3 cup :) |
Puzzles
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| Colton is LOVING puzzles lately and this was the first time he did this 24 piece all by himself! |
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| Kids will often pull games or puzzles to work on while I am folding laundry |
Bethel Visit
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| My mom and I drove to Bethel to see my cousin Jenna! |
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| While there we saw Uncle Eric's brother Andrew |
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| Grandma K, Larkyn and Jenna |
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| The kids were excited to see Ms. Kae - Uncle Eric's mom who works in admissions at Bethel |
Girls Date to the Theatre- Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
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| Summer watching the show (held at my old high school) |
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| The girls! |
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| Summer driving Chitty Chitty Bang Bang |
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| Summer proactively walked up to/met/ and chatted with several members of the cast and LOVED meeting them! She is very excited to be in HER musical next month!! |
Daddy's Girls
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| Daddy and Larkyn |
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| Daddy playing dress up with Summer |
Dairy Queen Photo Shoot
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| My friend Jessi and her girls were asked to be on the cover of World of Dairy Queen Magazine- but they needed a little boy with them...so they invited Colton! |
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| We arrived at 9:30am at the DQ in Edina (near the DQ headquarters) and Colton did great for the whole photo shoot! |
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| Summer was AMAZING at cheering her brother on - I was so proud of her! |
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| After they were done with the "cover" photo shoot, they took some pictures for the inside of the magazine, and invited Summer to join them! |
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| The kids were asked to eat their ice cream cones (tough job, I know!) but were replaced with NEW ones after they ate part of them (so the photos would look fresh) |
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| The ice cream cones that never ran out... |
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| It was really fun to watch the photo shoot and how they did everything! |
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| These four sillies had so much fun together and were treated to a free DQ lunch after the photo shoot |
Learning
Summer has been loving writing and sounding out words. She writes probably 6 notes a day to varous people, sounding out the words as she writes them. It is fun to see what she comes up with as she mixes the sight words and family names she knows with sounding out words she doesn't know, for example spelling "who" as "ho" and "what" as "wat" and "house" as "hos". I am very proud of how she is sounding out her words - just in the last two weeks she has dramatically improved! This particular note is for Uncle Ty, and our current verse of the week. She asked for help on the word "commanded" and "Deuteronomy". It says, "Ty so be careful to do what the Lord has commanded. Deuteronomy 5:32"
She is also very interested in sign language lately and asking lots of questions. So we looked up a
video on youtube to teach us both the sign language alphabet. Here is the first time she did all the letters by herself (though today when she did it she is much faster than this video shows!)
Colton has been very interested in rhyming words and rhyming any words he can. Here is a video of part of our dinner conversation.
Here is their verse of the week:
"Our Time"
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| Life gets busy...So busy! Paul and I often connect around 10 or 11pm over a bowl of cereal. This is our favorite kind! I LOVE our cereal dates, and to me this picture represents a great part of our life right now. |
