Family, Friends, and Fun

Family

This past weekend Grandma and Grandpa T and Uncle Javonte drove down and stayed with us for the weekend.

We all went cheer on Auntie Sarah (and several other friends) at the Twin Cities Marathon on Sunday.  Auntie Sarah did AMAZING and both kids were pretty excited about making posters to cheer her on...

 It was pretty chilly, so we officially got out all our winter gear (hats, mittens, boots, and blankets) for the year...until they get packed away again next May ;).

Larkyn is under the blue blanket, Colton is wrapped in yellow, and Summer is cuddling with Grandma T!

One wrapped up Summer, One wrapped up Colton, and One Grandpa T :)

Uncle Ty's birthday was the next day, so we sent him a birthday video (we like to send birthday videos to our friends and family, but this is the first one that includes Larkyn!)...



I love my family...

I love watching Colton interact with Larkyn...in this video he is giving her an "underdog" in her swing...

 

I love watching Daddy play with and read to his kiddos...

I love watching Summer love on her sister through constant attention, hugs, and kisses.

And I love watching Summer and Colton play together.  A new "routine" at our house includes somersaulting over the footrest of our glider rocker after baths while I am feeding Larkyn before bed.  I took a little video of my view...

Friends

We are so blessed to have so many wonderful friends, and the kids and I alike look forward to our playdates.  Summer loves to make things (pictures/crafts/etc) for her friends and usually comes to a playdate bearing gifts for whatever friend we are seeing :).  With the weather getting chillier, we are even more grateful for friends to meet up with!  I usually don't take many pictures during our playdates, but this week I snapped a few...

We met up with our old neighbor, Joy, and her 3 kiddos at Chik-Fil-A to eat and play at the play place on Day 3 of rainy cold weather...the kids were like wind-up toys that were set free and literally ran for almost 2 hours straight!!   I snapped this picture of Joy and Larkyn because Larkyn's hair is sooo funny!

We met up with LaDonna and her 3 kiddos Pahl's Market, only a few miles from our house.  They always have lots of fun free things in the fall.  Their giant corn pit is always a blast!  I love this picture of Summer's helping Colton get up on the hay bale to jump off because he couldn't do it by himself!

JUMP!

Addison and Summer jumping into the giant corn pit

Colton and Brody...the lil' brothers :)

Pahl's Market also has a hay bale maze which is so fun for the kids, and we parents like it because we can see over the top :).  The kids played hide and seek and ran off a bunch of energy in here

We had a "picnic" lunch and playdate at our house when it ended up being too cold to go to the park we had planned to go to.  The girls all played dress up/princess/fairy.  Colton wanted to dress up too, so I let him wear his Lightning McQueen driver suit that we will wear for Halloween.  I think this pictures is so funny with the 4 girls (Summer, Faith, Noelle, and Adry) + Colton.  Colton's buddy Rylan was busy playing elsewhere at the time.

The princesses descend from their royal chamber

The little beauties...

How fun to have 4 four-year-old girls that love to play the same thing!

Fun

The kids love doing "school" type stuff...and this week they really led the activities...I love that their learning is so driven by them and that they find it so fun!

Colton started doing a "number hunt" (those were his words when he told me what he was doing) where he hid the numbers from a puzzle around the house, looked for them, and put them back in the puzzle!  Great idea Colton!  He did it several times on different days and loved it.  I had nothing to do with it. :)

Summer wanted to make a "Bible"...so she found verses to copy and also had me help her spell a verse she had memorized...I made the booklet for her out of poster board and paper but she did the rest, and has spent quite a bit of time over several days working on it all on her own.

 Summer has been very interested in money lately, and wanted to know how much money she had in her piggy bank.  We have counted it before, but this is the first time she was able to make the piles on her own (i.e. 4 quarters, 10 dimes, 20 nickles) and I think it was the first time she really understood that each of those piles represented one dollar....

20 nickles make a dollar...

She could count all the piles to tell me how many dollars she had...

Summer has been wanting to make a "colors of our shoes" graph ever since she finished her "favorite color survey" graph.  (Thanks Jessi and Hannah for the idea!)  Because Mommy was busy each time she asked mommy to make her a graph (seriously she kept asking me!) she decided to make the graph all by herself.  She loved using the ruler to draw straight lines.  She had trouble with getting the graph just how she wanted it, so she ended up wanting me to make a template for her :) 

Busy at work graphing the colors of our shoes

Besides me making the template (after being requested some 10 times!) she did everything else on her own!

Colton (of course) wanted to use a ruler too...and was interested in the numbers on it.  So we talked about how rulers measure things, as this next video shows...

I pulled out a box of stencils and the kids spent TONS of time playing with them. 

Colton traced his whole name all by himself!

He found the punch outs in the same box as the stencils and decided he wanted to match them up (all his idea) and it entertained him for quite a while!

This is Colton's drawing of a "car"...:)  He is getting better at his circles!

 One other fun activity we did was "hunts" for things in writing...

For Summer, because she is loving graphs so much, I made a graph similiar to one I had seen online.

I found a piece of mail and gave Summer 4 highlighters.  She highlighted each time she saw the word "in" in yellow, the word "to" in green, the word "and" in blue and the word "who" in pink.  Then she counted how many times she found each word and graphed it.  We only finished the first two words on this particular day due to time, but will finish the rest sometime this week.

Colton "hunted" for the letter "C" in his highlights magazine.  He found a few and then he loved coloring on the pages :)

Larkyn has so much fun in the bathtub!  Paul snapped this cute shot of her in her towel.

All 3 kids have worn this adorable reindeer hat :) Larkyn is ready for our walk!

The kids made their own fun - pushing their strollers WAY in front of them and then running to catch them on a recent walk.

That's all the pictures I have for now :)

Larkyn 3 months

Larkyn turned 3 months on Tuesday, and I continue to grow more in love with her each day!  She is the sweetest little thing with the cutest smile and dimple!  I laughed when we took her in for her 3 month pictures because her easy going nature made it so much less stressful than when I took my older two kids in for pictures as babies...they were so fussy at 3 months that I never brought my daughter in for pictures (too fussy!) and I spent so much time agonizing over the best time of day to bring my son in when he would have the best chance of being happy...however with Larkyn, I scheduled her pictures around my OTHER TWO kids scheduled swimming lessons, and had to wake her up from two separate naps that day, and she was still a sweetheart for pictures! 

These are the days...

These are the days where I'm woken up by my baby to eat...and then interrupted a few minutes later by a crying son who has wet through his diaper and all over his sheets.  Where I interrupt my sweet natured baby's feeding to change my wet son and his sheets...followed by spending time determining which toy is making the "alligator shadow" on my daughter's ceiling to put her anxiety at rest.  These are the days when my daughter would like TWO french braids in her hair this morning...where I start a load of laundry constantly and never have it all folded.  These are the days where I start to cook the eggs and toast the bagels and I am interrupted by the cries of a son who got "knocked over" by an exuberant puppy, a spill of some sort to wipe up, a need for some item while eating, and any number of various things.  These are the days when I eat cold, burnt eggs because I was too busy meeting needs to watch them and too hungry to make more.  These are the days when wiping faces and fingers after mealtime is no small task and stickiness and dirtiness abounds.  These are the days when I squeeze in prepping for dinner while eating breakfast and doing the dishes, of course being interrupted more times than I can count by poopy butts to wipe, diapers to change, help needed with craft projects, help looking for some item or showing me some beautiful piece of artwork.  These are the days where I spend time trying to tell my son that crayons can't be fixed by tape no matter how much you put on, but I use almost as much tape trying to help my daughter fix her broken paper.  These are the days when I get spit up on, pooped on, and feel as though I am constantly washing my hands.  These are the days when the word "Mommy" is literally uttered every 5 seconds for some "urgent" need.  These are the days when we finally finish our breakfast dishes and it is already almost 10am...


Yes, these are the mornings where my sweet baby looks up and smiles when she sees me.  When my son excitedly shows me his new drawing.  When my daughter is ecstatic that she learned something new and I am the one she wants to tell.  These are the days when my son "reads" his Bible to my baby.  When my daughter is persistently trying to make my baby smile.  When my son's silly songs and random words make me laugh.  When my daughter stops herself in her tracks remembering to make a right choice.  When I hear kind words exchanged between by kiddos...a victory after hundreds of times of repeating how feelings should be expressed between two siblings.  When my son thanks God for his fork during the mealtime prayer.  When I am my kids' hero...dominating terrible spiders, giving magic kisses that heal booboos, and performing thread and needle surgery on ripped bears.  When big eyes and sticky little fingers say I love you.  When I can still pick up my kids and cuddle their wiggly bodies close - even for a few seconds.  When we have mornings we don't have to rush out the door and can all be home together.  When we can spend an extra few minutes...doing everything and nothing all at the same time.