Wanderings

Last week we made our first attempt to bring our children to the BYU football game.  Usually we leave them with their grandma, who lives one mile from the stadium.  But they are getting older, and we got the tickets from Cosmo's kids club, so we figured we give it a shot.

Okay, wait, two interruptions.

First of all, yes, this is how ridiculously bad my kids are at pictures.  No matter how much I try to distract them or make them laugh or something, this is what I get.  That was actually the better picture out of the ones with Tyler and Kaitlyn.  He was making even odder faces and gestures in the other ones.  Best of all, they also love photobombing, as Kaitlyn is demonstrating, because pranking mommy is hilarious I guess.

Second of all, this is further proof that I am at my sewing machine almost every day.  Kaitlyn had a cheerleading dress that was too short, but on further inspection, the top portion ended way too high and the skirt was just fine.  So I took the cuff off of the actual, official cheerleading costume and made the dress into a skirt.  Now we both love it.

Anyway, they did . . . fine at the game.  Our original nosebleed seats were right under the speaker, which Jasmine declared totally unacceptable within minutes. So we wandered off and found other nosebleeds to squat in, and the kids liked spending the rest of the game climbing on the handrails.  But hey, we won the game!

Yesterday Tyler had parent-teacher conference.  Thankfully, he is doing great!  I was nervous about such a large class, but she said that he is handling it really well, and was able to show me all the progress he has made in just the last month or so.  Hopefully someday he will end up in a regular classroom, so I guess having a class of 17 now is just prepping him for that.

And after that, I figured we would hit the dinosaur museum.

Kaitlyn told me this fish is "just like the one daddy and I caught at Lake Powell!"  Riiiiight . . .

And the sand/water table is always a favorite.  This time I figured I would take advantage of the new waterproof camera.

Now, normally Tyler with stay at the table as long as we will let him, and be sad and slow to leave.  I've seen him last for an hour and still not be ready to go.  But this time, he stayed for 5 minutes and then carefully washed his hands (with soap even), dried them, hung up his apron, and went to the computer to play puzzles and a memory game.  What?

He has been so funny lately.  Last week I made blueberry pancakes, which he disliked so much that he spit them out, and then told me I needed to "fix" the pancakes.  He refused to eat any breakfast that wasn't pancake, and since I couldn't take out the offending blueberries like he wanted me to, I ended up breaking down and making another batch of pancakes so he didn't go to school hungry.  Another day he instructed me, very carefully, to make his sandwich with bananas and jelly in it.

And he has been sticking up for himself more lately.  Anytime I do something that pokes or pinches him accidently, I get a "ouch!  That hurts me, Mommy!"  But our favorite quote was when Daddy gave him a light flick for something he was doing and he said "OW!  That hurts Tyler!  Do we hurt Tyler? NO!"  Apparently he needs to quiz us on the rules too!

Okay, back to playing with the waterproof camera.

Tyler even happened to be wearing his "Dino Mite" shirt for the occasion!

Oh, and this girl.  I forgot to bring babyfood to dinner, and she was not pleased when I ran out of avacado to squish for her.  So she was rather testy the whole time we were in the museum.  And then when we got to the sand part, she suddenly was all smiles.  She didn't eat the sand, she just sat there and squished it and raked it around and smiled at me like nothing had ever been wrong.

So I sat and played with the settings on the new camera.  This one made me laugh.  I guess they were trying to imitate the low f-stop on a DSLR, where the background is blurry.  But instead, they just make the top and the bottom artificially blurry and call it "miniature".  Ha.  Nice try, point and shoot.

Overall, the quality is laughable in comparison to my regular camera, but it goes a lot of places my big, nice camera can't, so I'm glad we got it.

Well, I called this post wanderings because the places we went weren't connected, but apparently my comments are even less on topic today!  And now, I am off to enjoy the peace around here.  The kids are at school and Jasmine is down for a morning nap.  Tyler's costume is nearly done (I'm excited about this one!), so I'll go work on that.

Oh!  And I almost forgot.  My husband and his crazy purchase.  I refused to get on board with this idea, so his mom went in for half on this just so I would feel better.  But we are now the proud owners of a cotton candy machine.

I have to say it was much cheaper and more fun than I thought it would be.  Did you know that the cotton candy that Disneyland or state fairs charge $5 for costs about 5 cents to make?  It is about a tablespoon of the special sugar.  As a bonus, you can put in any hard candy and it will make cotton candy out of it.  So far our favorites have been Jolly Ranchers, but we also loved candy canes, Werther's, life savers, lemon heads, and atomic fireballs.  And in the last couple of weeks we have used it five times.  So maybe it wasn't such a bad purchase, just a crazy one.  (This picture was taken late at night the day it was delivered, since we couldn't wait to try it out.)  And while I don't care for regular cotton candy that much, the novelty candies thrown in make it fun.