Easter

I was reflecting this year on why I am really not into the Easter bunny.  I actually have wonderful memories of hunting for eggs as a kid.  My parents were really smart about it- everybody came downstairs to find their basket and empty carton in a different room, and you had to search that room until you filled up your carton again.  That way the eggs could be hidden on your level (easy or hard), and no one lost any eggs (in theory).  So why didn't I want to do that with my kids?

I mean, it has quite a bit to do with how much the silly stuff distracts from the real meaning of the holiday, but I'm not nearly as against Santa Claus.  I think Santa and all of the presents still has a good spirit to it though- we focus on thinking of others and giving to others.  But why should I spend Easter morning, after the kids have had between one and four egg hunts in the last week, doing yet another round of searching for candy?  My kids do not need any more candy- we still have Christmas candy, for crying out loud!

Anyway, the egg hunt with family the day before is always great.  I don't mind egg hunts as social activities on days other than Sunday.

Christopher grew up with a trampoline, and he would really love one for our family, but our kids are just going to have to enjoy them at their cousins' houses.  Because when I look at this picture, I just remember the statistic that the chance of an accident on a trampoline goes up by 75% once two or more people are jumping at the same time.

Moms are so mean sometimes.

Daddy was more than happy to get up there with them.  But once the rest of the cousins had run off, he lay down for a nap.  Christopher has been putting a lot of hours in renovating our newest townhouse lately, so he was looking to relax.

And, one by one, our kids wanted to snuggle with him.

Did I mention Kaitlyn lost her second tooth?  Those are BIG events to her.  She wouldn't stop talking about how wiggly it was for weeks, and went through multiple drafts on her tooth fairy note.

I like this cutie :).

My sister-in-law brought the parachute again to keep the kids occupied while the adults spread the loot out on the lawn.  I just love how intense Tyler gets!

There were so many eggs (Grandma always goes overboard!) that they ended up just sprinkling everything across the grass.  "I felt like I was feeding chickens!"

Jasmine, as usual, was absolutely thrilled about it all.

As we were dozing off that night, I was rationalizing what we would say to the kids if they noticed the Easter bunny hadn't come to our house.  Last year tried to go without, and told them he would come while we were at church.  This year I figured we could tell them that he knew our eggs weren't dyed yet, or that he knew we had already hunted for eggs.  Of course, Christopher has always talked about the year that the Easter bunny brought a Nintendo.  His mom found a good deal and wanted to give it to the family, but didn't want it to just be a random thing that appeared one day.

So when we came downstairs that morning, I found a surprise at the bottom of the stairs, with a note from the Easter bunny that we should use it to play some Easter songs.

I can't tell you how happy this made me.  Our old digital piano broke a month ago, and it has been a long month without it.  I hadn't played much for years, but Kaitlyn taking lessons has kinda brought me back into playing too.  And then one day, for no reason at all, our piano made a hissing, staticy sound when we turned it on.  And when we pressed a key, it made an angry, hissing, staticy sound.  When we called up a repair guy, he told us that basically most of the digital pianos out there are meant to last about 5-10 years.  (Seriously?)  So our 8 year old piano was just dead.

We do like having a digital one, though.  It is always in tune, and it has a volume button.  This one even came with headphones.  So we realized that we either needed to commit to another thousand dollars every decade or so, or spend a bit more and get one meant to last a lot longer.  We've spent a lot of time debating that over the last month, and frankly procrastinating dropping all the money on something that should have still be working in my mind.  Grr.

Anyway, this thing has been a world of difference so far.  Christopher keeps mentioning that he isn't a piano person, and didn't expect to be impressed, but can't believe how awesome this one is.  Kaitlyn and I have been playing constantly all week!  It really is wonderful therapy for me, too.

Unfortunately, we only got the piano two days before her piano recital.  All of the rest of her practicing for this one has been on our awesome neighbor's piano or during her lesson itself.  But I think she still did a great job!

You can see the video of it here.  The piano store she performed at is running a contest, and whoever gets the most views on their video wins a free piano.  I can't imagine that happening, but she liked dressing in costume for her song to make it more fun!

Back to Easter morning, the one tradition I do love is Easter dresses.  I want it to feel even more special than the average week at church- and wow, our choir made it amazing this year.  Anyway, these were actually really simple to put together.  Kaitlyn and I liked this knit fabic at the store, and so I just whipped up the pair of dresses and happily found there was enough for a skirt for me, too.

I love how much Kaitlyn enjoys matching her sister.  I was worried that with a four year gap, she might not be interested in her baby sister, and that might happen someday.  But for now, both of the older kids practically follow her around to play with her.

Let's see, what else have we been up to?  Kaitlyn has been student of the week this week.  She has been over the moon about that.  She told me it took a lot of work to be chosen (since you have to be quiet and attentive!) but she was so excited she could hardly contain herself.  She got to make a poster about herself to hang on the door all week, bring in a "sharing item" each day to tell the class about, and today she got to bring in her favorite book for the class to read together.  I think her favorite day was bringing in Jasmine for her "sharing item", though her adored stuffed animal Muffin might have been a close second.

Oh, and I made this coat closet this week!

Please pay no attention to the laundry all over the background.  I'm not entirely finished yet- it needs a back, but that wouldn't fit in my Pilot with kids in tow.  But this is a huge improvement anyway.  We used to have a couple of coat racks on the wall, but the hooks were too close together for backpacks.  Once we had two backpacks up there, along with winter coats and my purse and everything else, the kids gave up and started just dropping their backpack on the floor, since it would just slide there anyway.  Not how I want the entrance from the garage to be.  These are basically skinny, open lockers, and I do lose some space in my laundry room making it, but now they can hang everything up!  And now my purse is up high on top, out of the reach of my toddler!  (She adores taking out all of my credit cards and money.) I had fun breaking out my old wood-burning tool to write their names on the front.  I might put it up on casters soon, so that I can wheel it out of the way to do laundry, but overall, I'm just happy everything is off the floor.

And now, it looks like I need to go do some laundry . . .

Spring break school

The last couple of weeks have been a bit different around here.  I got off to a rocky start for April.  It was, luckily enough, the day our insurance became effective.  Christopher is always getting after me (rightfully so) to watch out for my sewing needles.  Jasmine loves to wreak havoc on my sewing area while I sew, and one of her favorites is my pin cushion- she pulls them out one by one and sprinkles them like manna in the carpet.  No matter how much I try, I never seem to find them all.  I actually spent about a half an hour or so vacuuming and picking up that area one night, and still, the very next morning, I managed to find one more needle.  With my foot.  And when I went to pick that one up, I only found half of it.

But when I went to get my tweezers and pull it out, I couldn't even see anything.  I couldn't feel much, so I tried to go into denial about it (maybe it was already a half of a needle!), but a few hours later, I had a doctor pull this out of my foot.

I think this confirms my lifelong fear of needles.  It took me a week to walk straight, after having the doctor dig around and stitch me back up after finding it, but thankfully it has healed well now.

Anyway, once I got that out of the way, I had to get things ready for spring break.  I figured I would use that week as a test.  We hadn't been able to figure out what to do for Tyler's summer school this year.  Most kids regress quite a bit over vacations, but with Tyler, it is a bit more pronounced.  We've really enjoyed summer school at Clear Horizons this year, but we just weren't sure it was in the budget this year.  And even if we sent him, it would only last half the summer.  While I don't feel capable of teaching Tyler at home year-round, I need to get a lot better at teaching him while he is home.

So for spring break, we had a week of homeschool at our cabin.  I figured that we would give it a trial run before it was too late to sign him up elsewhere if it went poorly.  And amazingly, it went really well.  Not perfectly, but I like knowing that I'm not their sole teacher.  I can be the supplement, and that makes me feel a lot better about my shortcomings.

Thankfully, I had a lot of great resources.  Tyler and Kaitlyn's teachers were a great help in giving me a head start.  And my sister-in-law gave me an awesome book years ago with hundreds of "center" activities we used to start our day out.  That was my favorite part.  We got a book from the library for each activity, and we had a lot of fun.

One day, we read a book detailing how to carefully pick a rock from the mountain to be your pet rock, and the kids loved going on a walk to find their perfect rock.

As a side note, I think we are the only people I know who went to somewhere colder for spring break.  There wasn't a lot of snow kicking around, but some lingered in the more shaded spots.

Jasmine didn't know exactly what we were up to, but she loved going for walks.  Oh, and wearing gloves.  She is obsessed with "goves" right now, and when given her choice, likes to take off all of other clothing and just wear a diaper and gloves around the house.

The book instructed them to wash it in a clear mountain stream, but Jasmine figured throwing them in was much more fun.

Another center morning was all about animals, one was about making bird nests with chocolate and Chinese noodles, and one day we gathered twigs and leaves to make a tree out of.  Lots of fun!

One reason that I am glad that I am doing this is that I get a clearer picture of where my kids are at, academically.  Kaitlyn is actually doing really, really well.  She can read chapter books now, and when I had her try a test online it said she had a Third Grade reading level.  She also took to two-digit plus two-digit addition like a fish to water.  We talked about why you "carry the one" and what that means, and off she went.  She needs a lot more practice, but she can do it.

Tyler, obviously, is a different story, but that's okay.  He is pretty good at adding and subtracting small numbers now, and he did pretty good at coins and their values.  I was really impressed with his attention span.  They usually do 15 minute rotations at school, but he handled 45 minute math sessions just fine.  His main struggle is reading.  It is just so hard for his brain to figure out what those words say!  He actually spends a lot of our reading time trying to weasel out of reading.  He'll interrupt to tell me he wants to hug me, he'll ask me to read it, or sometimes he will just make random guesses based on the picture.  Anything to get out of it.  Too bad, kiddo.

My wild card was Jasmine.  I was worried that she would be a disruption to the whole thing, but she actually did okay.  She was a part of center time, and we would involve her however we could on other things.  Or just give her the Kindle and let her play by herself.

Anyway, I'm mostly writing this down because I always like to go back and see where my kids are at.  The short story is that homeschool is a success, and is probably how we are going to spend our summer!

And when we got back to the valley after a week by ourselves, the weather down here was just lovely.

Tyler and Jasmine both wanted to play on the one swing, so I figured they could just share!  Tyler was SO happy to hug his favorite little girl.

Okay, I probably should have brushed her hair.  But I just love the happy little grin!

Oh, and I have to include a couple of forgotten pictures up here.  A few weeks ago, our neighbor had a kids Zumba class in her backyard.  And my kids had so much fun!  Jasmine loves dancing, and I was impressed at how much Tyler got into trying it out.

And lastly, a picture taken quickly before she took off the cute hat.

Frozen party!

Back in January, my mom was asking what she could get the kids for their birthdays.  And I told her that I didn't really know for Kaitlyn as much- but I already knew my "Let it Go" obsessed toddler would really love the movie for her birthday.  And so my awesome mom put it on pre-order for her.

When their cousins heard that we were getting it, they all said that they wanted to see it to.  And "you should come over and see it at our house!"  turned into "we'll make a movie premiere party out of it!"  turned into "maybe we'll just call this Jasmine's birthday party, despite being two weeks after the fact".  Since another cousin has a birthday in a few days, we made it a joint effort.

Now, normally I am the type of person that rolls my eyes at "Pinterest parties".  Seriously, some moms spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars, and the practical stick-in-the-mud part of me says "bah, humbug, what a waste".  But I found a printable pack that was really cute, and lots of cute ideas online, and figured I might as well try some of them out.

And it was such a huge hit!  I couldn't believe how much the kids loved the little touches, like the "snowball" cake pops or the "ice cube" Jell-O jigglers.  Apparently the lady with "melted Olaf the snowman" labels for her water bottles wasn't that crazy after all.

This was one of my favorites.  I took the cute cupcake toppers and put "Happy Birthday Jasmine and Mollie!" on the other side with pictures of them.  They aren't all that professional looking, scotch taped to a toothpick, but everybody thought they were pretty cool.

Including our birthday girl, who still hasn't gotten the hang of blowing out candles yet.

Lucky for her, there were a lot of kids to help her out.

Kaitlyn helped me cut up a couple of the dollar store tablecloths to make the backdrop and doorway "icicles".  The funny thing is, I didn't even call it that- the kids named our basement "the icicle room" and loved going up and down the stairs through the fringe.

Kaitlyn cut out the little circles for the banner, and Tyler strung them together along with the snowflake that Kaitlyn and I made.  That is another reason it was worth it to have some fun with this party- it was a fun thing for us to do together.  The kids love helping, and if we learn pattern and cutting and sewing skills along the way, all the better.  We had pizza, veggies and cupcakes upstairs, but down here I had a stash of snacks that they could fill their little baggies with to munch on while they ate.

Tyler loved that bag.  He was so proud that "there are two Olafs! And it says Tyler!" once he got his name on an Olaf bag to match his Olaf shirt.  And then he filled that thing with a ton of blue marshmallows, chocolate candies, and blue cookies.

Christopher was worried the kids would all just go crazy and no one would be able to heard the movie, but I gotta tell you it was a very attentive audience down there.

Jasmine does love her Frozen!

Elsa's dress

I finished this a week or so ago, but I waited until I got snow pictures to post them up here.  Kaitlyn finally got her Elsa dress!

It has been a fun ride getting here.  First I saw a pattern that some people altered, but our Jo-Anns were out.  Then I saw someone online that needed pattern testers.  And my mom found the pattern and sent it to me about the time the blogger said she would love to have me as a pattern tester.  From no patterns to two in one day.  And then one and then a second friend wanted to sew along with me and make dresses for their daughters.  And then the blogger got delayed getting the pattern to me, so after all that I ended up just drafting my own pattern after all.

Whew.

I learned a few things making this dress.  Well, I always do.  This time, I learned about sequin fabric.  I had two options I took up to the cut counter that day- one was a stretchy, sort of sparkly thing, and the other was this gorgeous sequin fabric.  I was going to go with the more practical one, but the guy there talked me into the sequins.  They were just to awesome to pass up!  And when you are making things for little girls, you can never have too much sparkle.

What I learned is that in order to sew sequin fabric, you have to cut all of the sequins off of the seam allowance, one by one.  Arg.  It was worth it in the end, but only for very special occasions.

My favorite part of the dress is the cape.  I made a template out of wrapping paper with snowflakes taped on, laid the sheer fabric on top, and Kaitlyn and I traced it out with fabric paint.

Kaitlyn loved having the ownership that she helped make her costume, which is absolutely worth any imperfections in her painting skills.

As a total bonus, my mom sent me a pack of 50 or so snowflake buttons about three years ago.  Jackpot!  I love how they pop against the blue fabric to hold up the cape.

The hilarious part is that I bought my fabric when it was just going to be two dresses- but I didn't have a pattern yet.  So I guessed how much I would need.  Once I cut out mine and part of hers, I saw that we had plenty for the second friend to join us two.  And now that we have about 2.75 of the 3 dresses done, it turns out we have enough to make one more dress.  So I did something I didn't think I would do- I sold it on Etsy!  I'm going to start working on that dress tomorrow, and then ship it out.  I normally would never try to sell things I sew, because I just can't compete with labor prices in China.  But the Elsa costume is sold out across the country at this point.  Disney stores here say it will be 3-6 weeks.  So there is a demand for costumes on Etsy at the moment.

I don't think I will make many more (you would think 4 would be enough), because honestly the reason I sew is right there.  I love seeing their happy little faces light up as they dance around in them.  Kaitlyn has been thrilled to wear hers as often as she can, and that makes it all worth it.

In fact, one day Jasmine desperately wanted the expensive Anna doll at Target, so I went home and made an Anna dress for a doll kicking around the house.  It was just the scraps from Jasmine's costume, which means it was free and matches her perfectly.  Making costumes for the entire family AND the dolly is probably a sign I need to back away from the sewing machine, but that just isn't going to happen any time soon.  I'm an addict at this point.

Forgotten pictures

It turns out that I have a lot of pictures that never made it on here.  Huh.  I was cleaning off my SD cards today, and had to check the blog to notice that a lot of things never ended up here.

This one is a funny story.  Christopher told me that he had a craving for a corn dog, and since we had hot dogs and corn meal I told him I would try making them.  And he looked at me like I was insane.  "You don't make corn dogs.  You BUY them."  Well, now it was a challenge.

Which I failed.

The people on Pinterest made it look so easy!  My batter just ran away from the hot dog as soon as it hit the oil, and it just made a crispy, greasy mess.

We now have a box of store-bought corn dogs in our freezer.

We've been heading to the cabin when we can, but that hasn't been terribly often.  I'm just glad we have the Argo this year.  This winter has been relatively mild, but even in nice weather, it was a chore to shuttle our family of 5 up to the cabin on snowmobiles.  Now we just pile from the car into the Argo, with all of our gear on the roof.  No problemo.

The melting and freezing of snow is actually fun to see sometimes.  Our driveway was covered in this- diagonal ice shards reaching outward.  Pretty cool.

This last weekend was still very snowy . . . in some areas.  The roads were still too slushy to drive on.  Half of our lawn was grass, and the other half was three feet deep.  Christopher took his shirt off and leaned back in his lawn chair to enjoy the sun while the kids played in the snow, but I'll spare you all that picture.

I think by the time we get to go up again, we'll be able to drive there.

Let's see, more pictures. . .

Ohh, and this was my favorite steal!  I have always wanted a cool leather jacket to ride on the motorcycle with, but never wanted to spend the money.  And I scored this one at the thrift store for $3!  Made my week.

For Christmas, my brother got our kids these butterfly and dinosaur cutouts for their new rooms.  So we put them in old T-shirts and let them paint them to their heart's content (since we only gave them the room colors, we figured it couldn't be too bad.)  Jasmine LOVED smooshing the paint around for as long as we would let her.

I just love the paint on her happy little toes.

Oh, and speaking of that funny girl, we keep catching her asleep in the most random places.  It was worse when she first moved into her room, since she didn't like staying in her toddler bed for whatever reason.  Every day she would pick a new spot on the carpet to nap on.

One morning Kaitlyn woke up to find her sister asleep under her bed.

Another day, she fell asleep on the carpet less than five minutes before the babysitter arrived for the evening.

One day I found her in her bed, but she dozed off in the process of spreading the wipes all over her room.  I took this picture, and then filled up an entire gallon ziploc with her efforts.

And this picture takes the cake.  One day she wandered off from where Daddy was playing with the kids in the basement.  He went to check on her and found this.  Apparently she climbed the stools to get to the Oreos, but she can't get down from the stools by herself so . . . she dozed off in her spot.  I am so amazed she didn't fall.

For Valentines' day this year, Kaitlyn needed to make a box for homework.  She had an old shoebox her princess shoes came in, so she cut a hole in the top and wanted to call it good.  The practical part of me said that was all we needed to do!  But then I remembered Crazy hair day.  She was excited to just frizz her hair into a little curly afro and call it good, and when I took her to school she saw all the kids who went WAY over the top.  One girl even turned her hair into a flower pot, complete with sprayed colors and everything.

That, and her teacher's note said that she hoped the Valentines box would be a project families could work on together.  "You could make it out of fabric, buttons, paper, paint . . .", her list went on for nearly a paragraph.

So Kaitlyn and I made a castle out of an Amazon box and some felt.  Not bad.  She even let me braid her hair into a heart.

And last but not least, I cleared off the iPhone pictures.

Everyone was so impressed at our ward dance that Christopher's tie matched my dress.  Since he had it since high school, it was just a coincidence!

And this picture is from the Blue and Gold dinner.  Tyler is still loving scouts!  It is a good challenge for him to keep up with the boys his age.  And he has awesome leaders, so I know he is in good hands.

Whew!  I think I got everything cleared out!