We Love the Coach

We have talked recently about the possibility of adding children to our family, possibly through adoption.  Tim told me the other day that when he thought about it he had visions of the movie Cheaper by the Dozen where the dad had to take kids to practices with him.  So to help him feel more comfortable with that vision, I thought we'd do something from the movie.  In the movie the kids all hold up letters that spell out "We love the coach."  Since we don't have a kid for each letter we had to condense the number of signs, but here is what we made:




When we showed up to Tim's tennis match everyone thought the kids were so cute.


And Tim got a big kick out of it!

Animal Rides

I mentioned yesterday that Jon and Becca play so well together.  Here is one thing they have been doing a lot lately.  Giving their stuffed animals rides around the house.

Flower sandwiches

I feel a lot like I'm entering a new phase of child raising.  I think back to when we just had baby Michael.  I remember feeling like it was a lot of work to care for a baby 24 hours a day, but I didn't feel as busy as when I had a full time job.  There were plenty of times when he napped or was happily playing that I could attend to the house or have some time to read, scrapbook, or whatever.  In fact, I often enjoyed having other kids over when I did child care because it gave me some more work and purpose to my days.

Then along came Jon and being a stay at home mom felt like a full time job for me.  I would feed Jon, tend to Michael, change Jon, help Michael, entertain Jon, repeat.  There were brief times when I could check e-mail or whatever, but I found that to do chores around the house I started including one of my kids to give them the attention they needed.

Then came Becca when Jon was still so young.  By this point someone wanted attention all the time.  Even to check e-mail I often had Becca in my arms or Jon on my lap now.  I found myself working hard to schedule everyone's day so that nap and rest time for all three would overlap, so I could have a small break in the afternoon.

Now, Michael is at school full time.  Jon goes three afternoons a week.  When Jon is home, he and Becca play together so well that I often find myself folding laundry alone or sitting on the couch with nothing to do.  It is so fun to see them growing up, but sometimes I just need to pick one up and force a bit of cuddle time.  :)

So with my free thinking time, I decided to come up with some fun activities for Jon and Becca to do.  There are so many things that I did with Michael at this age, but when I had super young Jon and Becca the days were mostly just too busy.  First up is a fun lunch.  We decided on sandwiches cut in the shape of flowers with carrot stems and lettuce leaves.  Then we used grapes to make rain drops (since it was a rainy day outside that day).  Jon and Becca had a blast with it.

Jam Session

We just finished a weekend where I was sick.  Ugg.  No fun for me, but my kids loved the fact that they got to watch a little extra TV.  :)

Last night, Tim had to go out for a bit, so I supervised from the couch and let the kids put on a David Crowder Band DVD.  As they always do, the kids had a dance and jam party with it.  See Jon playing guitar with the hockey stick!!  Becca was watching him and all of the sudden I saw a light go on in her eyes and she ran to the shelf and took a guitar puzzle piece out to play.


Here is a close up:

Legos

As you can probably tell from the previous post, we now officially have a lot of legos in the house.  The other day I found that even Becca thinks she is old enough to graduate to these big kid legos.


I have been looking all over for some way to organize the legos and I'm loving what I found.  These tray storage unites are the perfect size to hold them all.  Each set (or 2) goes in each drawer.  I have heard from a lot of people that their kids like to sort legos by color or size, but Michael is still very much into creating with instructions and so he likes each package kept separate.  The kids just pull out a drawer, play with it on the floor or table, and then pick them up and return it.  We have also identified one drawer to be the "extra pieces" drawer.  Now, Michael is on a mission to create each one so that I can take a picture of it and lable the drawer.

7 year old party

Last week we had Michael's birthday party for his school friends.  He wanted a soccer party so we chose to have the party right after school and at the school since there was a soccer field there.  Hard part: I had to get everything there and ready.  Easy part: it was all outside, the kids had a blast on the soccer field and playground, and everyone from his class could come since it was right at school at the end of a day.

So what do you do with 14 6-7 year old boys?  We started with some soccer ball relays and an obstacle course.  Then we had a ring toss game where they could ring a water bottle.  This was followed by cake and popsicles.  You can't tell from the picture, but this was a soccer field cake.  I picked two colors of candles to make the teams and the boys all thought it was funny that the teams were 3 on 4.


Then of course there were presents, highly concentrated around legos.


And then we set up a game of soccer.  I was so impressed at how they all played so well and stuck with it without half of them getting sick of it and wanting to stop.


Michael had a blast as did the rest of the family.  :)

The Piggy Game

Jon and Becca have been entertaining themselves a lot with "The Piggy Game."  They have found two pigs from our Little Tikes farm - one is the mommy (Jon plays this one) and one is the Baby (Becca's pig).  It is so cute to see them come up with creative play with these pigs.  Problem being, they will often have a pig call for Mommy and when I come they laugh and say it was the pig calling for the pig mom.  And the other day, Becca kept crying and I would turn to see what was wrong and it was just her making her piggie cry.

I think in this picture the piggies are riding in a crayon boat.