Picture Post

The past several months have been interesting.  However, things are finally starting to slow down and I hope start to make more sense:)  The first major reason is because.....**drum roll please** Jeremy passed his state licensing exam! yay!!!! We are so super proud of him.  He has worked so hard the past several months studying and preparing for this very difficult exam.

However, now that his studying is over, we have our evenings and weekends back.  Where, now we can hang out, guilt free that he should be studying. 

Hopefully, with that big task completed and as I prepare for Nicole's Kindergarten year, I will be more conistent with this blog and update it a bit more.  But, until then...I will post some pictures from the past few weeks.

The girls thought they should give the birds a chance to live in a bird house...the put it right in front of the bird's nest.

Hannah was trying to "mow the grass" with her daddy.  Yes she is wearing a fancy dress.

Following her daddy

She gave up on the old plastic mower...now she's really helping daddy:)

Guess who....



The kids all fell down together.  I think both girls are "laying" on top of Nate hehehe.



Hannah girl!

My girls, Jessica and Elisa, after our "girls night" in Tampa last weekend.  We went to see Hillsong United in concert.  It was a lot of fun.

These two LOVE to play together:)

Nicole is putting lipstick on Hannah. So sweet.

Nathan man...what a cutie!

Hannah was being so sweet one night.  Just sitting in her chair, holding her baby. 

Nate is trying to roll.

5 Year old Handprint

I have been waiting more than 5 years for the moment we had on Wednesday.  I remember the first time I walked into our pediatrian's office when Nicole was a newborn and I was surrounded on every possible wall with handprints.  When a child turns 5, they are allowed to place their handprint on the wall of the office.  I remember thinking..."5?  5 years old...that is SO far away!"  And, now....we are here.  We have a 5 year old who finally got to put her handprint on the wall.

To be honest, I was way more excited than she was.  I literally had nightmares about two things happening - 1. That they would run out of room and my kids wouldn't get to print
2. That one day, I would walk in and the painted the walls white and erased over 15 years of memories. 

But...neither one happened:)

So, without further ado....Photos of Nicole's special moment.

This is the picture herself that Nicole chose.

Dr. Brown let Nicole have a purplish color...custom made (but it's a secret!)

Hannah was sad she couldn't put her hand on the wall:(  Two more years sweet girl.

E...Elephant

We are s.l.o.w.l.y. making our way through My Father's World this summer.  Hey...it's summer, right?

Well, over the past week or so, we have been learning around Elephants.  They key phrase is "I will remember what God has done for me".  However, to be honest, I have not made the girls memorize that or really much of anything lately.  We are gearing up though for a tough semester with lots of memorization...so, we need to start exercising our brains again. 

Anyway....we did have fun reading about elephants and doing some really fun activities.
Some of our favorite books were
Grandma Elephant's in Charge by Martin Jenkins
An Elephant Grows up by Anastasia Suen
and Elephants Can Paint Too! by Katya Arnold.

The last one was really interesting and created a morning of fun for us.  Elephants Can Paint Too! showed us about some Asian Elephants that are being taught to paint. Some just paint lines and dots...but some can even be taught to paint flowers!  So...inspired by the book...we decided to paint like elephants.  Although, instead of holding the brush with our trunk, we used our mouth (because we don't have a trunk, and there is no way our nose would work ;)



Can you hear Nicole giggling here?



They even dipped their paint brushes in the paint while holding it in their mouth. The girls really enjoyed this...they giggled almost the whole time.

 The last page of the book shows two elephants...one with his rear facing you with several paint streaks on his behind. the other with a paint brush in his hand.  It looks like they were being ornory and painting each other.  Well, that sort of happened to us.  Both girls were bent over to get more paint on their brush.  Nicole stood up, and painted Hannah's forehead as she stood.  Hannah was not happy, but Nicole and I giggled. 



My little elephant's masterpiece



My other little elephant's masterpiece.

We also made an elephant out of our hand prints.  I picked up Hand-Print Animal Art by Carolyn Carreiro at a garage sale a while ago.  In the back, it gave instructions on using our hands to paint an elephant.  Here are their works of art.

Nicole's hand print elephant with no help from me...just instructions

Hannah's hand print elephant...I had to help her a lot on this one.

We also made elephants masks from the template found here.



Hannah's elephant mask...she glued this herself.



Nicole's elephant mask..she cut and glued herself:)

We learned about the difference between African and Asian elephants from this website which also included other activities, poems and puzzles.  We even had to put together these two types of elephants and then label the correct one.

My Other Other little elephant.  He saw me taking pictures and said "Ma-Ma, Cheese" So, I snapped a picture of him. 

We used this as a time to have fun with a purpose.  The girls know the difference between African and Asian Elephants.  They insisted I call them "little elephant" while painting with their mouths and we practiced making noises like elephants. 

Sometimes, you disappoint

I know I have disappointed my children at various times in their lives.  They didn't get that extra cookie they wanted, or they didn't get to watch another TV show.  It doesn't bother me when I disapoint them that way.  That's a lesson for them in obedience or self control. 

However, this morning, I woke up to the sobbing, heart broken tears of my dear Hannah, and discovered I had greatly disapointed her. 

You see, for the past couple of days, she has been carrying around all kinds of stuffed animals and dolls, and calling them her "children".  She has an active imagination  and has spent hours caring for her children, feeding them, reading to them, teaching them song, and rocking them.  She is seriously adorable!

Yesterday when we quickly left for dinner and church, she asked me if she could bring a couple of her "children" along.  I allowed her to.  Well, she rode home from church with daddy and forgot to get her children out of the car. 


Hannah reading the Bible to her children, "and God made da whole ting"



Last night as we were tucking the girls in, she began to crying because her "children" were still in the car. At first, we playfully said, "Oh no...you can't leave your children in the car!  You may get arrested and go to jail"  Now, before you send me hate comments...we have joked abou that before...and we were smiling and laughing as we said it.  Well, Hannah was in no joking mood...this was serious to her!  So, immediately I gave her a huge hug and told her she wasn't going to jail and I would take care of her children.

Guess what....I forgot.  I didn't even think about it again!  This morning, a few minutes after six, I was awoken to the sobbings of a three year old.  When I finally figured out what was wrong, I told her that I was sorry...and I forgot to get her children for her.  Oh dear....wrong thing to say! She almost had ME crying.  I can't even call it crying, she was sobbing.  Big, heavy tears with shoulder quivering.  She was so sad that her children were in the car all night long.  Poor little thing. 

That, was one of the first times I felt like I really disappointed her. 

D: Dinosaur

It's taken us a few weeks to get through...but we finally made it through our D--Dinosaur study.  This was fun, when we put the time into it:)  (It's summer...cut me some slack;)

We learned that "Big and Small, God made them all". 

A few of our favorite projects were...

Tracing Dinosaurs.

I got a couple books from the library and the picked out Dinosaurs to trace.  This was their first time really tracing anything.  They didn't love it, but we are going to do it more and more.

We also made dinosaur eggs.  I bought a package of tiny dinosaurs, stuck them in a balloon and blew it up. Then we made paper mache glue (water and flour) and paper mached newspaper around the balloons.

 .  A few days later, we painted the eggs (Hannah did an excellent job...she covered every square inch!).


Nate even got in ont he painting....he loved finger painting, can you tell!

  

Finally, we cracked our eggs open and discovered our baby dinosaurs.


Listening for the baby dinosaur in the egg



 

The other cool thing was when Nicole made a dinosaur diorama.  This was her first ever diorama...but she really got into it.  She spent over an hour painting, coloring, and gluing (I helped her with cutting because we glued the papers onto cereal boxes for structure....which made the cutting hard).

She still shows people her creation.  She really enjoyed  that activity.

We also used a coloring/activity book we got at the dollar spot at Target and looked at Dinosaur flash cards we bought there as well. 

Random pictures

Since I'm a little behind in my blogging...I thought I'd just put some random pictures in this post to catch up the past couple of weeks.

In all honesty....we have not done that many fun things.  Things have been crazy, and fun was just not on the menu.  I am working hard hard hard to change that.  I think the kids have had a fun few days.  We went to the beach on Friday with a bunch of friends....and that was fun (except for clean up when we got home).  Nicole went to her little friend's birthday party today, and to the salon with my mom and I this afternoon (I have a rockin hair cut I really like:) Thanks mom!  That was fun:)

I have some fun activies planned for next week as well, and we are working to get back on the learning and Bible study train we fell off of for a while. 

Anyway...without further ado....random photos....

Goofin Around

Silly mommy

Ready for church. 

Hannah took this picture...didn't she do a great job!

Nate Dawg!

Where are Nicole and Hannah?

Oh, there they are (they were giggling like crazy)

Nicole could not wait to use the sparklers this year.

Nathan even got a chance to try:)

Hannah got a "big idea" the afternoon of the Fourth of July.  She decided to make a fruit salad for us.  She started with a mashed banana and pieces of bread torn into small bites.  She mixed these in a bowl, then spread them out in this pan. We baked it at 350 for 3 minutes (because she is 3 of course).  Then, she added strawberries, blueberries and several other toppings.  While watching the fireworks that night, Hannah exclaimed "OH, I got!  I got mommy!  My fwuit salad" (I got means I forgot).  She ran inside, got her fruit salad and brought it out to serve us.  The kids at a ton of her fruit salad...somehow, Jeremy and I got away with not eating any of it ;p