Patches and Monster Mash

With going to school three times a week, Tamlin has been tumbling / playing more on the floor which has resulted in wearing out the knees of several jeans.  He's still young and growing and I have Jude following behind... so I decided to patch the worst pairs.


Four pairs of 5T jeans got their knees replaced with corduroy or jean patches.  (The scraps came from old pants in the spare fabric bin of ours.  Yeah, up-cycle!

I used inspiration from several fellow mom blogs, hence the stripes and the nod to the British flag.

I'm glad to have these still wearable but man-oh-man, sewing in those little legs and stitching one inch at a time is really a pain.


Tamlin seemed to like them and agreed to model a couple of pairs...

These are his "Monster Mash" dance poses.  He's been doing the Monster Mash on the Just Dance wii game and has been becoming quite good at dancing like a zombie. 

Easter Egg Hunt Chaos

 We attempted an egg hunt at a local park...a huge, chaotic, egg hunt... with a gazillion kids (I swear!)  Ok, when I decided to go, I didn't think it would be quite as many people since it was in one of the nearby cities that wasn't too large. 
The park had large areas of the field corded off and littered with little plastic eggs. At least they had the kiddos separated by age into different corals.  Tamlin was with the 5-6 year olds and Jude with 3-4s.  Oddly, the older kids were scheduled for their run 30 minutes before the littles.  Tam was excited to give it a go.  Jude was a fussernut... he was upset to wait, upset to stand, upset when his bag got twisted, upset with the mud, upset with waiting...did I mention he was a nugget-head?

 The whistle blew and the kids were off...Chaos!

 I swear the eggs were snatched up within 5 minutes... 5 minutes!

 Tamlin picked up 3 eggs.  Really, I was proud he at least got that many given how many kids were in the area competing for these things.  The eggs had coins and tickets for candy and prizes.  We attempted to wait for Jude's turn...but he was having none of that.  He really doesn't like being in places with lots of people (I think its because he is only looking at kneecaps!). 
Given the choice, Jude opted to get no eggs and to go play instead.  I wasn't going to put up with whiny Jude for the slim chance of him grabbing some cheesy eggs...so we left the hunt to check out the treats and crafts.

 Crafts went over much better for both boys.  They made pom-pom chicks, pom-pom bunnies, and bunny masks.  Jude really enjoys crafts so this was great.  Tamlin likes crafts, but was way more interested looking at all the live snakes and turtles in tanks around the room.

 Tamlin insisted on a photo!  Both boys ended the time playing on the playground with the other gazillion kids still here after the hunt.

On the way back home, look who we found outside the candy store in our town!

It was a sweet way to end the day.  I don't know if I would do a big egg hunt like that again...next time I'll stick to the local church gigs.

Happy Easter!

The universe laughs

We have finally paid off our 2008 car...
Brian finally got his temp license...

And then the universe laughed at us...

The dreaded check engine light came on.

Luckily Autozone will hook up the device and decipher the code for you for free.  We seem to have a small leak somewhere in the emission line.  Yes, the gas cap is tightly screwed on, but we are going to try replacing that first before off to the mechanics.

We have to get this straighten out prior to our emission test which is needed before I can get my new ohio plates for the car and before Brian can take the driving test.

Sigh.
Thank you, universe.
The second biggest bummer (first being that we have to shell out cash for this) was that it happened on Saturday and I missed two (TWO!) mom sales because of it.
Sigh.

Fighting winter

Argh!  It is the winter that wouldn't end!  Our neighbors had all said the winters were mild here, with hardly any snow.  Liars!  We had oodles of snow and still had more snow all the way into the first week of April...with threats of snow later this week!

At least lately, we have been sneaking walks to the beach between the snowflake storms on days when the sun is shining.


Our latest walk reveled that the lake is slowly melting and the beach is visable again. 

The kids had fun running around and throwing rocks into the shallow water.  We even found our first beach scores of 2014... a few shells, cool rocks, beach glass, and rounded brick.

Can't wait for spring to get here!

Memory Monday - Box

I remember the fun of giant boxes.  On he rare occasions when we got a huge box at home, it was hours of good times.  I recall that we often made houses out of really big boxes, complete with cut out door and windows.  I do remember being given markers to help decorate our houses too.  I recall one time actually having a real cardboard house for awhile.  I also recall that that particular house stayed outside on the patio and then the spiders discovered it.  I was NOT a fan of spiders.

Inside, slightly smaller big boxes were made into pretend cars or boats or other vehicles for my sister and me or for our dolls.

Now I tend to do quite a bit of ordering off the internet so that I can buy our staples in bulk.  This results in many boxes coming to our door throughout the year (frequency is definitely higher around the Christmas holiday).  The latest box housed a huge supply of paper tolls = huge box.

The boys loved it.

It became a house...and then a trap... and then a car when flipped upright.
When upside down, I cut out the ends and it became a tunnel for cars, tractors, teddy bears, and little boys.
Markers were passed out so that it could be decorated...with lots of swirls, stripes, doodles, and car drawings.
It then was leaped upon...which led to it becoming slightly collapsed...

So it became a ramp for cars!

They were so entertained with this cheap free toy for several evenings before it got officially broken down for the recycle bin.  Yeah, cardboard boxes!

Latest artwork

I finally figured out how to scan my boys' artwork so that I could include it on the blog

and in the books.

 

Jude's rocket from their space unit.  He can point out and name all the letters.  

He can also recognize his name when it is written.  Jude can sing the alphabet song but the middle bit is garbled: "l m n m n el el el o p."

 M is for music.  Jude's handiwork here from their music unit.  He still sometimes calls his "M" as an "N".  They are now on the letter S for spring.

Tamlin's drawing of himself... with spiky hair...and a belly button.  

Tamlin's drawing of Brian... complete with smile... shoes... and black hat.  Tam has started to recognize many of his sight words.  However, he still flips his "b" and "d".  He had to practice writing the letter d before writing "Dad".