Tuesday, December 17, 2013

'Tis the Season

For Christmas Lights!  My children are in love with looking at outside decorations!!  We decorated our roof, trees, bushes, and porch and when I saw "we" I mean Keith.  It looks great and the kids LOVE it!  They also love driving around and looking at all the other yard decorations.  For Clyde there are some awesome houses!

Tonight after the basketball games I drove the kids around our neighborhood.  I was impressed with so many houses!  One house probably had 100 wood cutouts of cartoons characters, Santa, and reindeer.  A few others were just covered in lights! One had their front room open and in the background tons of Christmas dolls, a spinning Christmas tree, and a Santa!

Ashton kept saying "Wow!  Look at that!" and "Ohhh man.."  Presley and Keegan were a little less impressed and just said "Christmas lights!"

It's neat to see the little things others do to make others happy.  Just putting up Christmas lights and decorations for others to see has brought a huge amount of happiness and excitement to my kids which makes my heart happy.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Advent

This year we decided to attempt doing Advent with the kiddos.  What is Advent?  I am still learning but it appears to be a daily bible study that takes place Dec 1-25 and takes you through the Bible and God's story.

We have been using a free version I was able to download from Austin Stone Community Church.  It has a reading plan along with little pictures that relate to the story that the kiddos can color.  You can get it here!

Another great thing about this Advent study is it provides not only the readings in the Bible but also gives page numbers for the same story in The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones.  It's a great children's Bible!  We bought these for our kids this year for Christmas. When we found out the Advent we downloaded used it we let them open a Christmas gift early.

So far the kids have enjoyed reading their Bibles...even though we end up having to paraphrase the stories because their attention span is so short.  They are excited to get their Bible every night, look at the pictures, and find out what picture they get to color that night.  Here are a few examples of what they get to color and of course it goes right on the fridge.


Wednesday, December 4, 2013

2 years and 10 months of ..... craziness

So today...I was vacuuming out the van (which should be done on a daily basis but really happens every other month or three) and the kids were playing in the driveway.  I hop out of the van and make sure all were accounted for.  There's Presley, Keegan is over there and ..Ashton...Ashton?   I walk around to the front of the van and find Ashton...butt naked.  Why in the world are his pants and undies off?? Then he starts waving his undies around over the grass and poop starts to fly out.  Yea he is still hit and miss with the pooping in the potty thing.  At least he is a go getter and took care of it himself right?  Ugh...glad no one was around to see this.  Gotta love boys.

Driving home from our playdate and Walmart Presley zonks out pretty quick.  Ashton is crying/whining "hold me mommy...hold me"  with his eyes close until he finally falls asleep 5 minutes away from home.  Keegan is playing with his little plush cookie monster.  "Here is a chip Cookie Monster...its spicy.  Ohh Cookie Monster I told you so!  It's spicy!  It's ok {gives Cookie Monster hug}.  No hitting Cookie Monster!!!  BAD BOY!  You go to time out!  Not hit!"  And he continues to play and talk to Cookie Monster.  I think it is the cutest thing when Keegan pretend plays with his toys...pretty sure I could watch it all day.

My children somehow find their DVDs and get them out and play with them...frisbee, throwing, sliding, ect.  I have told them until I blue in the face "YOU ARE RUINING YOUR CARTOONS!" We don't have cable so we rely on DVDs and Netflix. Well today we were going to watch Mickey, but once I grabbed the DVD from the mantle ABOVE the fireplace I noticed it was split in half....pretty sure it wasn't like that when I put it up there.  REALLY?!? Ugh these kids.  We settle for Dora.  I was cleaning the kitchen when the kids started to say "Dora is freezing"  Must be a Dora in the winter right? Wrong!!!!  Dora now skips and pauses at the end.  I looked at them and said "Oh no!  What are we going to do?"  Presley looked at me and threw her hands in the air with a shocked face.  She then got a real sad look on her face and fell to the ground in a little ball.  A few seconds later she jumped up laughing.  Oh the actress she is.



Keegan


Ashton
 

Presley