Shoot

We were ready for church 20 minutes early today! That's got to be some sort of first time record for the Swans. Ha! What did we do with our extra 10 minutes? A photo shoot of course. I couldn't resist, because everyone was looking so cute in their Sunday bests.

I sure do love this bunch, even if they are the worlds most irreverent group to sit with in Sacrament meeting. I think I got up and took someone or other to the foyer or the bathroom at least 7 times today. Whew. Good thing they're worth it.

I also had a little min-photo shoot with Little Miss who is going to be ONE on Tuesday.

Thanksgiving 2015 in Hooper!

 

Day 1: We drove up to Hooper first thing Wednesday morning to beat the snow. Aaron worked from Hooper, and Mom and I made pies, cranberry sauce, and Sweet Potato Souffle. In the evening we left the kids (except Rue) with a baby-sitter, and Mom and Kerry took us out to dinner at Roosters to celebrate Aaron's birthday. Kyle and Kels and Jackson and Bri met us there. So it was a swinging party. It was good to see everyone, and just have some time to chat.  

Gramma Tam taught Lincoln how to place jacks.

Day 2: Thanksgiving day. It snowed and Hooper looks beautiful dressed in white. I love Hooper any time. Waking up in the mornings to the sun shining through the tree branches and the birds singing. Well, I guess there aren't birds in the winter, but it's still beautiful to see the snow on the pine trees and across the corn field.

Adelia and Ollie and Aaron went out to play in the snow and built a really grumpy looking snowman. They had a great time. The kids played a little Wii while Aaron read his new book, and I helped make dinner.

Dinner was perfect, all the things I love. :) Besides us, and Mom and Kerry and Tanner, Tanya and her boys were there, and Jackson and Bri and Stratton came for pie. Good food and good people. 

Day 3: Everyone slept terribly during the night, and then Ruby refused to nap. We thought we'd just go home and spare everyone the crank fest. But the older kids really wanted to go sledding in the field. Kerry started up the four wheelers and hooked up the sleds and Gramma Tam and he pulled the kids around and around. I was glad we stayed. It was refreshing to be outside on a beautiful day, and the kids had a wonderful time.

Chopsticks!

We're still working through our Simple Machines book. Today's activity was to have some fun with a class one lever, chopsticks! We spent a good deal of time at first teaching the kids how to hold and use the chopsticks. Everyone but Ollie caught on eventually. And I just let him use his fingers to play the games, no big deal. After everyone could use their chopsticks, we timed each other to see how quickly we could put a pile of sugar cubes into a bowl. Then we had a rely race, the idea was to pick up a sugar cube from one bowl and run across the room and put it into another bowl and run back and tag the next person. It was a lot of fun. :)

Aaron's Birthday

Aaron turned 32 this year and we had a weekend full of celebration. On Saturday night we went out to dinner with Kelly and Esther. It's our tradition every year to go out to eat together, instead of having Kelly and Aaron swap birthday gifts. I like that tradition just fine, because that means Esther and I get a night out too! ;) This year we went to Hu Hot, a new Mongolian grill that just opened in Spanish Fork. It's all-you-can-eat noodley goodness, and I'm excited to go there again. And of course, it's always a fun night when we get to hang out with Kelly and Esther.

On Sunday, Kelly's actual birthday, we celebrated again. Chuck and Debbie, Ryan and Melissa, Kelly and Esther and their boys, and Lisa and Jared and their kids all came over for potato soup and cornbread and a delicious carrot cake made by Esther. It was a swinging party.

Aaron, Adelia, Kelly, Eli

Monday was Aaron's actual birthday. And I fretted on how to make it special, or not seem like a huge let-down after such an eventful weekend. I asked Aaron what he wanted, and he said that all he wanted was for Family Home Evening to be completely planned out before he got home so that he didn't have to run around trying to figure it out. I did my best. :) It wasn't the most sensational FHE there ever was, but it was planned and ready to go for Aaron when he came home. I also made brownies that turned out more like small rocks. :( I guess you can't win 'em all.

Happy Birthday Aaron! I hope you feel loved and appreciated, because you are!

Heaven Help Me

After Adelia, I decided that I never wanted to potty train another thing as long as I lived. Ollie has other ideas though. He's started taking his diaper off and running around the house naked. And I guess if I can't keep him in a diaper anyway, I might as well pull out the IKEA magic potty and give it a go. I. HATE. POTTY. TRAINING. But I'm trying to be very relaxed and casual about it this go around. We potty train in the mornings. When I dress him, I put him in underwear and I try to remember to have him go every 15 minutes or so. I don't set a timer. Because if I don't, then I'm not really potty training and it's not such a nightmare to think about it because I'm not committed or anything. Ha! So we work on it in the mornings. Then at nap time we put on a diaper, and put his underwear on over the diaper (because that's the only way he'll leave his diaper on. Out of sight out of mind or something). And after nap time we usually just stay with the diaper, because at that point in the day the E light on my patience tank is starting to glow and I know I still have to make it to bedtime, and potty training at this time of day will suck me dry. And ya, that's pretty much my strategy. I know. I'm in denial. But I can't bring myself to go into full-fledged potty-training mode. Judge my mothering skills if you must.

Ollie's taking it all in stride though. He does well. He will usually pee in the potty every time I have him sit on it. He usually poops in his diaper some time in the afternoon. Right now, this is an arrangement that I can handle. :) He's only had two accidents so far. Yay Ollie.

Funny story. Every time he sits on the potty, I've been having him take a deep breath to help him relax and "let the pee come out". It works great actually. But this one time he took his deep breath a little too quickly and swallowed a whole bunch of spit down the wrong tube. He coughed and spluttered for a minute, and when he could speak again he croaked, "Mom! The pee choked me!" Hahahaha! I laughed so hard. I love the way kids think. It's hilarious.

Also, he insists on wearing his rain boots and his boxer briefs together. It's adorable.

First Snow

We got a dusting of snow the other day. My kids used every ounce of it to make a snowman army in the back yard. They crack me up. They were out there for a solid hour or two; which, is the first time in history maybe, that they played outside for longer than it took us to find all the snow clothes and get them on everybody. Things are looking up in the world. ;)

Ruby and I, we stayed inside, nice and warm, and watched all the action from Adelia's bedroom window.

Nature Journaling at the Bean

This afternoon we went to the Bean Museum to do some nature journaling. Nature journaling is a new thing I'm trying out this year as a part of our writing program. I've really enjoyed it so far, although we don't do it weekly like it's recommended.

I'd invited our homeschool group to come with us if anyone wanted to, but didn't think we were going to get much of a turn out because I hadn't given much advance notice. It was kind of a spur of the moment idea. Anyways, I'd mentioned to Aaron that we were probably going to be the only ones going, which wasn't a big deal, the kids would still enjoy themselves, but that I would be a little lonely without any other moms to talk to. Well, that husband! He got off work early and completely surprised us by walking into the Bean about 10 minutes after we'd gotten there and spending the rest of the afternoon with us.  Then he took us out to dinner at Chick'fil'a afterwards. Talk about a spontaneous family date night. I sure do love that guy!

We also found that drawing by Aaron's nephew Zac. Zac drew a picture to advertise for a kids' art class that the Bean Museum is offering. So of course we took a picture with the display and sent it to him.

Poetry Tea Time

Welcome November. Today was crisp and chilly. It seems like the perfect day to test out Poetry Tea Time, a fun activity that's a part of the my new writing curriculum that I've been absolutely loving! (Are you stick of hearing me rave about it yet?) Poetry Tea Time is simple. You gather around the table with hot chocolate and a snack of your choice (today we did graham crackers), and you read poetry out loud together while you eat. That's it.

My kids LOVED it! And we all know I'm a poetry freak, so there's no need for me to tell you that I enjoyed myself too. :) At first I started out reading some of my favorite children's poetry, then after a bit, each of the kids took turns reading, or picking poems for me to read. We went wayyyyyyy over the 30 minutes I'd initially planned to spend. I thought the kids would be bored and complaining long before our 30 minutes was up. So I was surprised and happy that they swung the opposite direction. In fact, they can't wait to do it again.

And some other random side notes.......

Chicken are weird:

Ruby learned how to jump on the mini-trampoline:

And Adelia's gotten really into the wallpaper making business:

Enjoy your Tuesday!

Oh ya, and School

Oh ya, and we've been doing school too. :) The kids finished up their animal books, which was our writing project for September. Lincoln's book was on dogs, Ivan's was on several poisonous animals, and Adelia's was on bugs. All three of them did a great job. I was proud of their work.

Our writing project for October has been to make lists. The first list we made was a list of possible lists we wanted to make. It included things like:

Favorite Books
Place we want to visit
Star Wars Characters
Birds we've seen fly over our house
Words that start with the letter G
Planets
Nicknames for Ruby
Potential Halloween Costumes

We've also been talking about Simple Machines this month in Science. Our first project was one on friction. We made a ramp using a couple of my Norton Anthologies and a cookie sheet. Then we put different things (carpet square, dish towel, piece of cardboard, etc.) into the cookie sheet to make surfaces with varying amounts of friction. Then we rolled matchbox cars from one end to the other and timed them with my iphone stopwatch (probably not the most accurate, but suited our purpose) to see which surfaces allowed the cars to move more quickly down the ramp. The kids had fun, and played with the ramp long after our "official school time" was up. :)

Another day we learned about levers. Here are Lincoln and Ivan demonstrating Class One, Class Two, and Class Three levers.

Lincoln and Ivan had to do animal reports this year for their class at Harmony. Ivan chose crocodile. He wanted to make a life-sized one to show his class just how big these guys can get. It was quite the undertaking. On a roll of butcher paper Aaron help Ivan measure out the length. Then Aaron drew the body lightly in pencil and Ivan traced over in magic marker. Ivan wanted to color his croc, but since it was over 20 feet long, I told him he really didn't, and that he'd get sick of coloring it part way through and stop, and then he'd have a croc that was only a little colored and it would look silly. Ivan came up with the idea to paint it instead. So we did. And that didn't take very long at all, and the paint gave the croc a really cool texture that made it look more life-like. When the croc was done drying Ivan wrote 10 facts about crocodiles in boxes around the outside of the body. It turned out really cool.

Lincoln picked to do his report of frogs. I was mean and made him type his 10 facts into a report format with paragraphs and such, because I figured he's a third grader, he can be held to a little bit of a higher standard. He decided to make a frog habitat in a box and did that part all by himself. He also had some party blowers with velcro that he was going to let his class you to pick up little black pieces of paper on the table to demonstrate frog tongues, but somewhere over the course of the week we lost the party blowers and cannot find them anywhere. So he had to do without. Linc also chose to display his Dog Book writing project on the table with his frog report.

We spent one afternoon talking about basketball. I drew a basketball court on the whiteboard and we labeled all the positions and all the lines on the court and talked about what they mean. And I explained the rules a bit. There are just some things that little boys need to know. We'll call it PE. ;)

One night we had tickets to go on campus and see the BYU Chemistry Magic Show. It was pretty fun. The kids really enjoyed it. I didn't take many pictures because I had to leave half way through to go to my volleyball game. I missed the best parts, apparently, where they lit things on fire and made a bunch of loud bangs. Ivan drew a picture of it after in his journal. 

 Our homeschool group had a talent show this month. It was awesome. Except for the part where Ruby decided to puke all over everything and we had to leave early. :( But luckily my kids went near the beginning, so they got to do their talents before Ruby's puking episode. Adelia's talent was making up interesting characters to go in the stories she tell. She made a poster of her characters and told the audience all about them. It was sort of hilarious, and soooooo totally Adelia. Ivan told riddles, but I didn't get a picture of him because I was helping him and holding a wiggly Rue. Lincoln played three of his favorite piano pieces. They sounded way better on the baby grand than they do in our living-room. :)

And then there was art. My kids had been whining about our very obvious lack of Halloween decorations. And I saw a really cool blog post by my friend Arianne about painting with corn syrup and food coloring. I decided that was going to be our vehicle to decorate for Halloween. The kids loved it!

 
Our city has proposed a bond to build a new Rec Center just a block away from our house. I took the kids with me when I went to vote. They got to see the process and ask a million and one questions. We're just going to chalk it up to Political Science and move on.