If you ever wondered if preschool boys had any interest in dinosaurs, let me emphatically assure they do!  For the last 2 weeks we have been learning about dinosaurs in our homeschool preschool.  We talked about meat eaters and plant eaters, we sorted by size, we matched pictures to shadows, we made play doh fossils, and we roared…A LOT!  We played dino games, made dino puppets and even learned to how to draw dinosaurs!

He drew pictures for dad and all the grandparents and then we mailed out his one of a kind artwork.

We also learned that they came from eggs.  And what better way to learn this, than by making dinosaur eggs!  I found a recipe online for making a dough out of old coffee grounds and flour

then you mix it into a dough and hide the dinosaur inside

Once that’s finished, just dry out in an oven, low and slow.

The next day, Rex had babies!  (No, we haven’t had any sex ed classes yet.    Ever since I got pregnant with Berlin, every now and then he talks about babies being in his tummy.  Then he “opens the door” to let them out so they can play.  The door has a latch sound.)  But I digress…

Kyle came home from work one night to help the eggs “hatch”.  Kade loved every minute of it.

The proud “mama” and her babies.

There are some days that I think this is what I look like as a mom…and I only have two!

The highlight of the week was pretending to be a paleontologist.  I found this cute kit on Amazon and then Kade and his dad donned their safety glasses and went to work.

To put it mildly, it was a messy project…

but that couldn’t dampen the joy of discovery!

Look out plant eaters, here we come!  ROAR!!

I made this file folder game for Kade back in August when we were getting ready to go on our big camping trip to the Giant Sequoias and Yosemite, but it continues to be a huge hit.  I figured if he enjoys it this much, your kids might too.  It’s SUPER simple and easy, so hopefully you can whip one up before camping season starts in a few months.

I started with 2 file folders and a few scraps of felt that I had lying around.  To begin, I cut some random scenic shapes out of the felt and sewed them directly onto the first folder in layers.  Then for the “cover” I used the second file folder as a stencil and cut out one large piece of brown felt.  Now because I had already sewn the felt on the inside, the first folder was a bit thicker than the second.  So to enable the second folder to give a bit and wrap around everything without pulling, I split it down the center fold.  Then I stitched the large piece of felt to the now 2 pieces of folder.  I then attached a square of felt to act as an outside pocket for the pieces, and then finally stitched the two folders together back-to-back.  Voila!  An outdoor scene!

Next, I googled “animal silhouettes” and “camping silhouettes” and came up with 2 sets to play with, separately or combined.  Above are my wild mountain animals.  We were going to bear country so I cut out three different bears, these ended up being the only bears we saw on our entire camping trip.  Below is the camping set.  I just sketched out what I couldn’t find on Google and modified to what I new we had (ie. Jeep SUV and pop-out trailer).  My caffeine addiction apparently knows know bounds, as I included a coffee pot and cup as essential camping supplies.  I also decided to take some freedom with my creative expression and dressed “myself” in a red sundress.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never worn a dress in the wilderness, but who’s to say it can’t happen.

Either way, Kade seems to love it.  He makes up stories about the animals chasing each other and how they try to hide in our camp.  It’s probably one of the simplest and cheapest toys  we have and still a hit.  So embrace the felt, succumb to the creativity and cut out your story – it’s sure to be fun!

I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but sometimes it feels like our days are intense.  Not intensely bad or good, necessarily.  But we eat our breakfast intensely, clean up furiously, then play vigorously.  Emotions are only felt in the extreme.  We giggle instead of laugh, sob instead of fuss, scream instead of yell.  Some days this doesn’t just go for the kids, but me too.  My theory today is that it’s because of the weather.  The mornings lately are cold and gray and dull – so everything else is vibrant and INTENSE to compensate.  That goes for the editing of these pictures from our afternoon at the park this week, too.  Whatever the reason, sometimes being a mom just calls for a little intensity.  Today I’m intensely grateful!

Welcome to my sad, crowded, disorganized mess of a pantry.  It has needed some TLC for quite some time, but I never got around to doing anything about it until last September I couldn’t take it anymore.  That’s when I saw a couple of pantry redos on Pinterest and got inspired.  So I set to work organizing, pulled things out, thought about new placement, emptied ugly store containers to fill labeled Tupperware that I had on hand and stuffed everything back in.  Sadly, the picture above is what it looked like AFTER I “organized”.  All that energy and the result was that Kyle couldn’t find his cereal in the morning because it was on a different shelf!  So, deflated, I walked away for a few weeks.  Then my mom came in October and re-inspired me.  We went to IKEA, land of great cheap organization, and talked paint color and label design.  My Silhouette Cameo didn’t arrive in time to do the vinyl labels with her, but I started on those a few weeks later.  Right before Christmas, Kyle convinced me to paint and get rid of the tacky contact paper and finally this week, I finished painting the shelves.  After 6 months, it’s finally complete and I love it!

A little paint and a few cute containers and organizational tools made such a difference!

One of the best ideas was to use the door space.  Although Kyle raised his eye brows a bit at the red baskets (his quote after I told him what I wanted to use them for, “OK, but what are they supposed to be used for?”).  And I LOVE having the spices there, hanging pretty on the door, easy to see, easy to reach.  Perfect!  I told Kyle it was what I’d “always wanted” and he said if he’d known a magnetic board and tin cans would make me this happy, he would have done it a long time ago.  Lesson:  Better Communication – the key to every good marriage!    Oh well.

The Silhouette was a godsend.  It was so easy to use and I loved how the vinyl labels turned out.  It had a little trouble doing the tiny labels for the spice cans, not because it wouldn’t cut the vinyl, just that the little bits it was cutting out tended to get caught in the blade.  It was more trouble to apply the labels than make them.  I’ve read that transfer paper makes this part easier, so if I ever need to do this again, I think I will go that route.

One thing that I think made my pantry so ugly before is all the little packages of junk that make it look like the baking aisle threw up on the shelf.  So I bought these cute boxes at IKEA and labeled them too.  Now the popcorn salt, taco seasoning, bread crumbs, marshmallows, etc are all hidden away and not cluttering up my pretty pantry.

Now for a little Before & After:

Top Shelf – before everyday items like cereal and bread were hidden among all the unopened Costco stash.  After, it’s reserved for the unopened food items and a few big container spices.

2nd Shelf – before the stacking of stuff drove me crazy whenever I needed something on the bottom, but after I put those white wire shelves to better use and fixed my container issue with new coordinating ones.

Third Shelf – before I could never find the can I was looking for and always bought more of what I already had by mistake.  After, the can organizer and red boxes cleaned up the clutter.

4th Shelf – I’m not sure why I don’t have a before pic but the after speaks for itself.

Bottom Shelf – before it was packed with stash items always looked cluttered.  After, most things are hidden in the black container and what’s out can be neatly stacked.  And who doesn’t love a basket of root veggies, right?

I’ve finally completed what may have been the most unnecessarily long project EVER.  But I really do enjoy it.  The red makes me happy when I open the door and I love that it’s so much more usable now.  Shoulda done this a long time ago…

I almost forgot I wanted to share about our first Family Night, if I don’t I will completely forget everything that happened since I didn’t take a single picture.  So instead, let’s pretend that Kade did this to my kitchen when he was making dinner and that it wasn’t me who emptied the entire contents of the pantry in order to paint shelves this afternoon.

Kade and I made pumpkin pancakes with “raisin faces”, which to the untrained eye might have looked like raisin polka dots.  Kyle suffered through one of my favorite traditions, eating breakfast food for dinner.  He put on a brave face for the kids though, and was thankful for the bacon.

After dinner we played a new game that Kade had received for Christmas, Angry Birds.  It was a fun night, nothing off the charts.  But it’s another one of our New Year goals (I like that term better than resolutions).  We are trying to be intentional about creating stability in Our Family Unit.  We want to be building an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance, where we can all let down our guard and be exactly who we are without fear.  One of the things that does that is Quality Time.  We figure at 3 and 1, our kids are pretty happy to spend an evening with us; but unless we make it a regular part of normal every day life, they might have to be physically tied to a chair to do it when they’re teenagers.  We want Family Night to be focused on the kids, to hopefully give them something to look forward to, where they’re in charge of food and entertainment, where we are willing to set aside parental control on nutrition and our definition of fun and let them pick.

Parenting…the Great Experiment…we’ll see how it nets out.

I’m in a bit of a reminiscent mood this morning, hence the photo editing above.  Bear with me…

My brother Jacob and I are the same age apart as Kade & Berlin, except that in my case, I was the older one.  I like to imagine that I was as nice to him as Kade is to Berlin, but in reality…there are stories.  Like me feeding him pennies when he was an infant or coaxing him to touch the oranges that Mom had forbidden us to touch or Dad coming downstairs to find Jacob crying, with a red hand print across his face.

Dad: “Did you hit your brother?”

Me: “Nope”

Lucky for Berlin, Kade is a very sweet older sibling (most of the time).

We went to the park this week to burn off a little energy.  It was a gorgeous day and we had a great time!

Just want to give a little shout out to my cousin, Amanda.  One afternoon about 20 years ago, she and I went to a thrift store and found the tiniest clothes we could.  They were so small and so cute and she might have been a little baby crazy and pulled me into her craziness.  (I blame her entirely!)  But I ended up saving a pair of shoes and a little plaid vest and this jumper for 20 years so that one day my baby girl could wear them.  But of course, I lost them and forgot about them.  After Christmas, we cleaned out the garage and guess what I found buried in a plastic storage tub!  Only problem, my baby girl wasn’t a baby anymore and this little jumper was the only thing that fit.  I couldn’t help but think how things have turned out just like I imagined 20 years ago.  Am I lucky, or what?!

On to the playground…below he is ignoring me and she is blowing me kisses.  Together it’s a good balance.

Priceless!

Hope everyone is having a good weekend.  Tonight is our first “Family Night”, Kade is making dinner and we’ll all play a game or two.  Then tomorrow night we hope to have installment #2 of “Foodies in Training”.  I’ll try to keep this updated.

Just wanted to wish the love of my life a Happy Birthday today!