Pump It Up!

Yesterday, we headed over to Pump It Up with Camden & Johnny! It's a great place to let the kids run off some excess energy. The only problem was that Lily is a bit of a scaredy-cat. She did get into the bouncy houses (after a lot of pleading...on my part...).

I know you can't tell, but that is Lily & Camden.

Lily refused to go in the obstacle course though. This is as far as she got. She tried several times, but always climbed right back out saying she was scared.

The boys, on the other hand, are not afraid of anything! One of the favorites was this giant slide:

Camden was cracking us up with his "coconut slide". He kept getting in this position and saying, "This is my coconut slide!!" I don't really know why though.....

This was as far as Lily would go on the slide for the longest time:

The stairs. She would get about halfway up, and then climb back down.

Finally, she decided to actually go down......

and she LOVED it!!

She went down several more times. Usually with a look of both terror and excitement. ;0)

She says she can't wait until we go again. =)

Scout Badges

Zach has a lot of scout badges. Most of them go on his shirt, but some of them he got and then they just sat on my dresser collecting dust. So, this weekend, I decided to make a board where I can put his badges that do not go on his shirt.
I used a bulletin board, scrapbook paper, and stickers.

First, I stapled the paper on how I wanted it. I found some great patriotic paper that I thought would be a good background.

Then I added some cute scouting stickers I found. They say service, community, fishing, camping, etc. After I placed those where I wanted them, I stapled his badges on, leaving plenty of room for more badges that he will get in the future.

The thing in the bottom right hand corner are his beads that he earned doing activities during the year last year for scouts. Since he will start over this year, I added this to his board too. I attached it with one of the mother's pins that I get each year.
Zach was really excited when this was finished & he is even more excited for a new year in scouts!

Riley will also start scouts this year too. He is especially excited that his dad will be his scout leader! =) I think I will have to make another one of these boards pretty soon........

Color Walk

Since Lily has a bunch of cousins that are around her age (preschool age) we invited them over to have a color walk with us. I painted these egg cartons using 6 different colors.

We were originally going to take a walk outside and find things in nature that were different colors and put them in the right spot in their carton, so I only used half of an egg carton for each child (thinking that some colors are hard to find in nature), but it was raining off and on all morning, so we decided to play it safe and do our color "walk" inside.

We could have done lots more colors since it was inside, but 6 seemed to take them awhile to find anyway, so 12 would have been a lot harder. They did do a good job though of finding things all over the house that were the colors they needed:

They came up with lots of different things and didn't just copy off of each other.

After that, we had a color art project!

We made flowers with different colored petals.

They worked really hard on this and all did a good job!

Their flowers turned out great!

I am so glad Lily has so many friends to do things with now that her brothers are in school all day. It makes the day more fun! =)

1st Day of School!

Today is the first day of school!! Riley started 1st grade & Zach started 3rd! (How did that happen?!?)
Jeff & I took the boys to school this morning. Riley wanted us to come, but while Zach didn't tell us he didn't want to be walked in, he didn't act super excited about it either. I'm not too sure he will let us next year. ;0)
Riley was excited to meet his teacher! We left him at his room so we could walk Zach to his room (before he left without us) but when we came back, he looked a little sick. =( But I am sure he had a great day once he saw all of his friends.

Zach went into his room and was so excited to be there, can't you tell?

Yeah, he looks super excited.... ;0) I am sure he will have fun today too though. His teacher is the same teacher he had in 1st grade & we love her!!! Yeah!

So, now it's just Lily & I. We are going to be doing lots of fun stuff together. =)

Our Summer

Here is our summer in pictures:

And that wasn't even everything! We have definitely kept busy this summer. We tried to get everything done on our summer fun list, but we just couldn't get to everything before school started. Maybe we can still do some of them in the next month or two though.

Now we will start a new kind of busyness; all of the activities that school brings!

Kansas City Trip

We took the kids to the first Chief's game of the season. It was a pre-season game though. We take them to those, because it doesn't really count, (good thing, because they stunk!!!) so Jeff doesn't care that they won't sit through an entire game.

This was the boys' 3rd game, but Lily's 1st!

She was excited!

And she actually sat through half of the game! (she got wiggly after the half, but hey, she's 4! I was suprised she lasted that long!)

Our seats were pretty far up this year, but the boys liked using the binoculars, so that made it OK. =)

I like how Lily is peeking through to smile for a picture....such a ham.

Me & Riley. He loves going to the games. He gets so excited!

They all lasted about halfway into the 3rd quarter, which is pretty long. Especially since the game didn't start until 7:00 p.m.

We had gotten a hotel in KC so we didn't have to drive back that night.

The next day we let the kids swim at the hotel & then headed off to the T-Rex Cafe!!

The boys had seen advertisements for this & thought it would be a cool place to eat.

They had dinosaurs, a giant octopus, flashing lights, woolly mammoths, and lots of aquariums with real fish.

We sat on the second level in the "Ice Room". Every 30 minutes, the lights would change from blue to red during a "meteor shower".

The food was actually really good too. We got this giant dessert to share at the end of our meal:

It had a cup of dry ice that spilled out over the dessert. The kids really liked that!

Even though there were 5 of us, we could not finish all of that dessert. It was yummy too!!

Then it was time to head home.

We let Lily drive us:

Just kidding!! This was during a bathroom break & she thought it would be funny to come sit up front with me while Daddy was gone.

I think that is our last trip together for awhile. School starts on Wednesday. We have had a really fun & jam-packed summer!! I am sad that school is starting because I will miss getting to do these fun things all of the time with all 3 kids, but I am excited that school is starting, because I think we have all had a little too much together time. ;0)