Fall Craft Day

OK, it's not exactly Fall yet, but with the temperatures in the 70's & 80's this week, I felt like doing a little fall crafting. Fall is my favorite season. =)
Today, we invited Ares & Johnny over to make fall trees. I cut out trees and glued them onto paper. Then I put yellow, red, orange, and brown paint onto plates, and let the kids go at it.

At first they weren't too sure about sticking their fingers in the paint.....

...but they got the hang of it soon enough!

They had a lot of fun and their trees turned out really cute!

Now we have a little bit of fall in our house. =)

Princess Lily & Sir Ares

Yesterday, while I was at my mom's house, she gave me Ares' Halloween costume to give to him. My sister Dianna had dropped it off for him (he's borrowing it from her) and my mom knew I was going to see Ares later in the day. I know that is a long (and boring) explanation, but that's how I came to be in possession of a knight costume.
When Ares saw it, he wanted to put it on. He likes to be Flynn Rider from Rapunzel. When I saw how cute, I mean brave, he looked, I thought, "Why not torture these two 4 year olds and make them pose as a knight & princess?" I mean, who wouldn't think that?!?
So, Lily dressed up in one of her many dress-up dresses, and off we went. They were actually really good sports about it, and I only had to bribe them with candy for the last few pictures. ;0)

I am sure they are going to LOVE these when they are 16.....

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!