Hmmm...

Dear Opa, Uncle Jeff & Aunty Holly,  maybe you, Opa, are glad you aren't Nana! and maybe you, Holly could teach my boys a few things...I think mice are nicer than tarantulas!!!

Cody slipped to the door of his room and said, "I want to sleep with my spider."  When I asked him where it was he said, "Sammy hid it under Nana's covers."

ugg, it doesn't look that real but I would have felt bad if Mom had turned down her bed to find that ugly thing there!

Spring Break: Day One

I will admit today was a bit crazy! 
a)  We started off with a bang, we did a cousin swap sleepover.  That meant one got to go away, one got to have someone sleepover and three thought the scales were slightly skewed.
b)  Seems like most thought Mom qualified for spring break which meant she should have been up for every game playing, book reading, lego making, toy fixing and card making scheme that was proposed.
c)  It's raining barracudas and sharks on our end of the valley which means everyone's a bit antsy to get outside but not really excited about getting soaked.  Although Leah and Kayla did go out on the tramp in the pouring rain everyone else just bounced around indoors.
d)  Kayla and Leah wanted to make cards and had every inch of Leah's room covered in paper scraps and ink.  They helped themselves to my scrapbooking supplies (well, they were somewhat aware of the folly of being too free) but they felt comfortable enough to transfer enough stuff from behind my desk to Leah's room to make a royal mess. :)
e)  I didn't have a plan in place, I did have a few things I was hoping to get done.  Come Monday we'll have settled in a bit, have the unified goal of having a cleaned up house (VERY different from clean house :) ) for Nana's arrival, have an idea of what's going to be allowed and what's not...for example we are NOT playing playdoh and making cards at the kitchen table within the same period of time) 
That being said everyone is really looking forward to a playdoh playing marathon with a special toy I picked up at our gasping Zellers.  We'll probably have our first trial run bright and early Monday morning.

Now do you understand why "cleaned up" and "clean" are so very different?

In my children's defense, they can play playdoh very nicely for many hours in a row.  Yes it is a mess but I can leave them to it and go work at cleaning up a different area of the house and we'll all be very happy.  Until they start asking me to roll them worms. :)

What are your favorite ideas for making home days special?  I absolutely LOVE having the kids all home and I'm really looking forward to the next two weeks.  But I'm not so naive to think it won't have it's bumps.

Especially if that rain keeps falling!

While Care was here another family graciously lent my mom a vehicle so Care could have the van to do her trotting around and visiting.  Shortly after Care left we showed up at Mom's one morning and as we came up the driveway Cody noticed the Jeep for the first time.

"Whose dragster is that?"

Cam's answer?!!!  "It's not a dragster, it's a Jeep.  Isn't that funny to have an OLD GRANNY driving a jeep?"

That Cam!!!  We did laugh pretty hard, though.  (Probably because we all thought it a bit funny to see Mom in the Jeep but none of us ever said it out loud!)

Story Time

Sam has a gift for reading out loud.  And he has a very willing audience!!

Boy can he get them giggling :)

Grandparent's Day/ Parent's Evening

Every year the kids have a very special day which they spend hours preparing their classrooms for...Grandparent's Day.  Everything is cloaked in secret, projects are hinted at, toys head to school to add to various displays.  The grandparents and grand friends get to spend the morning soaking in the excitement.

Then at night it's the parents' turn.  The theme for this year (k - 7) was Canada.  With kids in 3 grades plus a niece in one extra one we got to see a small slice of what these kids worked so hard on.  There is SO much to see and 1 hour just doesn't get us very far!  What we did see though, was pretty incredible.  Kudos to the teachers for all the hard work in filling these kids with the knowledge, or steering them to hunt for information on their own, putting up with a lot of general chaos, supervising messy projects and presenting decked out classrooms on the final day.

 

We started with Cam, for some reason I don't have good pictures of his classroom.  He shared his latest worksheets with us (I think they were encouraged to do their neatest work :)  Inside his classroom there were a few letter specific projects; ladybug, monkey, octopus etc.  You can see a slice of the ocean bulletin board on the top left corner.  Outside his classroom was a big map of Canada with a bag of push pins so you could mark all the spots you've visited.  Neat, I thought.

Next we visited Chief Sam who studied about 5 different Native American peoples.  Neat to hear him pronounce their names :)  They had a teepee in the corner of their classroom, some different projects like a mask in the hallway, some work on beavers, a stuffed with info folder on the Native Americans and then some other stuff like designing a new swim suit for Toad.  You know Frog and Toad...

 This was the main display in their room.  Igloos, buffalo, teepees and totem poles!

 Leah's class also studied the Native Americans.  Her group of about 5 did a display on the Inuit.  This was SO well done!  The marshmellow igloos are ones that Leah made at home one morning when she was still a bit too weak to go to school after a bout of flu.  We found some flickering tea lights so the igloos looked as though they had a fire burning - gezellig!!

 Hard to see but they had dog sleds, fish drying racks, a hole in the ice for seal hunting and even a playmobil horse transformed cariboo!  There was  a neat "can you find?" list that really helped you look carefully at what was all going on.

One of the families in her class also had this friendly fellow at home that was lent for the day.  :)  "Buddy" was a real hit!  (Grampa came at night and happened to be in Leah's class at the same time as us)

If you haven't already noticed it, the amount of work the kids and teachers put into a presentation like this always impresses me.  Majorly.  Not only the creativity and all the different kinds of learning involved, (what can be better for a little girl than learning how to work with 4 other people (3 of them being boys) to get a satisfactory end result!?  but mostly because it blows my mind away to think about what kind of mess those teachers put up with in the inbetween stages. I'm pretty sure a classroom of that would drive me right out the window.

Playdough Fun

With some cousins on the way over we thought it was a good time to try out a new playdough recipe that was sitting in the cool-ideas-found-on-pinterest file.  Made a really long worm!

 With spring break coming up and rain a possibility, here's the website if anyone is interested.  Homemade Playdough Recipes  This morning we tried out the jello playdough.  It is a great recipe although I found I needed to knead in about a 1/2 cup extra flour to eliminate extra stickiness.  (we used a kiwi flavored jello so the color isn't as exciting or bright as other flavors may give)

She baked cookies

She wore a cute pink apron (that kinda fits) and concentrated intensely!

 She smiled a precious smile.

 She happily iced her cookies.

 And delighted in licking her fingers :)

(and nobody complained...they love root beer cookies!)

Too much reading, not enough understanding :)

The other night after Cara and Cody had been tucked into bed (and after they had gotten out of bed again to play "friends") I heard...

Cara:  "giggle, giggle, Cody did you hear what I said? I said 'I think you're adorable, but I meant handsome!'"
Cody:  "well, Cara, I think you're grotesque-tic!!"

Judging by the tone of his voice he was trying to tell her she was fantastic x 10.  After all, he had just finished praying, "thank you for my special twin sister who is my best friend" (unprompted).  I think he just has a few years of language arts and spelling words before his comprehension catches up to the vocabulary all these books are providing him. :)

This is our library list and partially emptied box. We usually borrow between 40 - 50 books and right now I usually go to the library every week or week and a half... truth is, I love books and the library.

And you better believe I get plenty of strange looks struggling to move that heavy box from libary counter to van and back again :)

And gone again

No doubt, visiting our house was a bit intimidating, especially with the big kids knowing they were off to school and not going to see these cuties all day.  (they backed poor Gavin right up and he looked like he was feeling a bit trapped by all their loving!)

But, I think they'll miss us just as much as we miss them.  Even if we are a bit scary!!