Bunk Beds!

We finally got the boys bunk beds! The frame was from the beds Mike slept on as a kid that had been stored in his parents barn.  The slats for the beds were missing so Mike had to rebuild that but that wasn't too bad. We mixed the blue color from Silas's room (Rowan's old room) with some of the aquarom my room because we didn';t have quite enough.  Mike did the building and I did all the painting.  I love how it turned out! I painted the slats under Rowan's bed different colors so Eli has something cool to look at. I also finished their picture wall.  i've been trying to do it for a montha dn finally got it finished.  The pictures in frames can easily be swapped out (one is empty in the pic but now has an Eli painting in it) Some of the art is from their art class ( big pic top left-Eli. bottom right- rowan {it's a collage of Silas (well a baby) walking across the Grand Canyon!}, the start Rowan made too).

 

Mike's next project- assigned by me- is to build them a desk.  That'll go where the two tables are behind the fan.  I want it big enough for them both to sit at and think it'll be good to use for homework, lego building, art...and it has to be taller because these boys are growing up!

 

THey love the bunk beds!

 

Fun Day!

Yesterday was Rowan's last full day of 2nd grade! It is also what his school calls Fun Day!! Fun Day is a day full of different activity stations that the PTC puts on every year. It's fun ( obviously) but also so exhausting. I volunteered for the day and was assigned to Rowan's class and boy was I ready for a drink at the end of the day ( or by lunch time ;)). Teachers really are saints. You kind of forget about all they deal with... I don't think I could handle more than a couple days a year of this. I would not be able to keep my cool at all.

It was fun though. They have a dunking station where the kids got to dunk their teacher! Some different inflatables, relay races, sack races, a photo booth! (My favorite!), kickball, ice cream from local ice cream spot! There was lots of kids arguing and fighting over the most ridiculous things ( seriously, why?!?) but most of it was fun. I loved seeing Rowan with his friends even if he was weird and annoying ;)

Eli goes till the end of this week and then they're home for the summer. :/

Pics of both boys on their first and last day of school this year. It's official, they're growing up!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Eli woke up so excited for today! He's not usually a morning person so this was really nice! I made pancakes last night for supper ( with the maple syrup Mike cooked down last weekend!) so for breakfast they each had a leftover pancake and I made an egg in a cookie cutter so it was heart shaped!

I helped with Rowan's class party this afternoon and I planned the games. Rowan helped me pick some Minute to Win It style games. The favorite was Face the Cookie. Where we put a cookie on their forehead and they had to get it to their mouth without using their hands. We had their teacher try it first! They loved that! Some kids would give up pretty quick and just eat the cookie, others would keep trying over and over...I think one kid might have spent almost 10 minutes trying to get it and he finally did! :)

Eli loved being in Rowan's class! I think he really feels like one of the big kids when he's there. Silas was awesome as usual. Just sat in the stroller most of the time and then a friend of mine who works there came in and held him for a while so he was happy. All the kids rushed up to see him when we came in :)

I had to wake Silas up from his nap to go to the party.

One of the games we thought about doing was eating a donut off a string. Rowan really wanted to do it but I realized it wouldn't work so we just kept the donuts. We tried it last night to see how it'd be and they loved it so I told him we'd do it tonight. So after dinner Mike and I held the strings for the boys and then they held them for Mike and I. Eli held mikes and got a little crazy with it! :)

Tomorrow Rowan gets out early so we might go in town for lunch and to play. This weekend Rowan gets to go with Mike and I get to hang out at home with the little ones. Should be fun :)

Boys Room update!

It's done! Well until we get/build bunk beds and get/ build a desk. But for now the room is much less cluttered! For now I just took the toys out but we'll see what happens to them. I'm hoping this will decrease the fighting too. New rule is if they fight over a toy they lose it for 4 days!

I'm blogging from my phone and the blogger app doesn't let you put the pics in the post with words so I can't actually describe each pic but they're pretty self-explanatory. ( side note, I had a different app to blog with that I loved but it started having problems so I deleted to reinstall and update - I have a new apple id so had to do that- but it's not free anymore :(. I rarely ever will pay for an app so I'm using this one but it sucks so I might just have to breakdown and spend $1.99...)

Anyway, I took out Eli's bed and brought in the two tables. The tall one I put the fabric on to cover the cords for our Internet and router ( I'll dewrinkle it soon). On that table I put Rowan's tool box filled with plastic cups to hold art supplies ( probably get something more permanent eventually). That table is where they can keep their lego creations. There won't be much room so they won't keep every little thing they build...

The rest of the room basically just got cleaned up. They had random Legos all over the bookshelf that I picked up. The giant Rubbermaid container was stuffed full of toys and that's what we took out! I was going to let them each pick 5 toys to keep but they weren't acting very good this morning so I didn't give them a choice!

The green toy box under the table holds all the toys! ( except for train tracks, Lincoln logs and costumes that are all under the bed and hexbugs and Legos by the lamp table) I kept the play food, two of those echo microphones, and a few other toys that I decided were ok. We also have blocks and a box of small cars. No more random crappy toys especially ones from happy meals! :)

As soon as the art stuff was out they sat at the table and started drawing! Yes!! Success! :)

Wednesday Whining

 

 

I'm trying to play with photoshop more.  Clearly I don't know what I'm doing...

 

 

I used to love when the week got closer to Friday, because that meant the weekend was almost here! Lately, I find myself dreading the weekend. Rowan and Eli fight so much! WHY!?!? It's awful. They fight about anything and everything, I bet they've even fought about what to fight about. I don't get it. Last weekend we got up early Saturday morning and went to a pancake breakfast at Rowan's school. It was fun and the kids were good! Later we went to the park and ate Subway, by this time Rowan was mad about something and having little tantrums every few minutes. He lost his dessert so that led to more complaining. Mike made sushi for supper and bought them a neat (but weird) dessert from the Asian grocery store. That wasn't good enough and there was a lot of complaining by Eli- of course not till he had finished the dessert! So frustrating. We signed the boys up for Saturday Art School at the University so hopefully regularly getting out of the house will help with the fighting on the weekends...hopefully!  Is it spring yet?
 

Last night Rowan had an hour long meltdown. He was crying so hard we thought he might get sick, or a hernia or something! Over what? I made him a word search (by hand) with his spelling words for next week.  I through in a few extra words- Mom, Dad, Silas and Eli- thinking he would be excited to find those words in there.  Oh no! Apparently he was worried that when he took his test his teacher would say a word that sounded like one of those extra words and he would get confused and write down the wrong word and it would all be my fault for putting those words on there.  WHAT!? That doesn't even make sense to me but he could not be reasoned with.  I told him to just not find those words then, but aparentl;y that could not be done! He wanted me to make a new one and I said no.  He seriously went on about it forever! During dinner he said the worst part of the day was when "Mommy becamse my arch enemy" haha at least it ended in a laugh from me.

Eli continues to find things to whine about daily.  His first fit usually happens when he realizes I'm not going to let him watch tv after school. He is horrible when he gets to watch tv and wants to watch hours of it not just one show and then whines non-stop cause I tell him no.

Mike is working late two nights a week this semester.  It's only been two nights but I'm kind of reminded of what it was like when he was in grad school and Eli was a baby.  It shouldn't be too bad though and I can get away with not making "real" meals for dinner if it's just the kids.  Dinner time is already really hard because Silas almost always wants to nurse and/or be held.  If he could just nap during that time it'd be a lot easier! Of course, if I actually got it together and made dinner earlier and just warmed it up that would make everything easier.  But I'm not that smart ;)


Silas is as awesome as ever.  Can a 6 month old not be? He's still not really into food so we just offer it to him every few days to see if he wants it.  It is kind of easier not having to worry about feeding him food or having something ready for him (since we don't do jarred baby food) and since we are going with the BLW thing I haven't even made any pureed foods to freeze like I usually would.  When we do give him food I usually mash up some of whatever I'm giving him and try to fed him a bit but he really doesn't like or want it.  I think he's just got enough going on to worry about food right now! He gets around like crazy! Not crawling yet but he's up on his hands and knees a lot and can pull himslef around with his arms! All legos and other small toys have been banned from the living room because of how much he's moving.  Eventually when he's really crawling I'll just put a baby gate at the door to Rowan and Eli's room and everything small will stay in there.

Goodbye 2012!

For New Year's Eve we made our annual pudding parfaits! Yumm!
Then we hung out and watched The countdown on tv. The kids love to dance to the music.

I tried to get everyone to take a nap earlier so we could stay up late. Rowan was the only one who didn't nap and he ended up falling asleep before the NY ball drop at 11. I tried to wake him up for it but he was out! Eli stayed up for it for the first time ever but fell asleep just a few minutes later.
Mike also made some bacon wrapped poppers for us! Oh so good!

Christmas 2012

What a week!                                               My mom got these for the boys for Christmas!

Last Saturday (the 22nd) was my family's Christmas get together at my cousin's house.  Of course I didn't take any pictures....I did a hot cocoa bar for the kids like I did last year! They love it and I think it's so fun!

 

that morning during Silas's 6 months pics!

 

 

Christmas Eve we went to Mike's parents house for lunch.  No pictures of course :) The kids had fun and got some nice presents and we headed home to get ready for Santa to come! ELi fell asleep before we got home about 5:30pm and stayed asleep when we got in.  I woke him up about 8pm and put some Christmas pj's on him cause I wanted him to look cute in the morning (priorities!) He stayed awake for a few minutes and picked a cookie for Santa and even let me get a picture of all 3 of them!

                                                                         can you tell Eli just woke up? :)

 

 

 





 



Mike won "The World's Largest Stocking" from a local hardware store!  It was full of random toys.  I wanted to wait until after Christmas to give it to the boys so it wouldn't overshadow the presents we actually bought for the boys but Mike really wanted it to be part of Christmas morning so we put it out.  We did wait to open it up though.  We haven't even opened most of the toys in there and will probably donate a lot of them.  Their favorite is a Zhu Zhu pet! Geez that thing is annoying;)
Of course they liked the presents we actually got and Silas had a lot of fun trying to unwrap presents.  He only got a few- 2 new toys and some dishes for when he starts eating, but it was still a lot of fun!

                                                           Eli is in that fake smile stage...

                                                             STill can't get over his eyes! :)

                                                  This game has caused so many problems I'm starting to hate it! I've discovered we are not a game family!

My mom and sister came over late morning (after we ate homemade sourdough coffee cake!) and we opened presents and ate a late lnch together.

We spent the rest of the week just hanging out at home mostly- Mike took the week off.  Rowan and Eli spent a night at my moms, Mike and I ran to Arthur one morning, Rowan went to a friends house for dinner one night...Saturday Mike's parents came for lunch because his brother and his wife were visiting from Texas. They stayed the night here so we could all hang out.  I made sugar cookie's the day before so I whipped up some icing and we all decorated them! We didn't get many cookies made this year due to Eli being sick but the boys (and Mike!) love decorating cookies so I knew we'd still have to do it.

 

Sunday Mike's brother and wife left around lunch time to head back to his parent's house.  Before they left some other friends who live in PA stopped for a short visit.  They have a little boy a few months younger than Eli and they have a blast together! They ate lunch with us and the kidsplayed for a few hours before they had to head back.  It was a lot of fun to see everyone, but We felt like we'd been entertaining non-stop for a week- well Mike did he really does all the cooking when we have people over! So it was nice to just sit and relax last night and today!