Take Your Kids to Work Day

Last week the kids and I got to watch the awards ceremony at Kelsi's school.  Kelsi walked away with an award for at 3.5-3.9 GPA for the first semester!  Wooohooo!

After that, we decided to go hang out with Daddy for a while and "help" him.  This resulted in spilling tea all over his desk, nearly unplugging the network,

playing with the touch screen monitors,

 

and generally getting in the way.

 Thankfully, they have a good daddy who didn't mind!  At one point, Matthias found Daddy's name tag and put in on.

Which of course meant Lydia needed one too.

Then they decided that since they were wearing Daddy's name tags, they might as well act like him.  So they did.

So, seriously, isn't that the sweetest thing ever?

The Great Chicken Bone Experiment

In order to keep some kind of record that I do, in fact, teach my child occasionally, I present to you "The Great Chicken Bone Experiment".  I promise there will be no pictures of chicken feet, there will however be pictures of chicken bones.  Be forewarned ;)

For science we're studying the skeletal system, so we did an experiment to see what would happen to a bone if you took all the calcium out of it.  First we had to make our observations and hypothesis...

Put the chicken bone in a jar...

And cover it with vinegar.

And of course clean up the mess ;)

Then we waited.  We were supposed to wait 3 days but it ended up being 2 weeks.  We're working on our counting skills next.  Just kidding, we all got the plague and so I decided we'd take a 2 week Thanksgiving break!

While we were waiting, Matthias went and joined his Magic Treehouse Book Club.  He was super excited!

Turned out I got the time wrong (stupid time zones) so he had to watch the recording of it.  Perhaps next we will study the rotation of the earth and how it effects time...

Finally, after two weeks of having a chicken bone sit in a jar in my kitchen, it was time to finish the experiment.  We got the tongs ready...

Pulled out the chicken leg...

And look at that strength!

I'm not sure if he was more grossed out or impressed.  But, at least now we know why calcium is so important!

   

A Day of Firsts

I have lived here for almost 30 years and this year was the first time I have ever gone to the parade and tree lighting downtown.  Crazy, right?  Which of course means that the kids had never gone either, so we bundled them all up and headed downtown.  I quickly remembered why I've never wanted to go!  There are so many people and it took forever to find somewhere to park.  Thankfully we were meeting up with some friends who had gotten there earlier and saved some room for us!  And thankfully they thought ahead and brought some umbrellas!

It's coming!

Matthias trying to get Lydia excited about the parade!

Poor girl tried to tell me something about the parade coming and I blinded her with the flash!

Then it was off to the fireworks.  Of course my poor, deprived children have never seen a fireworks show like this so they were totally into it!

Although, Matthias quickly decided that the fireworks would make good special effects for his fighting and began punching and kicking the bad guys.  Thankfully there was no one directly in front of him!

The fireworks were cool, but there was so much smoke you could only see half of it!

And of course the grand finale!

Thanksgiving

Since we are now in a house, rather than a tiny apartment, we offered to host Thanksgiving this year.  This holiday season we're trying really hard to put Christ back into all our celebrations so we decided that Bible verses about being thankful would be a good start.  So I sent the children to work.

Well, there was some play too ;)

We came up with some fun little cards to put on everyone's plate.  Kelsi came up with the titles, Lydia colored it (well, not mine apparently) and Matthias cut it all out. 

 On the inside they kids each wrote a little note telling the person why they were thankful for them.  Kelsi did great at this, Matthias not so much.  I don't know that he fully understood what we were telling him to do.  He ended up writing some pretty amusing things.  

Speaking of amusing, this is what happens when I try and take pictures of my kids:

I love my goofballs! 

13!

I still find it hard to believe that I'm the mother of a teenager (I'm also the mother of a 2 year old.  That wasn't planned out too well).  For Kelsi's 13th birthday, I wanted to do something special, something that would celebrate her transition out of childhood into becoming a young woman.  I looked all over the internet trying to find ideas, but all I could find were coming of age ceremonies from other cultures and crazy slumber parties where they all talked about periods and feminine hygiene products.  Not quite what I was looking for.  So, I planned a fancy dinner with all her female relatives.  And chocolate.  Lots of chocolate.

Daniel's sister made all the awesome tissue paper flowers and I used the china my grandma passed down to me and the real silverware my other grandma passed down to me!   Sadly the picture isn't that great, but you get the idea!

We had two chocolate fondue fountains, with plenty of goodies to dip!

And a hot chocolate bar with goodies as well.  

And of course the food!

I wanted her gifts to be special, so I came up with a couple of ideas and everyone was nice enough to help out!  The first gift was a scrapbook.

Not a typical scrapbook full of pictures, this scrapbook is full of nooks and crannies for storing special items and tons of spots for writing.  So I asked everyone to either write some things in it, or bring a note/letter for her to store in it.  The idea is to have a memory book full of words from the women in her family.  She loves it!

The other gift was a Pandora charm bracelet (I use the name "Pandora" loosely here.  Have you seen how much those cost?!).  For this, I asked everyone to get her a charm for it that way she'd have a fun bracelet full of gifts from the women in her family.

I think in all the party was a success, and hopefully one she'll remember for a long time.  

She seemed to have a lot of fun.  I know this because she pretty much talked nonstop which is what she does when she's happy ;)

Happy birthday to my beautiful Kelsi!