Just for fun

Anna- 9 months

Van- 9 months (look at those two teeth sticking out!) :)

Adam 2 years 9 months, Van- 9 months

Adam- 9 months

Happy Birthday Van!

My sweet Van turns three this coming Saturday. I love all these pictures I posted of him. His sweet little innocent face the day he was born. And then all the other pictures of him being his crazy self. I believe he has had the 'terrible twos' for half of his little life. It started when he was about 18 months and still continues. He doesn't bang his head on things or people anymore thank God but he still will melt onto the floor. He is 110% boy as you can tell in the last picture. He likes trucks, tractors, four wheelers, snowplows and dirt. He's always fixing, digging or getting into something. He has a mind of his own and knows how to get his brother's goat.

I still think of him as a baby. I know I shouldn't but I do. And I call him baby too on occasion which sometimes he responds to and other times he'll say, "I'm not a baby!" I love his angelic little face and the way he marches to his own beat. Happy birthday to my sweet sweet boy. I love him to pieces.

Daddy's girl

Anna and her daddy have quite a thing going on. I love the last picture of the two of them. He plays with her like she is a little boy and she loves every minute of it. I have to say he doesn't treat her like a little girl at all and I don't think she even knows she is a little girl. She always grunts and growls, never a little dainty coo. And when she gets in her jumper, she goes insane. You can't walk by her without her trying to smash into you. She crawls after the boys and grabs their trucks and pushes them around. Chip calls her his little diesel mechanic because he is convinced that she is going to grow up and be one.

This morning when I go and get her out of her crib, she has a rubber football in her bed. I yell into Chip, 'Do you know that Anna has a football in her bed?' "Oh yeah", he said, "I put that in there with her last night when I put her to bed. She likes it."..... Huh? I think. It actually cracks me up to see them together. She gets SO excited when he comes home from work and she gets to see him. I am anxious to see how she is when she is older. I am going to keep dressing her in dresses and hope for the best. :)

Playing Farm

The farm set has come back to play in a big way in our house. That is a hay elevator that Adam made going into the barn you can see above. And he has the manure spreader backed up to the barn, just like we do at home, to collect the manure and spread it out over the corn fields. Last week one of our cows had been pregnant too long or something and gave birth to a still birth calf. The heifer was wild so my father in law couldn't get a hold of it to help it or something. This was the first thing I heard about when I got home that day. There was a dead calf in the drop and Papa took the calf out with the tractor bucket. You can be sure that scene was re-enacted here with the farm set. But such is farm life I guess. I like that they are playing with the farm set again and using their imaginations. I thought that hay elevator was pretty clever.

Swimming lessons

We have put the boys in swimming lessons at the Lodge in Rock Hill after church on Sundays. I am very happy with the program. This is real instruction opposed to a program we have done in the past where you basically walk your child around the pool for a free swim half an hour. You can see in the one picture above, it is one instructor per like 3 kids. And I don't even have to go in the pool for this one! The pool is very warm as well, otherwise my kids would not have even attempted to go in. They walk right in so I am happy about that. Van of course is sort of a free spirit. Today he shimmied himself along the side of the pool to the other end and they had to sway him back. They put flotation devices on their backs and teach them how to swim properly. Adam can swim, but he does this side to side motion to keep him afloat. I want him to learn how to do it correctly. They enjoy going and I probably will put them in another semester.

The 'hide-out'

This is what I found in my pan 'drawer' today.

Making Crayons

My pictures are posted backwards but that's ok. We decided to make crayons today. I got this idea from my favorite website over a year ago:



http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2008/12/best-of-2008-count-down-2.html



And today we decided to make the crayons. I got candy molds from AC Moore as the blog creator suggested and they were like a buck or so each. Then as you can see, Adam and I (Van wasn't interested) gathered all of our 'bits' of crayons and sorted them by color. Surprisingly, some of the bits were REALLY hard to get the wrappers off of. We put them in the foil cupcake wrappers as suggested. Some people said the paper ones didn't work so well but the foil worked just fine. We put them in the 220 degree oven (and the website didn't say for how long but I timed it and it was about 20 minutes.) I took them out, the foil was cool right away, and poured them into the molds. They didn't take that long to cool I didn't think. Maybe it was an hour but it didn't seem like it. And they came out wonderfully. I totally recommend this project and will probably do it again.