Kindergarten Easter Party

Last Friday was Dallin’s class Easter Party. They had it early in honor of having this week off for spring break. They read Peter Cottontail stories while the eggs were being hidden by their reading buddies.

Dallin’s reading buddy is Alejandro. Fourth graders come to their class a few times a week to sit with each child and help them read. Dallin thinks Alejandro is the “coolest”.

Rather than just doing a regular egg hunt, Ms. Allen number a set of 12 eggs for each child and they had to find the eggs in order. So it served as a math activity as well as a fun way to hunt eggs.

Layton loves Ms. Allen. And she loves him. She especially loved his Braves outfit. She is a Braves fan too. Must be why she is such a great teacher.

After eggs, they had cupcakes and partied a little bit with their reading buddies.

See Layton sneaking up on some unsuspecting kindergartner trying to steal her eggs?

He succeeded. I gave her an extra piece of candy for sharing.

And what was Mandy doing all this time? I brought some eggs for her so she wouldn’t feel left out. All she could think about the whole time was the candy inside of them. Candy is serious business to her.

Lens Flare

Lens flare is normally something that you want to avoid. But, in this case I think it makes these pictures of Mandy kind of interesting. I know I’m biased, but she is just so beautiful to me. She is bratty and whiny and bossy and moody and wild and unbearable sometimes. But other times she is sweet and loving and darling and precious and so beautiful it breaks my heart to look at her.

Bang Bang Bang

Layton just celebrated his first birthday and received several new toys. His brother and sister have toy boxes that are overflowing with fun interesting things for him to play. But yet, almost every day I hear a bang, bang, bang, bang, sound coming from the kitchen. And when I go see what the sound is, I invariably find Layton doing this:

Dallin and Mandy always did the same thing. Why is it that kids love playing with pots and pans when they have hundreds of other bright, loud, fun things to play with? I just don’t get it. I'm thinking about putting a nice shiny saute pan in his Easter basket. He loves to share with me (just take a look at my clothes, you'll see all kinds of stains where he has "shared" his food with me), so I'm sure he'll let me borrow it every now and then. He gets a new toy. I get a new pan. Sounds pretty perfect to me.

Friends

It’s friendly face week at I Heart Faces Photography. Nothing is better to me than seeing my son and daughter play together as friends. It just does my heart good.

Dizzy

My kids love to make themselves dizzy.  Since the moment he could walk, Dallin has spun himself around in circles to make himself dizzy.  He has passed on that love of spinning on to Mandy.  One of their favorite things to do is to twist the swing around and then let it spin them around.  They are crazy.  Yesterday at the park they spent most of their time on the merry-go-round.  Maybe this love of spinning explains why Dallin gets his “best ideas” when he is dizzy.

Against his will

When Chloe came over the other day, as mentioned before, while they played outside, I took a few pictures of Layton and a few of all of them playing as well.

Then Mandy and Chloe requested that I take a picture of the three of them as “friends”. Dallin was less than enthused.

He was much more interested in doing this:

Than posing for pictures like the girls:

Poor Dallin. He is so often surrounded by girls. And so often, he gets overruled on what they are going to play together. But it doesn’t get him down. He just takes the opportunity to change a lovely posed picture with his cousin, into a demonstration of his manly strength:

Spaced

Mandy is one of those kids that lives in her own little world. She has no trouble going off by herself and making up some elaborate fairy tale scenario that she plays out with imaginary friends. I have often found her talking to herself and have even made the mistake of answering one of her out loud questions. I was immediately corrected and told that she wasn’t speaking to me, she was just pretending. She really spaces out sometimes though. I think she may have inherited that from me. I totally space out sometimes too. Like this past Tuesday. A friend of mine was babysitting our niece Chloe while my mother-in-law was out of town. My friend’s daughter had a fever and probably an ear infection, so she called me to see if I could take Chloe while she took her child to the doctor. Of course I said yes and then I think I lost all consciousness of what day of the week it was. It was Tuesday. Dallin had soccer practice that evening. But after Chloe came over, I let them go outside and play. I played soccer for a while with them and then I began…oh wait, are you sitting down? I would hate to think that if you passed out from the shock of what I was doing that you might fall and hurt yourself. Ready, breath deeply….I began taking pictures (I know so unlike me to do such a thing) of Layton (football pictures) and the other kids. And so I let time pass and didn’t think for one more second about Dallin’s soccer practice. I came inside for a minute and the phone was ringing. I read the caller ID…it was Nathan. Oh, I thought, he must be on his way home from work. I answered the phone and he immediately asked me why I wasn’t at soccer practice. Oh, snap. I quickly try to cover my memory lapse by explaining that Chloe was here and I didn’t have room in my car for four kids. Good cover, right? Not so much. I immediately realized how lame it was that if that were truly the reason I didn’t come then I should have called Nathan and told him not to show up at practice. He forgave me. And I kicked myself in the bum. It’s all good. I fear for Mandy though. She is an awful lot like me. Poor thing.

Layton's Soccer Skills

So we all know that Layton has got astounding football skills. Well, just wait until you watch this video of him working on his soccer moves. He kicks - he throws - he's AWESOME! He might just be the youngest soccer superstar in the history of the world!

Conference Snacks

While browsing at the Idea Door website, looking for primary ideas, I came across this cute idea from the Friend magazine for making General Conference a little more interesting for kids. It uses snacks as a reward for listening to the talks. I decided to take it one step further and make little snack packs for the sisters that I visit because all of them have young children and I thought it might be a fun way for them to make conference a little more entertaining for their kids. The activity presented in the Friend has twelve different words that you listen for during the talks and each time you hear that word you get to eat one of the corresponding snacks. Well, because I didn’t want to have to go out and buy 12 different snacks, I just picked 5 words and 5 snacks.

I divided the snacks into little plastic bags and then made up a little “snack legend” to let them know which snacks to eat when they hear the corresponding word.

I decided to go with the words Jesus Christ, Missionary, Scriptures, Prophet, and Love, but you could of course choose whatever words that you wanted to. The snack possibilities are pretty endless as well. You could use popcorn, cereal, raisins, peanuts, gummy bears, mints, or if you are doing this at home with your own kids and there are no worries about the snacks being perishable, then you could do healthy snacks like apple slices, grapes, cheese cubes, carrot sticks, etc. I am really looking forward to doing this with Dallin and Mandy. I know Mandy probably still won’t pay very much attention, but maybe Dallin will actually listen to a few of the talks. Who knows, maybe it will help me and Nathan pay attention better too!

Click here for a copy of the snack legend that I used or better yet make up your own to suit your own personal tastes!

1 Year Old Check-up

I am still having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that Layton is a ONE YEAR old. Crazy. I took him in for his check-up and not surprisingly he is a major light weight. He only weighed 17 lbs 5 oz and he is 28 inches tall. That’s ok though. The doctor didn’t seem too concerned because he meets all of the expected developmental milestone, like walking, bending down and picking up objects, playing games (he loves to give you a "high five"), saying “words” like ma-ma and da-da, gesturing, and responding to his name. He did tell me though to try to up his calorie intake. Layton is old enough now to start drinking regular milk. With Mandy and Dallin, the only way that I could get them to transition from breastfeeding to drinking cow’s milk was to mix in a little Hershey’s chocolate syrup. I had always felt a little guilty about doing that because of all the sugar it adds. One of the things the doctor mentioned for me to do to up Layton’s calorie intake is to ADD chocolate syrup or chocolate powder to his milk. So now I don’t feel that bad about giving it to Mandy and Dallin, because like Layton, they were always on the bottom end of the weight scale too. So it’s chocolate milk on doctor’s orders!!! Lucky Layton!

He also received four shots. One in each arm and leg. I was told that they would probably make him run a fever and he would likely seem a little lethargic. So it was no surprise when I saw Layton laying on the couch like this:

But wait, what’s going on here:

Oh, he was just kidding me:

Not even shots can slow this boy down:

Maybe that explains his very low weight – the child is always moving at 150% -