getting back to it...

The Monday after a vacation is always fun and today was no exception. Actually it wasn't too bad, but you knew it was a Monday and you knew we were a little rusty with our routine. :-)

Today after our normal seat work, we started our unit on Hawaii....
you can read more about that here if you would like.

We are all so excited about our trip there in a few weeks. We did a ton of shopping for the trip while we were in Missouri last week. I think we're pretty much set, as far as purchases go.

Tonight at cooking class Alex made sushi rolls. Now, I love sushi, I truly do... but Alex's sushi rolls... not so much. I seriously had to fight the gag reflex while eating one as he watched me expectantly... sigh. There is such a thing as putting too much cream cheese in a sushi roll. My goodness... his roll was HUGE and sliced thick. It was like eating a quarter cup of cream cheese wrapped in seaweed. Ugh! Poor boy... he just put his favorite things in his roll... he just got a little carried away. :-) Thankfully we had stopped by the Thai place by our house on the walk home to get some pineapple fried rice, crab rangoon and egg rolls to go with Alex's sushi (I know, that didn't exactly go with his sushi, but the Japanese restaurant, although it was close, was the opposite direction from our house). I forgot to see what he's making next week.

Okay, it's late and I need my sleep!

'nite!

(oh... and don't go into shock but I actually scrapped something tonight! i hope to get it posted tomorrow!!!)

we're home!

A quick little recap of our week with LOTS of photos!

Sunday - my quest for the perfect Easter portrait of my two went unfulfilled yet again...On Monday... Clara got something new... can you guess what it is?
Tuesday I took no pictures :-)

Wednesday Clara officially became a member of the "no more training wheels" club...

Thursday, after a day at Silver Dollar City the kids still had energy...
There is a "what happened next" photo to go with the one above... but I'm saving it for later! :-)

Then they went fishing in grandpa's pond...

Then they did this when the wind kicked up as a storm blew in...

(don't ask... but it was grandpa's idea)

Friday Alex discovered golf...
... and he hit golf balls for well over an hour (even after it got dark - the front yard looked like a driving range with golf balls everywhere the next morning).

And finally, right before bed, Clara modeled her new dental work...
... courtesy of a trip to Incredible Pizza that we had made earlier that day with a friend of mine from high school and her girls.

Today was a full day in the car driving back to Chicago! Now we're home and although we had a great time in Missouri... we're glad to be back home!

'nite!

spring is in the air!

Oh, sorry... that's snow that's in the air... sigh.

We're off to Missouri tomorrow... see you in a week!

party time!

It's spring break time here in Chicago... some schools are wrapping their breaks up this week and others are just beginning today. So, today they were invited to a birthday party at Pump It Up! They had a fabulous time!




They filled up on pizza and cake before heading home.

We decided to take the "L" home instead of the bus. Don't they look thrilled that I'm taking their photos??? :-)
This is Clara's pose of choice when she wants to have her picture taken....
I'm not sure where that pose came from, but it's been with us a while now... sigh.

Well... Jeff's almost home from work so I'm going to run!

'nite!

wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii..............

Look at what came today....Wooooo Hooooo!

Jeff had some award money from work that he could use to "buy" gift certificates. We had been thinking about options for a while now. But last week he got the itch to spend it on a Wii system. So... after some hard core online shopping last Thursday, our order was placed and our gift certificates spent. Buying it all through Amazon, it came from three different vendors shipping by three different carriers... BUT they all showed up today! FedEx, UPS and the Postal Service... wooo hoo!

Thankfully the last of it didn't arrive until after we were done with our school work. But as soon as it came we started setting it up. Sadly, I'm a bit sore from doing the training exercises on Wii Sports... how sad is that?

Well... I'm up too late again so I'm going to take some Tylenol and head to bed!

'nite!

lots of photos, not a lot of words

Okay... I always spend too much time messing with my photos and then it ends up so late by the time I get around to posting them (okay... so I don't start working on them until the 10pm news comes on, but still... LOL).

Today we dyed our Easter Eggs! We decided to mix the colors on the window sill after we discovered that the last three were so dark we couldn't tell the shade unless we held them up to the light.

Here's Clara waiting for Alex to fetch her more water :-)
The inspector keeping an eye on Clara's work...
The mixed dyes...
Clara putting stickers on her egg... she took them off after she dyed the egg so there would be polka-dots...
Alex dying one of his eggs...
Some of the finished eggs...
They had a lot of fun with these. They used stickers to make polka-dots, they colored the white eggs with a white crayon before dying them and they even wrapped some with rubber bands to make cool white lines. Fun stuff!

In addition to the eggs... we also did this somewhat messy project for school.

And yes, Lisa... I do try to blog regularly, I find out that if I miss more than a couple days I have a hard time getting started again and the next thing I know a couple of days have turned into a couple of weeks. :-)

Okay... I'm off to bed!

'nite!

eggs...

My kids will be dying Easter eggs for the first time ever this week! I can't wait. In preparation for this, tonight I boiled 18 eggs. Jeff said 12 would be plenty but I'm not real good at boiling eggs without cracking 2 or three in the process. So, to be safe, I got one of those dozen and half packages. And, yes, I did crack two in the process :-)

Today was a very busy church day since it is Palm Sunday. The kids sang at both the 9:30 and the 11:30 services. They both did really well. Other than that... nothing much went on here. It's just the final dash to Easter and our trip to Missouri for Spring Break.

Okay... I'm boring... LOL!

'nite!

saturday

Nothing exciting here. Clara had dance again this morning (ballet and character). They started work on their recital pieces. Clara's ballet piece should be interesting as her instructor has decided to "showcase" her. Not sure exactly what that entails but I guess we'll find out! :-) I did warn her instructor that we won't be back in dance for three weeks (next week is off because of Easter and the following week we'll still be in Missouri). He gave us some homework to do while we're gone.

One of Clara's dance friends came over the play for the afternoon so I got out the camera and took a few photos, but since I don't have permission to post her friend's photo I'll just post the one I snapped of just Clara...
Tonight is family night and it's Clara's pick. Instead of a movie she has chosen to play Disney Scene It so I should probably wrap this up and get ready to play!

'nite!

another beautiful day...

... another trip to the zoo!

Oh... and another photo of the lions... LOL!
Today they were outside enjoying the sunshine though.

The flamingos were out too...
Last week it was only like 25 degrees out so they were in their little flamingo house.

Today we made it to the Farm in the Zoo to play in the barn...

Again, we couldn't stay that long since the kids had martial arts this afternoon. But it was so nice be outside in the sunshine!

Nothing else really to report... oh, we have a fun family present coming next week! I can't wait! But besides that.. nothing really! LOL!

'nite!

what's wrong with these photos?

besides the fact that Clara's hair looks like the Heat Miser's from The Year without a Santa Claus... LOL!

Hmm... could it be that in the first photo the rope is tangled around her feet and in the second one, although she's doing a fabulous tuck jump, it appears to be ill-timed given that the rope is way over her head at that moment... sigh. Hopefully as warmer days come more often we'll go outside more so she can get some more jump rope practice in... LOL!

We had a beautiful day here (for March in Chicago... I had to qualify that statement). They kids had a good time playing outside, well... until Clara launched a chunk of ice that caught Alex in the head. Then it was all over and before a full scale brawl erupted, we headed back inside for some "independent time" :-)

Tomorrow is supposed to be nice as well so we'll try to get outside again, this time hopefully without the violence... sigh.

I'm off to tuck the kids in and watch Ghost Hunters!

'nite!

life with a lego maniac

I was inspired the other day after reading my friend Pam's blog post about finding her son's Legos EVERYWHERE to do a Lego scavenger hunt in my own house.

So, this is a sampling of what I found yesterday...

These creations were found on the kitchen counter next to the coffee pot...
This one is on the little half wall thing at the top of the stairs (I found out later that it was built by Clara)...
Here is a helicopter landing pad next to Alex and Clara's math books on the dining room table...
I found this guy looking out the window...
And then there's the pile of lego people by the sliding glass door...
and the place where lego creations go to die...
(this is kind of like the salvage yard... creations go here and the kids occasionally come by for parts)

Not sure if this guy is guarding or attacking Alex's science experiments...
And finally... I'm not sure what's wrong with this guy, but I hope he gets help soon...
This is merely a sampling of what I found yesterday... I flubbed a couple of the photos and there were other random Lego creations and just piles of stuff but I just couldn't photograph it all... LOL!

And yes, Katy... Clara is doing a soap carving! :-) If you want to read more about it and see way too many photos, they're on my homeschooling blog (I just didn't want to overload the photos here).

Okay... need to start my day!

Have a good one!

ack!

I took a ton of pics today but I waited too late to edit them. Now that I'm done, I just want to go to bed instead of blogging. So, I'll leave you with one photo and I'll be back tomorrow to explain what's going on here....

any ideas? :-)

monday... done

whew... I can check another Monday off my list! And today was my last super hectic Monday... now I'm down to just hectic Mondays.... LOL!

See for the past 8 weeks we've been going to the Notebaert Nature Museum every Monday afternoon for a homeschool science class Alex was in (if you want to know more, go here). Then we rushed out the door to make it to cooking and gymnastics (which begin 15 minutes apart and end at the same time... sigh).

Each Monday Clara and I hung out in the museum with another mom from the group and her daughter. It was really, really nice. The girls became really good friends as well.

Here's Clara hanging out in the tunnel...
She was waiting for her friend to get back.

It was a good day until both Alex and Clara decided to mess around after class and we ended up being late to both cooking AND gymnastics.... sigh. Oh well!

Well... I'm off to the couch!

'nite!

progress :-)

what a difference a couple of weeks makes! :-) (here's the old post about these books)

okay... i lied :-)

Blogger will let me upload photos but only if I do them one at a time... sigh.

Today we ventured out of the city and to Aurora so Clara could go to the birthday party of one of her friends from dance. And I decided to bring my camera since I'm trying to get back into the swing of the photo-a-day thing.

Here you can see Clara in the background, riding with her friends on one of the rides at the party place...
We were there forever, but the kids had a great time. We grabbed dinner while were out there and then headed back into the city to go home.

I was glad I had my camera because I love when the city comes into view.... I always feel like I'm "home". The strange thing is, I have always had that feeling. I can remember visiting the city in college and having that feeling. I just knew after that trip that I wanted to actually live in Chicago.
Look... an iPod billboard...

and another... they're everywhere! :-)
(ignore our city stickers and the window frame in the shot above... I was having fun shooting through the front window as we drove around)

Not sure exactly where we were for this picture...
There had been an accident on the interstate and traffic was backed up so we decided to take the scenic route home.... which ended up with us momentarily "misplaced" in an industrial area :-)

Okay... photos posted... I'm heading to bed!

'nite!