My Christmas cactus is in bloom!! You know what that means...
Christmas is coming!!!
I have been wanting to get these little puppets made since Emma was a baby and I just have never been able to get it together early enough. My mom made them for us as kids and they were always my favorite thing to pull out of our Christmas box when the decorations came out. This year I decided that if I got any Christmas crafting done it would have to be these. I finally got them done and the kids love them!!
It has done nothing but snow for days here and one by one each of us have caught the flu. As I type I am in bed and have been for 30 minutes and fully anticipate going to sleep the second I hit "publish"....and it's only 8:00pm. As any mom knows illness plus snow equals days inside. We have spent the entire week confined to the indoors and are going CRAZY, Walker especially who is the only one who hasn't gotten sick yet. So this morning I was desperate to find something that would entertain my little ones while we awaited Emma's arrival home from school. I accessed my handy dandy "kids board" on Pinterest and searched for some new activity to do while Walker whined beside me "Hurry Mom! I really need to do something fun." I quickly found an activity for both he and Lillian and we had a morning of messes, it was wonderful.
I always struggle to find things that will help Lillian learn and develop fine motor skills but never really know just how to go about it. I found this great idea on one of the mommy blogs and it worked beautifully. I was worried that she would put the little pieces in her mouth but she didn't try even once for the first 30 minutes until she got bored and then attempted to eat them, which meant that it was time to put the "sensory bin" away.
It took her a while to understand that she was allowed to play in the rice and pasta and she just spent a long time trying to put it into the shapes. She figured it out though and our kitchen quickly looked like this...
and she looked like this...
Then it was Walker's turn to do cotton ball painting. It
was the messiest thing we have done in a long time but he enjoyed it, especially after we baked them and he got to break them apart.
It is so hard sometimes to let your kids take the lead in these kinds of things. I pictured these brightly colored cotton balls in primary colors but Walker, the mixer, decided on yellow, gray, and whatever that gross color on the left is.
Seriously!! SO MESSY!!!
Sampling his creations. Don't worry, it's only water and flour.
He loved cracking them open because the inside was still all cotton bally.
I love his sweet face.
And an update on our Emma. She got an award at school last week for all of her hard work in class. Her teacher says that she is an "industrious student" who works hard and helps others. We are so proud of her!! She is such a responsible little thing and when she had to miss school on Monday because she was sick she nearly had a nervous breakdown because she would miss "work." Maybe she's a little too responsible for a 6 year old.
She was SO excited that she got to shake the Principal's hand. You would have thought he was Cinderella at Disneyland or something, it was kind of hilarious.
Monday is laundry day at our house. Every week I avoid making plans to run errands or have play dates so that I can spend the day getting our "piles and piles" of laundry done. That and so that I can spend the day cleaning up the disaster area that is inevitably left over from Sunday. I don't know what it is about Sundays but somehow the dishes always end up piled high, the kid's bedrooms look like a bomb went off and our living room looks like a Toys 'R' Us threw up all over it. Come Monday morning I have at least 3 hours worth of tidying, washing, and cleaning staring me in the face the second I get up. Perhaps I should do a little less "resting" on the Sabbath. I have done the math a number of times and as it stands I do at least 7 loads of laundry a week, that's not including emergency loads that are bound to happen from time to time, in fact if there isn't an emergency laundry situation in a week it's a miracle. Anyways, 7 loads a week X 52 weeks a year equals 364 loads of laundry in a year. Luckily, laundry is one of my favorite chores. Why, the long winded explanation of my Monday routine? I have forgotten in the last few months that my original plan was to use this blog as a journal. I have completely neglected the day to day thoughts and goings on of my life and included only those of my children, which is great but I have scrapbooks and individual journals for that. The other day while telling an especially outrageous story about Walker to my sister in law Penny she said don't forget to record that in your journal, so here I am recording it in my journal. So, while this might be more boring for those of you reading this post, one day my children will appreciate the stories and thoughts that their mother recorded for them to read one day.
The other morning, it was a Monday so like today I was hunkered down in my room folding dozens of dozens of tiny shirts, pants and socks, with Walker and Lillian playing on the bed or reading books on the floor. Walker, on these days, is often running in and out of my room getting new toys or dragging Lillian back and forth in the hallway in a laundry basket. This morning was no different until I walked into the hallway and smelled a strong and awful burning smell. In my head I frantically ticked off the things that could be on fire, the iron, no I hadn't used that yet, the stove, nope, hadn't used that either, the dryer...THE DRYER, the only appliance in the house that was running at full force and had been for hours. So I raced downstairs to get into the basement when I was stopped by the thick black smoke swirling around in our kitchen, oozing out of the microwave with a time of 45 minutes still counting down on the timer. I rushed to the microwave and threw open the door only to find my rice bean bag smoking and burning and STINKING. The smell was putrid, I retched and gagged my way to the back door and threw it outside where Bridgett began barking wildly at the smoking, crackling, popping black bag in the snow (yes, she is brilliant.) Then, because Walker had come downstairs and was doubled over hacking and coughing in the kitchen, I locked he and Lillian in a bedroom and spent the next 20 minutes trying to help the smoke escape our home. When things had settled down and I was interrogating Walker about the cause of the bean bag being in the microwave he simply said "I think Lillian probably did it." I am still trying daily to get the fire pit smell out of our kitchen and we have since found the child lock function on the microwave, not that it matters much because this morning Emma went to pull something out of the microwave and pulled the glass tray out with it, shattering it into a trillion pieces. I think something's trying to tell us to get a new microwave.
Emma and Lillian are both sick with colds. Lillian gets particularly upset when she has a cold because when she tries to suck her thumb she can't breath making it impossible for her to go to sleep. The only solution is to hold her upright until she can suck her thumb long enough to fall asleep. Last night I was attempting this tactic and instead of trying to race to get her to sleep I sat with her in our rocker and sang one song after another to her, all of my favorite lullabies, most of which come from Disney soundtracks or the Children's Songbook. My heart was so full of adoration for this beautiful, tiny girl with her sweet smelling hair and little fingers holding tightly to my wrist that I couldn't bear to put her in her crib and let her drift off to sleep on her own. It occurred to me how close our children are to our Saviour, whom they left such a short time ago and I was overcome by the blessing and privilege it is to have these perfect spirits in our home. How grateful I am to be a mother and guardian over each of our precious children and to be able to be at home with them to experience each moment in their lives, even if some of them involve microwaves and smoke and "piles and piles" of laundry.
I couldn't help but include a couple of my favorite Disney lullabies.
