"We love because he first loved us." I John 4:19

Happy Valentines Day!

Here is how we spent our day....We talked a lot about this verse and made some valentine heart decorations. Actually, only Ella did...Caleb preferred to do dot-painting. He is obsessed with this...and goes through my dot-art books like water. I have to limit him to only 2 pictures each day. I highly recommend these for ages 3-5. We made chocolate covered strawberries and pretzels. This was super fun, easy and yummy! Our kids had a complete sugar overload today.
Love to you all!

Birthdays - 3 & 5

I have been meaning to post about Ella's 5th birthday, but if I do, I need to post about Caleb's 3rd birthday party too, since I never got to that either last July. So here is a little post about their special days...

Caleb has always been completely into cars, so we did a cars birthday theme. We had a bouncy house inside (borrowed from a friend), played "pin the car on the racetrack", swam in our blow-up pool and painted some little wooden cars. He had a great time... He also received the movie "Cars" on his birthday...that was a whole new world for him!









Ella had a princess tea party birthday. I had intended to actually use two different tea sets I have, but for lack of time and the breakable chance, we didn't do a real tea party. But, the kids did not seem to notice. The little guests wore princess dresses to the party or borrowed Ella's. We painted fingernails, decorated princess crowns and they danced. We played pass the slipper (like hot potato), did a princess memory game and painted princess magnets. We read a book about being "God's princess" and had our tea party. We had fruit wands, crackers and cheese cut into the shape of hearts, iced animal cookies, cranberry/orange scones with whipped cream, raspberry lemonade "tea" and of course a princess cake. It was so much fun and the girls were so cute!

Thank you to my family for helping so much on that day. It was a lot of work taking care of all
those princesses!

Thankful for snow

We got snow in February again this year! We were all very excited this morning and thankful because we had prayed for snow...

Here are a few pictures from our morning. The kids did not last too long outside since we do not really have the best clothes for snow and I didn't have time to double layer them. But, they did make snow angels, play on the play-scape, throw snowballs and enjoy snow ice cream. We even found some yummy caramel sauce in the pantry to top off our snow ice cream. Very yummy!

Will crawl for food!

Silas will be 10 months next week. He has been rolling all over the place for a while now, but just last week started crawling forward. Today I caught him finally making some tracks more quickly. He will apparently crawl for food!

Lightening McQueen, a princess and a pumpkin

Here are a few shots of the kids in their outfits for trick-or-treat day yesterday. Ella was a princess once again this year. She likes to pick one of her princess dresses from her dress-up box for her outfit...easy, not much work for me. She was "Sleeping Beauty" this year.

Caleb was of course, Lightening McQueen. He is absolutely obsessed with the Disney "Cars" movie and characters. His outfit took some work. We transformed a box of diapers into a car. When he first saw it, all he could say was "whoa". He was pretty much speechless, which is pretty impressive to be able to do to Caleb. He really enjoyed his outfit, although his tires kept falling off. Poor design on my part. I should have just glued the wheels on, but I thought it would be fun for him if they turned.

Silas was a pumpkin. He just sat in the stroller the whole time and did great. He didn't know what was going on....

We have lived in our house about 6 years now and this was the first year we went trick-or-treating in our own neighborhood. We know quite a few families around the neighborhood so it was fun to see them all out last night. A few families from our weekly bible study that meets at our house on Sunday night also joined us. It was a fun time last night!

Pumpkin Pie Spiced Playdough

I wanted to share a yummy smelling playdough spice recipe I randomly found online. I had to make pumpkin pie spiced playdough for Ella's preschool fall party this week.

I used a playdough recipe from a friend and then added my spice to the dry ingredients and the food coloring to the wet ingredients before I cooked together on the store. It smells wonderful...perfect for the season right now.

RECIPE FOR PUMPKIN PIE SPICE...

For a regular batch of playdough (2c. or so recipe, I would half the below ingredients)

Mix 4 tablespoons ground cinnamon, 4 teaspoons ground nutmeg, 4 teaspoons ground ginger & 3 teaspoons ground allspice. In a small bowl, combine all ingredients and mix well. Add to dry ingredients.

For color, add food coloring to the wet ingredients. (2 parts yellow to one part red - maybe about 6 squirts of yellow and 3 squirts of red)

Enjoy!

First Day of Preschool

Ella started preschool today. She was very excited and ready to go. She really did not look back when we dropped her off today. There were no tears from her...just from me, as I tried to take a few pictures and not be a silly, crying mommy. When I picked her up today, she said she had fun. She mentioned music time, so I guess that was a big hit. I asked her if she wanted to keep going and she said, "just one more time and then I want to stay home with you". Hope she will keep enjoying it when she realizes it is every week, twice a week!Caleb, Silas and I had a nice time at home while she was gone. Silas slept of course and Caleb and I built towers and knocked them down with trucks and practiced counting bears. He listened to some records on the new record player (see last post) while I cleaned our shower. Fun for me, right?! No, it was good because I don't get a whole lot of time to do this.

I am also thinking I need to start thinking of a new plan for home-preschooling Caleb soon now that we are just about done with BFIAR. Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated.