Holly's Birthday Times Two

Saturday night Mitch & I took the boys to spend the night with Gigi and Granddad so that we could go out with Holly and Chris to celebrate Holly's birthday. We started the evening with dinner at Cabo's - Holly's and my favorite restaurant to go on our Mom's Night Out, so we thought that Mitch and Chris should get a chance to sample the yummy food we always enjoy without them lol. After dinner we headed to Strikes bowling, but since the place was packed with high school kids hanging out on a Saturday night, the wait was over an hour long, so we instead headed to older Rocklin and hit up the old bowling alley there. I honestly don't even know what the place is called, but "older bowling alley" works just fine. It had a good vibe - as Mitch said, "This place is middle school. It's not old and rundown enough to be old school, but not fancy and new like Strikes, so it's 'middle school.'" I bowled my highest game ever - a whoppin' 137 - so I was happy. We ended the night back at Holly & Chris' watching "Superbad," which is sadly the first non-kid movie that we have seen in a VERY long time. We had a lot of fun, and we really appreciated the babysitting favor since Gigi was feeling a little under the weather but kept the boys anyway. Thanks, Mom!



Holly, Chris and I at the bowling alley



The b-day girl and her hubby

Mitch & I enjoying our night out

Monday was Holly's actual birthday, and since she didn't have any plans, the boys and I invited her and Hattie over for pizza lunch and cupcakes. It was an absolutely perfect day: gorgeous and sunny, the kids were behaving properly and everyone was enjoying each other's company. Sawyer was especially intrigued with Hattie's pigtails and hair ribbons this time around, and he kept snuggling up next to her to play with her hair.

Everyone was having too much fun playing outside to put the kids down for naps, so by the time evening started to creep up on us the kids were pretty worn out. I noticed that they were all laying down together in the clubhouse together laughing and talking. Sawyer was pointing out all of Hattie's body parts from head to toe telling her how much he loves her: "...I love your hair, and your feet, and your legs, and your hands, and your booty..." SO funny! Both boys really love having her around, and they had an exceptionally good time yesterday. The lack of nap actually had both of them asking for bathtime early, and they went down for bed easily and without any struggles. Sutton (aka Mr. Early to Rise) actually slept until 8:15 this morning!

Saw & Hat all snuggled up together under the patio table. He was telling her "Hattie, I'm just loving you" right after Holly took this picture.

As Holly said, "He's either her boyfriend now or her gay hair stylist" LOL!

Sutton couldn't wait to get his hands on the cupckaes

The exceptionally messy and goopy cupcakes actually required a change of clothing and a good bathroom scrub-down for all the kids! They were having fun though!

Last Week w/ the Kiddos

Every day with the boys is a new adventure. I absolutely love being able to watch them grow and change, learn new things, and express their own individual creativity. We've had beautiful weather here, so we've been spending most of our time outside (and I never seem to take my camera with me when I'm in rough-and-tumble mode). We've been getting ready for Easter and working on some Spring time crafts as well as working on finishing up our garden beds so that we can get our seedlings into the ground sometime soon. Unfortunately it was too windy this weekend to use the paint sprayer to get the beds painted, so the little plants will have to wait one more weekend. Oh well...a lesson in patience for us all!



Sutton working on one of the lessons that I created - matching wooden animal beads to laminated cards. I scanned the beads into PhotoShop and then created sequencing strips for him.



Sutton loves munching on rice cakes...he calls them "cookies," so naturally his big brother needed to get his hands on one as quickly as possible too. Sawyer bit into it, took the chunk out of his mouth and inspected it, took another tentative bite, took that bite out of his mouth to inspect it, and then immediately looked at me with a confused expression and asked, "Is this paper, Mom?" LOL!



I got this idea from Chasing Cheerios awhile back, and decided to give it a try after picking up some cheap salt and pepper shakers at the dollar store. Each bottle contains a cotton ball that has been dipped into an essential oil (peppermint, lavender and orange oils). The object is to smell each shaker and match up the scents (there are two bottles with each scent). There are matching colored stickers on the bottom of each shaker so that they can self-check their work.




It's a great idea, in theory, but I should have waited until the kids weren't in the middle of springtime allergies. They really couldn't smell anything since they're too stuffed up, with the exception of the peppermint. Sawyer smelled every bottle and declared that they ALL "smells like gum."

He opted to match paint chip colors instead since he was frustrated that he couldn't smell :)

One of the boys' most requested activities lately is cutting things with scissors. We grabbed a stack of old magazines and started cutting out some of our favorite foods.

Sawyer cut me out this beautiful bouquet of flowers from the magazine cover so that we could have flowers on our refrigerator. He's concentrating really hard on getting it cut out perfectly!

When all of our favorite foods were cut out, we had fun gluing them onto paper plates for a pretend lunch. Sutton's has Jelly Bellys, oatmeal, waffles and a sandwich (that they fought over who got to have). Sawyer's has cheese, bowtie pasta (which he just discovered he likes last week), fish sticks, milk and a kiwi-berry freezer pop.

He was incredibly proud of the fact that he made himself an afternoon resting spot out of my yoga mat and Sutton's blanket (and yes, that is Sutton's potty in the background lol)

Of course, Mr. Monkey-See-Monkey-Do had to copy his big brother and make a spot for himself too




Don't worry little seedlings, we'll get you into the ground someday soon!

Yum, Cookies!

I finally succeeded at creating an awesome chocolate chip cookie that satisfies the requests of all of our family members - chewy, crunchy, big, thick and chocolately, of course. If you're interested, I posted the recipe on MonkeyGeorge. Enjoy!

Play Date at Hattie's

It was cold and windy this morning,so Holly & I thought it would be a perfect time for the boys to visit Hattie and snuggle up to watch her new copy of "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" (a.k.a. "The Chicka Wah Wah Movie" according to Sawyer, who has been begging to see it every time he sees the commercial). Since we hadn't been over to Hattie's house in awhile though, the boys had other plans, naturally. We quickly nixed the idea of calm and quiet movie time, and the boys set about exploring all of the fun and awesome toys that Hattie has. Sawyer is especially fond of her play vacuum cleaner, doctor kit, and anything new and exciting he could find that made noise (drums, trumpets, train whistles, etc.).





For Sutton the highlight of the day was having another opportunity to ride on Hattie's Rody Horse. You can see from the look of pure joy on his face that he has fallen in love with Rody. I can see why he loves it though - it's sturdy, bouncy, brightly colored & just his size. Honestly, since the thing supports up to 300 lbs, I'll admit that I've taken my fair share of turns on the Rody Horse too...and I want one lol. We haven't decided yet what we're going to get Sutton for his 2nd birthday next month, so maybe we'll have to look into getting him a Rody of his own.



Yeeeee-Haw!




Nice Horsey

Sawyer loves it almost as much as Sutton does...but not quite!

We came back home after having lunch at Holly's house, and Sutton went down for a nap while Sawyer and I did some painting projects and calmed down enough to settle in for a little movie time. Holly let us borrow her copy of The Lion King, so Sawyer finally got to see the story that goes along with the singing Simba stuffed animal that Sutton has. It was funny to watch him singing along with songs from a movie he hasn't even seen before, but he was definitely enjoying himself. It looks like the rest of the week is going to warm back up a bit, so we'll be busy soaking up the sunshine, hopefully taking a few more lunches to the park, and getting started on the rest of our Easter crafts and decorations.


Working on a pinwheel for our new garden beds and giving me the "put the camera down already" look lol.

Blog #2

Well, I've finally done it and branched out. I created another blog as a place where I can show off some more step-be-step photos and tutorials of fun projects that both the boys and myself have done (that way I'll spare the grandparents so many in-depth how-to photos on the family blog!). I've tossed the idea around for months, but I hadn't had time to put it all together until this weekend. I have gotten so many wonderful project ideas, teaching tools and family activities from other bloggers and artists websites, and I wanted to have a place where I could possibly inspire someone else with the things we have created. So, without further ado, come take a peek at blog #2: Monkey George (the place for all things fun and curious!).



My first project: Easter Egg Banner

Spring...It's Kind of My Thing

I love all things Spring: the new leaves bursting from the trees, the warm sunshine, and the perfect jeans-and-tank-top temperature, but the thing I love most about this Spring is our new garden. Mitch has spent the last two weekends working through spurts of rain and sunshine to finish up the boxes for our new fruit & vegetable garden. I've got all of the seeds started, and we'll thin them out and see what actually makes it into the ground in a couple of weeks once they've started sprouting some more and there's some dirt in the beds. Right now I've got watermelon, cantaloupe, zucchini, tomatoes, yellow squash, wax beans, green beans, snow peas and eggplant as well as some mammoth sunflowers and herbs. We'll also be buying some pepper plants and a whole bed-full of strawberries and planting carrot seeds once we get the ground ready. I'm so excited - hopefully it will be worth all the effort! We've previously been successful growing zucchini, peppers and yellow squash...and I think that we managed to have one teeny little watermelon once. Hopefully we'll have lots of produce this summer!

New leaves on our baby trees

Mitch re-purposed our old broken down bike trailer into a handy garden cart for me - love it!

The only things the garden beds need now are a coat or two of paint and some good soil!

Starting my garden from seed this year

The forerunner in the seed sprouting race is currently these yellow wax beans

Despite loads of sunscreen, we all managed to get a little too pink in the sunshine while we celebrated the first day of Spring with a giant Play Doh party outside.



I even manged to get in a little Spring Cleaning this weekend: I re-organized and labeled my Montessori and preschool activities cupboard.

More Photos

My favorite new picture of the week



I love it when I sneak up on them, and they're involved in something productive together :)



This was one of Daddy's great ideas: jumbo sized lollipops at precisely two minutes before bedtime. Yum!




About three seconds later he used his lollipop as a drum stick on the table, shattering it into about a million sticky pieces that Mommy had to clean up.




I just can't believe how tall this kiddo has gotten - he takes up more than half of the big couch now!

Sawyer in his "U-is-for-unicorn" headband that he made and proudly wore around the house that day

The very best part of helping Mommy make brownies

This picture here would be of Nathan teaching my three-year-old how to shoot an air gun. This clearly was another one of Daddy's great ideas (notice how closely he's watching them). Daddy is sooooo grounded.

Who, me? I didn't stomp in the puddles, I swear.

Misc. Pictures

My antibiotics have kicked in, and I'm finally starting to feel better - yay! Now I've got some blogging to catch up on! I also have a lot of work and housework to catch up on, so I'll make it quick and just post some photo highlights from the past week :)



Sawyer riding his first real carnival ride at the St. Patrick's Day carnival in Rocklin on Saturday. Naturally, he chose to ride in the fire engine car!



I love his serious expression and his backwards pot holder. He looked at me and said "Cooooking, Mommy. Back! Hot!"



This kid said "Take a picture of me, Mom. I'm rocking out!"

Our coke bottle birdfeeders are almost empty already, thanks to about six different types of birds that have been visiting frequently. The pigeons definitely eat the most!

On Monday we made our birdie friends some new special treats to hang from the trees.

The boys have found a new love - yoga! Here they're getting ready for a morning session.

Sawyer really gets into it, and he works hard to make sure he's doing it just like the video! I want to get him these Yoga Kids dvds so he can have something a little more suited for a 3-year-old instead of the "Stress Relief Yoga" that he's doing here lol

Tandem rides on the "R2v" are commonplace these days, even though they weigh so much that the thing barely moves with both of them on it!

A basket full of empty containers and lids...time to match 'em up!

If I'd have known how much he would love this (and for how many hours he'd be entertained!) I'd have done this ages ago! He must have come back and done this activitity ten times before eventually taking the bottles into his play kitchen and "cooking" with them.

All finished!

Watching Mr. Caterpillar scoot across the patio