art imitates life

First things first.... a trip to the doctor ended up in the cards today for Punk. X-rays were taken and the doctor is pretty confident (99%) that he just sprained his wrist. HUGE sigh of relief! He is off gym for the rest of the week and was told not to attend Saturday's soccer game. He can still attend his first track meet on Monday and can go back to soccer on Tuesday. I feel SO much better knowing that everything is going to be ok and that he just needs to keep the wrist wrapped for a few days. Totally feeling like we dodged a major bullet this time.

Someone is going to be an amazing daddy someday.

The littles, totally unaware of any bullet  dodging, enjoyed a very pleasant morning outside with their paints. Pork, who probably was fondly reminiscing about our vacation this morning, just couldn't seem to leave little Yoshi behind. He found his sister's mei tai carrier and brought me the stuffed toy asking "Pack? Pack?" How can you say no to that?

I think that we ended up spending almost an hour in the sun painting beautiful masterpieces. Our art gallery hung on the garage all afternoon, waiting to dry. SweetPea had a blast painting her new favorite animal "black tip reef sharks" while Pork's art was a wonderful hodge podge of color on the paper, trees, grass, garage door, etc.

Days like today have me yearning even more for a consistent rise in temperatures. So hard to believe that this time last year, our weather had already had enough days hot enough to allow the kids plenty of water time. This year? Nothing yet. I know that its coming and that I need to be patient but spring sport season puts me in the mood for, well, spring weather. And I am not sure that the groundhog and I see eye to this year on what constitutes "spring".

tonight... tonight... we leave TONIGHT

Tonight is going to be BUSY! We still haven't settled completely on a departure time but we are thinking about midnight. Totally is going to depend on when hubby can get to bed so he can catch a few hours before our grand vacation. Breathe.. I need to breathe! Everything that should be done is now done minus packing the car and that has to wait until its here in the driveway. Kids are packed, I am packed, hubby is mostly done.... Animals have a scheduled care giver for each day.... Everyone is over-excited and doesn't think that they will sleep until we return... Yep, its vacation time!

rub a dub dub... two kiddies in the tub

Since my enthusiasm has been rubbing off on the littles, I decided to try something extra special today to give them something tangible to be excited about.... homemade bath-time body paint!

First, let me say that the recipe that I tried wasn't that great. It needed a bit lot of tweaking. And it didn't seem to "stick" well at all. But... it did serve the purpose of entertaining the littles while I bathed them and got them ready for tonight. Best of all, Pork actually liked the scent of the body paint so he was more than willing to paint things with it. I may need to see about making our own finger paints here and scenting them with essential oils to see if that will help him to play and discover more.

every Princess deserves a castle

Acrylic paints + one busy 2 year old = one messy kitchen table but a wonderful morning

Since today might be our last "non-structured" day for a while, I figured that it was a good time to break out the ceramics and paints and let SweetPea totally go to town. And it was a major success! I am definitely going to have to start thinking about getting her an easel and a smock as one of her birthday presents... or maybe wait and build her a painting area this summer in the garage. She adores coloring and doing any type of crafts and the painting especially seemed to be soothing... maybe because its not a "free choice" activity.

She also really surprised me today but showing me that she understands the concept of addition! While playing with some buttons this morning, she told me that she had three green buttons. Which she did. Then she showed me that she also had one yellow button. And that three green buttons "put with" one yellow buttons makes "four buttons for SweetPea". Wow! It makes me feel better about my choice to begin some light preschool work with her because she is obviously ready!