just life

I have slowed down posting on this family blog, significantly...so I have a large back load of pictures to share.

 

Let's start with summer.

 We just had our first snow fall yesterday so it's fun to see the kids hot and sweaty having a water balloon fight on our lawn.

You would think it would make me miss summer, but I was sick half the time so I don't miss it at all. My kids might disagree.

Look at Reid's face in this picture. When he's really focused he often looks ticked off. Ha...

It's also sad seeing our good friends/neighbors in these pictures. They moved away last month. We miss them.

We watched their kids while they packed up their truck.

 It was cute to get them all on the couch just hanging out watching Wall-E. Hannah snuggled right up to Reid. She is half his age almost exactly. She is tall for her age...Reid is not. :)

 Having a paper airplane race was on our summer bucket list. We didn't get to most of the bucket list this year because I was sick, but we did accomplish this!

 I made Reid's plane for him and Owen made his own - of course.

This is around the time that he was obsessed with turning every piece of paper into a paper air plane. Even now, he'll randomly admit while we are doing homework that he really wants to turn our homework paper into an airplane when we're done. :) I don't let him...but it's so cute that he feels tempted to do that.

Over the summer, Redbox started carrying Wii games for $2. We've rented the Cars 2 game a couple of times.

Reid was hamming it up for me, since he really can't play the game :). I couldn't resist taking as many pictures as he was willing to pose for.

 Owen can play pretty well...and I didn't want to get in his way. 

This game is serious business to him. :)

After school started for Owen I tried to plan to do fun things with Reid while he was gone. 

 Sorting letters by colors.We talked about letters and colors and counted how many of each color. Reid loved it.

He still can't get all his colors straight. He has the most trouble with purple and green...like his brother. I fear we might have another color blind boy on our hands??? It's probably too early to tell.

On another day we made jam.

 Strawberry and nectarine freezer jam.  YUM.

Our next project was making lemonade.

 We talk about the color of lemons, the letter lemon starts with, sweet and sour {sugar and lemon}...all that fun stuff.

 Reid is a little sponge and soaks it all up.

Owen is all of a sudden very embarrassed by most of his Spiderman, super hero stuff. He doesn't even like to eat off his Spiderman plate anymore.

So, Reid has taken over all of Owen's capes and Batman gear.

 I don't even know if he really knows who he is...but he loves to pretend.

 We started a new tradition called Table Time. The idea is from Family Fun magazine. 

If the kids get ready for bed and clean up their toys by 7:00 we get to play some games and puzzles as a family before bed - it's replaced our Thursday night dollar dates. We have been bad about doing it lately - since we never make it to 7:00, but when we do it's really fun and creates great memories.

After we took the boys' fall pictures we treated them with some ice cream at Cold Stone.

I don't know how he managed to get it in his hair but...

This is not all...there's a part II coming up...