Spring is coming!

The winter is almost behind us, and I'm so excited that the kids have been able to play outside more!

I am so, so thankful for a very play-able backyard.

The kids can spend hours out there playing with the sand and water.  And we just added a little garden!  Pictures soon.

Visiting Miss Betty

We visit Miss Betty every Wednesday at a senior center in town.  She loves the kids.  She calls them, "my babies."



I can't believe Charlie was only a few months old when we first started going.  Now he's close to walking.  She used to adore holding him on her lap the whole time.  Now she's happy when he just looks at her and smiles.

She doesn't take it personally when the kids aren't overly friendly with her, but she hangs in there and tries to engage them.



She must have been a very feisty young person, because she does not get (for real) scared when the kids want to play games that look like this:

More Tinkergarten and General Update

We had Tinkergarten this morning.  

The instructor brought "forest putty" (aka home made play doh), and the kids had fun hiding nature treasures in their big ball of putty and then surprising Daniel and me with them.  It was fun.  

Charlie enjoyed squishing his fingers all through the putty.

Elliot woke up totally hoarse, and his little voice sounds so cute to me.  

Lucy and Elliot had been looking forward ALL WEEK to Tinkergarten.  They wanted to shout their names during the introduction song time.  

They are usually quite reserved and quiet during that time, but somehow they got it in their heads that it would be hysterical for them to shout out their names at the proper time and surprise everyone.  They are so funny.

Oliver has been talking more and more!  Speech therapy is really helping, I think.  The therapist comes to our house once/week and plays very intentionally with Oliver, naturally incorporating lots of sounds and speech through play.  

She very seldom asks him to repeat something but rather models talking and noise-making during play.  

It's really interesting to observe how she does it.  His vocabulary has exploded, so that's great; we're focusing a little more on his articulation now.  That is still lacking, but he's improving.  

I resigned from my position with MinuteClinic, and it's lovely to look at the calendar now and know that I'll get to be a part of our weekend plans more consistently!  There may be something new for me in the coming months, but I'm not sure what.  

The timing is great, because Daniel also quit his job!  He is working full time for Sprinkl now--his side project he began a couple years ago with his friend and business partner.  

It's just a whole new chapter for us!  It feels good.  It feels really good being done with pregnancies and having babies!  Our family is complete (at least barring any big God-given surprises), and that feels amazing.  

Homeschool is going great.  It takes very little time out of the day, and the kids are getting to play outside a lot.  Since that was my main reason for wanting to homeschool, it's nice to see it happening.  Today is one of those rare days when the weather is gorgeous, the afternoon is open, and we're all home.  Thank goodness no one is in soccer yet, though I suppose that's fun in its own way.   

Tinkergarten

We tried out a new class today -- Tinkergarten.



It's all about getting kids outdoors and helping them to "just be kids" in the way that former generations did.



Kids are usually so directed in their activities now, and very little of their time is devoted to unstructured, imaginative free play outside.




So Tinkergarten basically encourages that.




It's not completely unstructured, but the direction given is flexible and minimal.



In this class, the leader read Stone Soup to the kids and then encouraged them to make their own stone soup!



They pretended various forest finds were celery, carrots, potatoes, etc.  And they stirred up their watery, muddy soups with sticks.



It was really fun!

Sandy Beach at Little Elm

I know I don't have to give y'all my excuses for why it's been a long time since I blogged last.



I know that if you read my blog, you recognize that I have four littles... none of whom even potty completely by themselves, let alone get snacks or drinks, print coloring pages, find markers, sort fights, get into car seats, etc.

So I won't bother with excuses.  I'll just say it's nice to finally post these pictures!



We tried out the Sandy Beach at Little Elm a couple weeks ago.  My sister Heidi was here, and she helped me with the bags and bags of stuff you have to bring to the beach when your littles carry nothing and in fact need to be carried.



We had a nice time!  It was hot, of course. And the sun was intense, of course.  But overall I much preferred this experience to the actual ocean beach we visited last year.  The water was calmer, and I wasn't burdened with the constant concern about salty water burning their eyes.  The sand-in-the-eyes is a concern always.  But at least there wasn't the salt and the big waves.



One downside to the lake is that it's not clear.  When the kids go underwater, they are completely hidden.  That was unnerving.  But they didn't go underwater much, and they stayed together and relatively close to Heidi and me anyways.



Charlie really got into his own groove, crawling into the gentle waves and pausing to sit peacefully in waste-high water while he looked around.



All the kids seemed to really enjoy playing in the sand.  Building, scooping, and just feeling the grit between their fingers.



Lunch time came, and we got the kids showered off and piled into the car, thinking if we could just get them home we'd be able to actually get truly clean and dry before our next event for the day.  Unfortunately, I had no idea the funeral procession was underway for the 5 police officers killed by the sniper.  We spent a long time on the road getting home.  



There wasn't time to rest much at home before our next outing of the day.  But the kids did okay anyways.



It was really fun to be able to grant their request for a "trip to the beach" without actually driving 6 hours to the coast.  I definitely want to go to this beach again some time.  I'll just need to make sure I have a helper then, too!

Baking, Construction, and the Cold Outdoors

 Brrrr.  It's been cold outside.  I mean, it's January -- so, yeah. 



But the kids have reached this delightful age where they can play happily outside for quite a while.  And that's nice. 



They play a combination of construction and baking.  They measure things like "baking soda" (sand) and "flour" and "sugar" into dump trucks, which then carry the ingredients over to the "cookie sheet" (spare baseboard pieces) and dump them into little piles. 
 

Or into muffin tins, depending on what they're baking that day. 



It's a really cute little mixture of stereotypical "girl play" and "boy play."  Makes me happy that both genders seem to enjoy both types of play. 

One of our favorite purely construction play scenarios is "making a road."  First comes the bull dozer to clear debris and "large rocks," leaving them in a pile.  Then a loader lifts the rocks into a dump truck, which carries them away. 



Then a grader comes to make the roadway all nice and flat, then the paver, and finally the roller.  Since we don't own a grader, paver, or roller truck, there's a lot of imagination and improvisation there.  It's pretty fun. 


Who knew becoming a mom would broaden my imaginative play horizons so much.   

Splash Pad

We're in the middle of a week of rain here.  A tropical storm (Bill) is actually to blame for it.  But the morning before the rain started, we met up with some friends for a splash pad play date. 



The water was heated!!!  That was SO nice, b/c it was in the 70's and not really warm enough to be walking around wet and enjoying it. 



We'd had swim lessons just before this, so the kids were pretty tired to begin with.  But they did have a lot of fun playing in the water and running around before they completely pooped out.



I think Oliver was especially relieved to be able to splash and have fun with the big kids without constantly being on the verge of drowning.



And Lucy loved running through the spray rings.  She even held Elliot's hand to help him get through them, too.  He wasn't as much a fan.



Of the three of them, Elliot is my really cold-sensitive one.  Objectively speaking, his lips turn blue and he shivers MUCH faster than the other two.



But he still managed to have lots of fun before he was done.



These spray grounds are one of the few things I like about being a parent in today's society.  They are amazing.



Chlorinated, heated water shooting out of a no-slip, padded surface you can run on.  I mean... if there's some way these could be improved, I don't know what it would be.



We were stuck inside all day today (because I turned down the dozen or so requests to go play outside in the rain).  So I'm glad the kids at least got this outdoor fun earlier this week. 



Today was pretty rough.  I'm hopeful tomorrow is easier.  As long as swim lessons and gymnastics aren't canceled, I think we'll be ok. 



The house cleaner comes in the morning, and we have a play date that will keep us out of the house most of the afternoon/evening. 


Which means tomorrow night we'll be sleeping in a CLEAN house!  How nice does that sound??



Amazing.  I'll tell you how it sounds.  Amazing.