Happy Birthday Eliana!

Happy Birthday to Eliana!! We celebrated this weekend, and she had some friends over for a jewelry-themed party.

Her cake was a jewelry box filled with rings and yummy candy necklaces.

She's 5!

The girls made bead bracelets and also played pin the jewelry on the doll.

Eliana got some fun gifts and quite a few were crafts! She started painting her little piggy bank right away.

She also worked on her stained glass paintings and some more bracelets and necklaces of course!

Karis' favorite joke

Karis loves to laugh at the kids and they found a joke that she loves!!

Check out her wrinkled up nose and head nodding when she laughs. She definitely approves!

Pump it up - Library days

The kids got to go to Pump-It-Up with their reading rewards again this summer. What a great prize - The kids just love going!

Eliana on the slide

Caleb ready to race

Caleb flying down the slide!

Joanna, our neighbor, and Eliana

Gourmet Lunch

Here's an email I got from Joel yesterday which had "I must be tired" in the subject line.

He said:

"I just nuked my peanut butter sandwich. I forgot that it wasn’t pizza. I packed some pizza for snack, but forgot that I had made PB for lunch. Duh. Nothing like a piping hot peanut butter sandwich."

Big Brother

Ok, so Caleb is a great big brother and just loves Karis. He gives her tons of kisses every day.

But now I know why the youngest child sometimes needs their own space.

Aww, so cute!

Ok, that's good.

Let me out of here!

Now!

Piano man

He just looked so serious - I had to take a picture.

Playdough flowers & cousins

We recently "dissected" a couple of flowers to learn about all the different parts. In the pictures below, we made playdough flowers with all the different parts like the sepals, petals, stamen, carpel and ovule. The playdough I made was a bit too sticky, but it worked okay. We also used q-tips and construction paper for different parts. We were watching the cousins that day, too, so Samantha got to try one.

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Caleb

Eliana

Joanna

Cousin Sam

Cousin Chloe and Karis. Karis likes to help feed the baby.

Bedtime delays

Kids always seem to have another reason to delay going to bed or something that gets them out of bed. Here's one excuse that we found while reading "Peter Pan" that Eliana has in common with the lost boys from the Neverland.

"Every boy had adventures to tell; but perhaps the biggest adventure of all was that they were several hours late for bed. This so inflated them that they did various dodgy things to get staying up still longer, such as demanding bandages...."

Eliana is the queen of needing another bandaid. She can always find a spot that needs one and it seems to be when she is supposed to be in bed! She laughed when Joel pointed this out in the story - She knew!!

She's got a belly button

Want to see my belly button?

I'm looking...

Still looking...

See!

Joanna's back

My sister e-mailed today asking if Joanna was still at camp =) Guess I haven't posted in a while!!