Christmas in July (7/7-7/9)

We made an adjustment to our summer daily schedule this week.  I'm now scheduling one big project each day for the afternoon.  In the morning, the kids get up and I make a list of what they need to get done for the morning and a deadline for when it needs to be done.  Workbooks, some reading, a few chores, and suddenly it's lunchtime.  This seems to be working pretty well for us, and the kids like having all their stuff done in the morning.

Jonathan being crafty.

The beginning of our week, our big project was to do some Christmas crafts.  Every year at Christmas, we have tons of projects and crafts that we want to do but we end up running out of time to get them done.  So this year we had our first ever Christmas in July craft days on Monday and Wednesday.

Emily working on a
Christmas craft.

Benjamin likes penguins.

Abigail is busy working.

Monday, we set up five different crafts in stations around the table.  Emily and Jonathan can pretty much figure out the instructions, which left me free to help Abigail and Benjamin.  Ben helped with a couple things, then was happy to go play with other stuff.  Abigail made a few, then got tired of gluing.  Emily and Jonathan sat and worked until it was time to clean up for dinner.

One of the picture clues
from FHE.

Monday night was Family Home Evening and Jay was in charge of the lesson.  He took close up pictures of lots of things around the house on his phone.  The kids had my phone and he would text them a picture.  They had to go find what it was, take a picture, and send it back to him.  It was hysterically funny listening to them whispering and giggling as they figured out the pictures.

Tuesday we went to the free movie at the Palladium, which was The Pirates: Band of Misfits.  The two older kids enjoyed it, but it was a little over the heads of the younger two.  Oh well-- it was free!

Starting the transformation.

In the afternoon, it was a little stormy, so we didn't head to the pool.  Instead
we started painting the master bedroom.  Good-bye to the ugly brown!  Jay is the master painter and got two walls finished by the evening.  The rest will get done another day.

Abby and Jonathan and the
mutant ninja
gingerbread men.

Wednesday started with workbooks and chores, then we did more of our Christmas in July crafts.  We had some to finish from Monday and two new ones.  Ben was starting to come down with the crud that Jonathan and I had, so he didn't do much.  Emily and I set up a snowman assembly line and worked away.  Jonathan and Abigail realized that some of the gingerbread men weren't cut correctly and made an army of mutant ninja gingerbread men!

Emily working on her
snowman assembly line.

Early dinner, gymnastics, baths, bed finished off our Wednesday and this part of Christmas in July.

A Fabulous 4th of July

On July 3, we were back to "normal" since all our company was gone.  I decided to give the kids the rest of the week off from workbooks since the week was almost over anyway.  Both Emily and Jonathan still had some thank you notes to finish up from birthday parties, so they worked on those for the morning.  After lunch, we made some fun shirts for the 4th.  The instructions didn't exactly work, but they still turned out pretty cute!  The kids each picked their own colors, so only Emily's was super patriotic.  (She was very concerned about this.)

After working on shirts, Jon, Abby, and Ben disappeared to play.  Emily had enjoyed the patriotic craft so much that she wanted to keep crafting.  She did some research and figured out a wreath that she could make.  I helped her print the stars out from the computer, but she did the rest of the work and design by herself.  She spent all afternoon coloring stars!  We did take a break in the afternoon to try some fruity yogurt drinks, which were pretty delicious.

Friday morning we had a slow start.  All of us were tired from a busy couple of weeks, and Jay had the day off.  After a breakfast of banana bread waffles, we went to the store to get groceries for the weekend and paint for Jay and my bedroom.  (It's needed painting since we moved in and we finally decided what color we wanted.)  After lunch, everyone had some quiet time so they'd be ready for fireworks and a late night.

The patriotic crew in their new shirts.

Jay built a sandbox for the kids last spring.  It was starting to fall apart in spots and needed some improvements, so Friday afternoon he started tearing it apart to put it back together again.  He had plenty of helpers!  Of course, they were more interested in playing in the sand than actually putting the sandbox back together!  Jay did a beautiful job-- he put a new liner in the sandbox, attached a lid, and started putting a walkway around it.  It should give the kids plenty of playtime.



It was super hot, so we made some iced hot chocolate for our snack.  Jay is usually at work when we have our crazy snacks, so he was amused to get to participate.  The kids thought the whipped cream was the best part of this one!

Our favorite part of most holidays is the food.  Independence day means cooking out!  We had an amazingly delicious dinner.  Emily had helped cut up vegetables for the pasta salad, so we felt like it was a group effort.

After dinner, the kids all got baths and put on comfy clothes so they'd be ready for fireworks.  Even Benjamin was excited to go this year.  Jay packed everyone up and off they went.  (I'd had a touch of Jonathan's crud all week and wasn't feeling up to sitting out in the heat.)  It had been raining and thunderstorming off and on all afternoon, so we didn't know if there would be delays with the fireworks.  They went off on time, but they all felt a little let down this year; the show wasn't as good as some years.  All four kids barely made it to bed before crashing.

Saturday we were planning on cleaning and organizing our room so that we can get ready to paint.  Jay decided to start outside finishing the sandbox project while the sun was on the other side of the house.  Even without the sun beating down on him, he came in dripping.  But the sandbox area is finished and beautiful!  (Except for 3 more bricks where he ran out...)

Meanwhile, I worked on our room.  Somehow everything of everyone's ends up on top of my dresser!  I got all of it sorted out and then decided that I needed some more storage containers.  A run to Target and Michael's and I came home with four containers and two picture frames.  More organization to happen in the future!

After all the excitement of the last couple days, the kids had trouble settling down to sleep Saturday night, except Ben who was asleep in about 2 minutes.  It was especially hard since a lot of the neighbors were still shooting off fireworks and we could hear the rain delayed show from Fulshear.  Jay and I had no problems, though!  All that cleaning is hard work!

It was a great 4th weekend and back to reality on Monday!

Aunties are Awesome! (June 30-July 2)

Saturday night, we put
Emily's hair in pin
curls.  It still curls pretty
well!

Emily in her new church
clothes.  She's getting so
grown up!

Auntie Rachel was here for a visit at the same time as Grandma and Grandpa, so the kids didn't get to see as much of her as we do on some visits.  But she stayed for a few days after Jay's parents, so we crammed in as much Auntie fun as we could in the few days we had.

Monday we met Momo, Popo, Rebecca, and Rachel at the Katy Mills Mall for a walk and a little shopping.  We had a pretty good trip, except that Jonathan thought that everyone spent way too much time looking at stuff.  Once we'd done a round at the mall, we headed over to Momo and Popo's house for lunch and playtime.  Everyone was happy to have TWO aunts to play with.  Emily found a puzzle to work on, so she and I, and eventually Rachel, spent most of the afternoon putting the puzzle together upstairs.  We had an awesome pasta dinner.  Then we had a fun Family Home Evening lesson about reverence with Rebecca.  She had made a really fun slideshow for her primary class with examples of how to be reverent and not to be quite so reverent.  We all enjoyed the fun pictures.  Dessert was an amazing Boston cream cake.  All of us wanted to eat the whole thing!  Emily and I snuck back upstairs to work on the puzzle some more until it was time to go.

Does Rachel have a
future as an architect?

Tuesday Emily and Jay went to Splashway Water Park with some friends, leaving the three and me at home.  Jonathan hates water slides, I'm not big on water parks, and the two littles are really too young to enjoy it, so we had decided that Emily and Jay could just have a father daughter day.  They had a great time.  (Emily wrote all about it for the family blog.)

Rachel and her fan club

Since Emily was gone, the other kids pretty much had a free day while I got some stuff done around the house.  Jonathan spent most of the day playing with Legos.  He loves to create different creatures and buildings.  Abby and Ben played with him some of the time and also played with the play kitchen and their other toys.  They all got along pretty well and we had a pretty good day.  I worked on some job applications, cleaned out my desk, balanced the checkbook, and played with the kids.  The only bump in our day was bedtime; Abby was sure that she needed to stay up until Emily got home.  Eventually she settled down, though.  Jay and Emily got home about 9:30.

The puzzle we did this week.  550 pieces.  We were missing
one, which isn't bad considering I think this puzzle is
about 20 years old!

Wednesday was Rachel's last day in Texas, so the kids and I wandered up to spend the morning at Momo and Popo's house again.  Emily and I finished the puzzle we had started on Monday.  The kids played with the aunties.  After lunch, it was time for Rachel to go to the airport.  We said our good byes and headed for home.

We had a quiet afternoon before gymnastics in the evening.  Everyone was sad that all our company is gone for the summer.  But we're looking forward to other projects!