Just a little late sharing but… we always make a bit of a fuss. I know that we should show love and affection year round, which we do. But it is nice to reinforce the need to SHOW this emotion with a month of careful labeling of Valentines, discussion of how to show we care and a slough of themed worksheets! Which I will share some links to, of course. 

We have a few traditions we do each year. Pictures in red and white clothes, of course.

A red and white lunch… this gets tricky as I don’t like to make the same thing every year. This year I splurged on Swedish pancakes, strawberry jam and chocolate from IKEA, heart shaped cakes, strawberries and whipped cream, those awful candies with words on them and pink lemonade. 

We spend half the day crafting. This coincided with our once a year (at least) request to decorate t shirts. I don’t force a theme on those but let them go wild. This year I picked a new set of rainbow thinner point markers and Gavin proved that they were a rather smart buy. 

With older kids now (oh my the twins are 13!!!) we are able to leave them to their own devices from time to time. So Ken and I made them walking tacos and rented the movie Storks for them, snuck out and went to Khan’s Mongoli Grill for the first time in FOREVER. We ate way too much and had a lovely time. 

When we got home it was time for cake! Yup, full on spoiling of the kids this year. 

Ken and I didn’t really exchange gifts. He says I cheated because I made him this heart.

I had to laugh as earlier in the week he offered me some shopping on Amazon. It just happened to show up on Valentine’s Day. So BAM my present. 

The kids got some Valentines in the mail, and exchanged with each other. We put the fairies and Hello Kitty Aunty Holly sent us out for decoration and had to have a fashion show of the new tops from Gammie.

All in all a fun day! I just hope our mailed Valentines make it to everyone. Poor Ken had a few trips to the post office this month!!! Now for the worksheets!

Activity Village has a whole section for Valentines – they have gone to a pay format but it is so worth it HERE

My collection that includes past years choices on Education.com HERE

EnchantedLearning (also pay for) HERE

February 22-25

What to do on a weekend when we plan to be home for it? Well… have company! Childhood friend Christopher and his wife Renee who is due any day with their 3rd (boy) and their sons Nathan and Evan. They came over for lunch and playtime. Younger than our boys the kids still managed to have a lot of fun. Of course Skylanders came out and Legos and such. It was nice to have company over where the adults could just sit around and chat (or craft).

Walking Tacos

We ended our Saturday calmly with a movie. Really not much to report beyond a great visit with old friends.

Sunday was totally a crafty day… after Sunday school. I had to get EVERYTHING out and package up my big commission from a friend up north… she requested I make her a variety of critters for her to gift etc this year… I think I covered the spectrum and had a blast honing my skills while doing it. Is it ever hard to wait until she gets it to find out her thoughts!!!

And then for a more local (but still mailing away) craft… one I have not done in ages – an infant knotted tutu. Using glitter tulle so I am on the hunt for the escaped glitter now. Really glitter is EVIL!

Monday was back to work… and back to swimming for the twins. I am really impressed how much more RELAXED they are each time.

We had some more sporty drawing to enjoy. Art for Kids (on right) put up a stick figure figure skating… something Trinity was quick to say SHE wanted to draw.

We decided to create our own Olympic medals. I love the 4 different interpretations… Zander’s all had his name on them, Gavin recreated the official ones for this year… the other two were equally creative. I got our template from Activity Village HERE. We used the 3 sizes of circles to show the different places as I really didn’t want to print out enough that we had 4 sets of large circles!

Emanuel and I are working on our Magic Treehouse dinosaur themed story still. It is so much fun reading one on one with him. His own reading skills are increasing by leaps and bounds!

We added a new animal to our Wild Kratts list – the Meadow Vole. The twins have come up with a new idea along the same lines. They want to watch Dirty Jobs episodes with Mike Rowe and pick one of the jobs of the episode to research further. We have been working on our Google searching and how we type in a specific topic or sentence and then reading through articles… with adult supervision of course.

The weather is just too yuck for the little ones so we pulled out our rainy day fun bucket and did some creative sticker and face shape crafting. Echo especially found this  to be great fun!

Tuesday was a rather special day… of course we still did our basics including some Lego time…

BUT Tuesdays 5-8 pm are free admission at the Minnesota History Center!

There was tons to see and do and not enough time for us to do it all. We had only an hour (5-6) before we needed to be back for Ken to go to his weekly gaming night but we made good use of it. We went straight to the area that was the most hands on for the kids. I want to go back and see the prohibition era limited time display in the following weeks.

There was tons about the fur trade and the Native Americans…

Reproducing bead patterns

A great display about the use of Bison…

And so much more.

The 4 big kids and Ken tried out the mine area as Echo was having nothing to do with the noise and darker ambiance.

It was so much fun to head out and just enjoy learning about the state we now live in. Together time well worth it! And how to end the evening with Daddy gone to gaming? With a late snack food supper and a movie… THOUGH I hasten to say – fun mommy was only for ONE night… the next night we planned bacon wrapped pork and vegetables…

The joy of learning not only at home but out in the open air!

For all of our Easter resources please refer to the blog entry titled “Easter Resources“.

March 24-25

March 24th (Sunday) marked day FOUR of our visiting and visitors… talk about an AMAZING long weekend feel to our days! Thursday was a trip out to use some time sensitive coupons and then heading to the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts with Shandai and Emily… Friday we had Steven over for the night for games and visiting… then Saturday was an afternoon (for JUST ME!) at Bree’s with my newest love of my life LILY! That brings me to Sunday and.. the NOVAKS!! ALL OF THEM! (that’s right Andy as well!)

Lily Irene who apparently takes binkies best from yours truly!

Our morning was spent with some cleaning and laundry and all that fun stuff and then early on in the afternoon we grew by 6 and had a grand total of NINE kids running around. Echo is especially fond of her Anthony who she has dubbed NeeNee… And was more than willing to babble to him until he was desperate to get her to just STOP for a minute!

With her NeeNee

We loaded up not only Minecraft but the PS3 and the adults settled in to visit.

Busy gamers

For dinner we had walking tacos… where you take mini bags of Doritos (50 for around 10.00 at Sam’s Club!!) and put your taco mix in there after breaking up your chips… add fork and eat! The amount of spillage was nil and everyone was soooo full!!!

Supper chaos lovely and controlled

We are already talking about planning a gaming night with NO electronics over at their house in April… as it stands right now we have a First Communion to see (Andrew and Anthony’s joint) on Thursday evening and then Friday is the egg hunt with them. I am going to be so spoiled with all my time with Darcy and the boys. Andy even hopes to be at both events in some capacity, though he does have to work both days.

The menfolk

Trinity and Aidan on iTouches

Monday marked the start of the end of our time without Nana and Baba. So it was time to go into overdrive on the Easter work. I really doubt  that we will finish the week or start the next with much going on school wise once Nana and Baba return home. I am already thinking on the penguins which are our next major topic before I turn us back to looking at the United States. I have not decided how we will deal with the general topic… but I really want to cover lots!

We made our Resurrection Eggs lapbook which corresponds terrifically with our book Lily’s Easter Party by Crystal Bowman. We did change two of the touch items out of necessity but it was fun to do together!

Trinity with our eggs

Creativity has been just oozing out all over the place here lately… today it was Emanuel’s turn with his fish themed picture.

A special picture

We also made our hand lilies… we didn’t have yellow pipecleaners so had to use bright orange and instead of straws went with green pipecleaners! We have continued with our song and it is almost ready to record!

Lilies on the table

We discussed the history of Easter traditions… specifically two questions!

1. Why is there an Easter Bunny?
2. Why do we decorate eggs?

We of course set Ken on the hunt for answers and he got us a video

That sadly went rather over their heads… but I found two sites with answers… The Bunny issue HERE and the Egg issue HERE.

And so the tone of our week is set! With Nana and Baba’s return imminent I am just hoping for some work done, some visiting and then the weekend going smoothly… but more about that later!

Andrew scaring Echo while Anthony and she are playing