Playing with shaving cream

A couple of months ago, I picked up a can of shaving cream at the store, so we'd have it around the house for the kids to play with when we needed something fun to do. I remembered about it one day last week, and since neither of the big kids napped on Friday, it was the perfect time for us to try it!

First, we filled up quart-size food storage bags with shaving cream, added a little bit of food coloring, and then poked a hole in one corner (like a bag of icing) so they could write with it on the driveway. 

Buttercup needed some help filling up her bag

Mixing up the food coloring

I made a small hole with a knife, and they drew/wrote on the driveway

After a few really good squeezes, the bags popped open. So the kids just emptied the contents on the driveway and smeared it with their hands. :-)

Before Buttercup's bag popped . . .

. . . and after. :-)

After a little while, I gave them the can of shaving cream to play with

Of course, they ended up smearing themselves with shaving cream!

Nothing like good, clean fun! :-)

Flashback Friday

WARNING: Cuteness overload ahead!

Here are some pictures from almost exactly 1 year ago, when Buttercup was 2 and Theodore was only a few weeks old. This crazy, stubborn, sweet girl was born to be a big sister. I dare you to look at these pictures and not feel your heart melt!  

Updates and some pictures

We have been very busy lately! Busy doing fun summer stuff, busy just hanging out, busy playing with friends, busy running errands, busy doing swim lessons and gymnastics, etc. Busy, busy, busy. 


Last week Oliver had a week of Lego Robotics camp. His complaints after the first day was that 1) he was bored, and 2) he had to build exactly what he was told to build. Ha ha. I talked to the teacher, and she said that most of the kids preferred the "free build" time (building whatever they wanted to from a big pile of Legos on the floor), so she gave them more time for that instead of having them finish up their projects. As far as Oliver being bored -- on the second day, the teacher split his group up so that he was only working with 1 other kid, and that kid was more than happy to let Oliver build all of the projects by himself. Oliver definitely wasn't bored after that, and his group was still usually the first one to finish!  :-)  The only day they didn't finish early was the last day, when the big project was a very complicated crane. He needed the assistant teacher to help him with that one. :-)  


Oliver is also making leaps and bounds with his reading these days. I counted up his sight words a couple of weeks ago, and he knows close to 200 words! And he picks up more every day. He's also able to use the combination of sight-reading and "sounding out" to read some pretty hard words! Of course Buttercup is interested in learning how to read now, too. ;-) 


Buttercup is kind of having a hard time adjusting to not being in school right now. She just craves routine and being around her peers! At the beginning of summer vacation, she would ask me every day if it was a school day, and then she would be sad for a while when I said no. :-(  Poor girl!  I filled up our calendar with playdates and trips to parks, pools, and splash pads to keep her occupied, but now it seems like she's still sad to be out of school, and is also tired from running around town so much. So now she's mad all the time. We just can't win! But it'll pass. I remember her going through a phase very similar to this last summer. It lasted about a month, so I guess we have another 28 days of this. Ha ha.


Theodore is having a very fun summer, just going with the flow as usual. He's so easy going! The only thing he really doesn't like is going to the splash pads, because he doesn't like it when water sprays him in the face. Poor kiddo! He loves going swimming though -- I hold him on my hip and he splashes the water with one arm and wears himself out. :-)


Here are some pictures of the three of them being crazy in the sun room this morning. :-)  

Painted toast

Here's a fun, easy idea for something to do on an afternoon when the baby is still napping and you need to find something to keep the older kids busy (and quiet). I found this activity on the Clorox website, of all places, ha ha. I'm still not sure how I stumbled across it, but it's a really neat website if you have time to go look!

Anyway. You'll need:

-- light colored bread

-- food coloring

-- milk

-- clean paintbrushes

First we mixed up the food coloring and milk:

Then they got to work painting their bread: 

The idea is that you paint a design on the bread, toast it, and eat it. You can't put too much of the dyed milk on the bread though, because you won't be able to toast it. My kiddos got caught up in painting and ended up with several super-saturated slices of bread that weren't able to be toasted. But I did snag this one slice from Oliver before it was too late: 

This was fun and served the purpose of keeping them busy! They both liked using milk as paint and painting bread, and it kept them busy for about 30 minutes. We'll have to try this again another day!

No summertime blues here!

We've been having a really fun summer so far! Lots of going to parks, wearing PJs until midmorning, swimming, building with Legos, riding bikes, etc. Here's a picture of my big boy, reading to himself during his rest time today. Nothing like reading on a lazy summer afternoon. :-)

We bought one of those big inflatable pools again (we've bought one every year since 2008 -- the best $25 we spend every summer!) and the kids have so much fun in it. They play in it almost every day, for hours, and they have a blast. And it wears them out, too, which is another perk. ;-)

Theodore has fun watching their antics! Sometimes he walks over to stand next to the big pool and splash, but he mainly prefers to play at the water table. :-)

One thing Oliver and Buttercup love to do is splash in the pool, then run over to the playscape and zoom down the slide. It's always a million times faster when they're wearing wet swimsuits! :-)   

Running stuff

Wow, God has really blessed my running in the past few months. I started a new training plan after the 3M half marathon, and so far it has been working wonders for me! I love it. The weekly long run is more of a progressive run (where you run about 3/4 of the mileage easy, then the last 1/4 at a faster pace), which works out really well for me.  And the speedwork is written so that it's easy to do on a treadmill, which is also great for me since I don't have the time to get out to the track once a week. So far, I've been hitting all of my paces perfectly, including the easy runs, which is something I've really needed to work on in the past! Every run is an answer to prayer and I'm just so thankful for it. I have even been getting up well before the sun twice a week to get my runs in so I'll have more time with the kids, and it has all been going so well. Hooray!  


This week I ran 45 miles for the first time in several years. Wow! I still can't believe it! Not only just the mileage, but also the fact that I'm not injured, plus I've been able to do some really hard workouts with ease. I feel like I'm a completely different runner than I was 5 months ago, and I love the feeling of finally getting back in shape after 2 years! I also love that being older and wiser also means that I don't turn every run into a race, and that I'm truly running my easy runs easy. But mostly, I'm so thankful that I'm running with my heart and mind in the right place! Such an answer to prayer. :-)  


I'm planning to race a 5k in a couple of weeks, so next week's mileage will be closer to 40 miles, and then the following week I'm planning to taper down to 25-30 miles so I'll have fresh legs for the race. Can't wait to run fast!  

More things I want to remember

Summer vacation just started, but it already seems like it's flying by! We're already halfway through with week 2, and in 2 short months I'll have a kindergartner. (Yay for the kids growing up and all, but it's also kind of sad. What are we going to do without our Oliver around all day?)  :-(

Anyway. Here are some of my favorite happenings from the past couple of weeks.  :-) 

-- We were at open gym last week, and a Journey song started playing (it was "Don't Stop Believing," if you were wondering). I happened to turn around and look at Oliver, and he was jumping on one of the trampolines with his eyes closed, mouthing the words and playing air guitar. HA HA!! It was awesome. :-D  

-- We were at a birthday party at a park a couple of weekends ago, and a girl standing near us started calling her brother's name to get his attention. Theodore looked at her and then mimicked her almost perfectly, yelling the same number of syllables with the same inflection. :-)  

-- At Buttercup's first gymnastics lesson, her coach was trying to help her walk backward on a balance beam. Buttercup insisted (LOUDLY) on doing it herself . . . and then she did it! (Without falling off, ha ha.)

-- We were at Barnes & Noble, one of the few places that Oliver will willingly read a book to me. He was steadily working his way through an Elephant & Piggie book, and out of nowhere he looked up at me, and said, "Mom, thank you for teaching me how to read."  :-)  

-- Buttercup calls cow udders "milkers."  We were driving past some cows one day, and Buttercup said (in a sing-song voice), "Mooooom, those cows are showing their milllllkerrrrrs."  HA HA.