What Not to Wear?-Noah

One day Noah woke up and decided he was going to wear a dress from the dress up box.  He wore it ALL DAY.  He thought Grandpa would like to see his dress.  He did look cute in it and he liked to twirl.

Monster Machines

A month ago we went to the Monster Machine event at Wagner Farm with Grandma D.  They charged admission but there was so much you could do!  N2 love to ride in the bucket trains and they could have done that all afternoon long!

There was a spot you could make ropes, so each one took turns turning the crank.  They love their ropes and use them all the time to play with at home!

They had children's games as well-Bozo buckets and tossing bean bags through holes.  N2 played both of those.  They got prizes for the games.  They also got farm animal tattoos.  We also wandered around and looked at the animals.  But they also had BIG TRACTORS and other trucks. How exciting!  You could climb up in the drivers seat on all the vehicles!

 It was a hot day and there was no shade out by the tractors.  The event was held in the afternoon (I think it started at 1).  So Noah found some shade under the tractor :)

Noah also found shade in the wheel of the tractor.  I think he was tired and hot!  We went to the dairy bar after that (along with everyone else in Glenview and they had their slowest workers there as well) to cool off.  This was a very fun event and we would go back again.  The hard part is trying to find out information about it!  Wagner Farm's website doesn't list it at all. We had seen the info at the Lake County fair and assumed to could find it online.  Wrong!  I actually found it on the Lake County Fair's website because the proceeds benefited the livestock barns or something like that.

Apple Picking

We went apple picking the last weekend in August when it was 90 degrees because I wanted to make sure we got apple picking before they were all gone!  It's a good thing we went because Heinz Orchard closes this weekend.  We've had plans almost every weekend since then!  We picked a big bag of empire apples which I think are the best eating apples there are.  They stayed fresh and crisp not in the refrigerator until we finished them last week.  The apples were a little small and N2 picked some really tiny ones that were a little tart!  If you can find somewhere the sells/grows Empire apples I would highly recommend getting a bushel of those!

Happy birthday Daddy!

Today is Brian's birthday and I just wanted to share some cute pictures of Brian with Natalie.  This was from our camping trip last weekend.

Natalie was quite insistent that she wanted to give daddy a kiss while he was still in the boat.

What Not to Wear-Natalie

Noah tries to match his clothes.  If he is wearing a navy shirt, he tries to find navy shorts.  If he has a red shirt, he picks his shorts that have a red stripe on them (the shorts are navy).  Most of the time his outfits are OK.  Natalie, on the other hand, loves patterns.  Here are two of her outfits this summer.

The Treehouse

Almost 2 weeks ago, we met up with our friends Ian and Jake at the Treehouse in Deerfield.  We were supposed to meet up outdoors but it rained in the morning.  This was the cheapest indoor option we could find (I think it is $2 a kid, maybe $3).  When we got there I thought to myself, why have we not been here before?  Then I remembered their website says that you have to be 3.  N2 and Ian and Jake were the oldest kids there.  I think most of the kids there (and there weren't that many) were all under 3.  I guess they don't enforce their rule!

It's a nice indoor play place-not a huge place but my kids didn't get bored.  They have a seesaw, a firetruck, a log cabin, a slide and maybe a few other small things.  Then they have a huge enclosed ball pit with tunnels leading to a slide and other tunnels.  The one area that N2 and Ian and Jake played in the most reminded me of the TV game "Wipeout."  In this area, there were 3 punching bag like things hanging from the ceiling.  The kids would stand at the edge of the tunnel and then jump onto one of the punching bags and hold on for as long as they could.  They would eventually fall off.  We had problems when kids landed on top of each other but for the most part, they had a great time!  Sorry for the pictures, it was enclosed so I had to take the pictures through mesh.

Bathtub Painting

On Monday Brian had marching band so I wanted to do something fun before bedtime.  We've never painted in the bathtub before nor have we colored with bathtub crayons before.  So I decided it was time to do bathtub painting!  It's easy to make.  All you need is baby soap, corn starch and food coloring.  Mix 1/3 cup baby shampoo/soap with 1 tbsp corn starch.  Mix until smooth.  Then divide into muffin tins or ice cube trays.  I made double as it didn't seem to be very much paint after 1 recipe.  Then add food coloring to each ice cube tray to make different colors.  You need 2-3 drops in each tray.  I ran out of red food coloring while mixing colors.  That's why my purple looks so weak!

N2 were so excited by this.  I gave them each foam brushes and showed them that they could paint the bathtub.

I also told them they could paint themselves since it's just soap!

I guess I stopped holding onto the ice cube tray or maybe I forgot to tell them that they needed to hold onto it when they got paint out of the tray.  No more than 2 minutes into our painting, the ice cube tray fell into the bathtub and spilled all the paint out.  I fished it out and we managed to get a little bit of color out of the tray but it didn't last long.  Here's what our water looked like. Appetizing, isn't it?

I think when I do this again I will use individual dishes and make less colors.  That way only 1 would get knocked down at a time.

Grandparent's Day Project

Since I had time this year and remembered Grandparent's Day well in advance, I figured I could do a fun project.  I found this great website (via Pinterest) that has fun handprint art.  N2 thought the owls were cute, so we decided to make those and write "Owl Love you forever" at the top.  What a great pun if I do say so myself!  Here's how our projects turned out.

This was much more labor intensive on my part as I had to paint in the branches, wait for them to try, paint over them.  Paint leaves, the face and the claws.  But the handprints were easy!

Bag painting

Not sure what to call this as it is not finger painting!  I saw on Pinterest an idea to put 2 colors of paint in a ziplock bag, tape them to the table and let the kids play with the paint.  I can't remember why I pulled this out recently-maybe one of my kids wanted to paint and I didn't feel like dealing with the mess.  It was a day Brian was home too.  Maybe it was raining???

What I couldn't figure out was if you were supposed to put the paper inside the bag or under the bag.  So I put the paper inside the bag.  I'm also not sure if I used enough paint!  I pulled out red, yellow and blue paint and asked N2 to pick two colors to put in their bags so they could see how the colors mixed.  Natalie chose yellow and blue and Noah chose red and blue.

We could see that blue and yellow made green.  It was harder to tell with red and blue.  I think Noah told me it made brown.  Admittedly it didn't look too purple!  The only problem with this is Natalie used her finger nails and scratched the bag so paint started coming out.  I put it in another bag and that seemed to be OK.  Natalie played with this much longer than Noah.  We also ran cars over the paint and made tire tracks.

The paper seemed to absorb the paint and after a while there wasn't much paint to move around.  I ended up throwing out one of the bags after not too long and putting red and yellow in another bag and this time I put the paper under the bag.  That didn't seem to be the solution either!  Overall it was fun but unlike the blogger that I got the idea from, I couldn't keep the bags around for a week!

Fly Swatter painting

When Marcie and her girls came down for my birthday, I knew I wanted to try a fun art project.  N2 and I picked up fly swatters at Wal-mart and luckily they came in a 2 pack!  I can't just buy 1 thing because each one wants to pick out their own so we ended up with 4 fly swatters-perfect for doing art projects with their cousins.

I found a recipe for sidewalk paint and I made it but it was REALLY runny.  So I added more and more corn starch.  But it was still runny.  So I heated some up and it because really thick, really fast.  I combined that with the runny stuff and thought it was fine.  But it was kind of clumpy and hard to get out of the pan.  So I would suggest using what the recipe says and hope it works!

All the kids had a lot of fun swatting at the paper.  Unfortunately the fly swatters kind of stuck because the paint got a little sticky and thick.

 Megan was quite gentle with her fly swatting.

 Here are their finished projects.  They were not keepers as the corn starch/water just flaked off after it became hard.  Here is the order of their art work.  Megan, Amelia, Natalie and Noah.  Sorry for the dark pictures.

My driveway was also well painted.  I'm sorry to say that it has STILL not washed off even after fairly heavy rains.  Oh well!  I'm sure it'll wear off sooner or later.  Not sure why blogger uploaded this picture vertically-it's not vertical on my computer.  Strange!  This is not the first time this has happened!