Baseball

My kids have been so interested in baseball lately.   They don't want to play t-ball, they want to bat without the tee.  Brian is the one who mainly pitches to them but I have as well.  I'm often critiqued for my bad pitches (obviously my pitches are bad and not that the batters are missing the ball!)  Natalie is insistent that she has to wear a batting helmet but since we don't have one, she wears her bike helmet.  They set up the bases around the house and they have to run all of them after a hit (no matter how small the hit is).  It is NOT OK to run the opposite way of the runner to try to tag the runner out.  That will result in tears.  You must run in the same direction.  We need to work on understanding that being tagged out is part of the game.  While one kid is batting, the other one is often the catcher but I make them stand really far back so they aren't hit by the bat.  They can play baseball for an hour at a time.  I think we need to enroll Noah in a baseball class or on a team-he is a fairly decent batter without the tee.

Fun with Cousins

On Friday N2 were so excited to play with Amelia and Megan!  It was a nice day so the kids played outside for most of the afternoon although Megan wanted to play inside for part of the time while the other kids played outside.  I had never seen my kids do this but apparently this is what they they do all the time and introduced Amelia to their fun.  At first I thought they were going to fly in the street but they go right into the grass and fly off the plasma car into the culvert.

After lunch Brian took the 4 kids to the park while Marcie put Nathaniel down for a nap and then she and I hung out.  From the pictures it looks like the kids had a great time!

 This next picture cracks me up because they are standing in age order front to back and it looks like a funny staged picture and I don't think it was staged.

And here's a picture of Nathaniel so that we don't forget that he was here even though he slept most of the time!

Dying Easter Eggs

On Friday, Marcie brought her kids to our house so we could play.  One of the things we did was dye Easter eggs.  Each kid got 6 eggs to dye and we had 9 colors.  We told the kids that they could draw on their eggs with white crayons before dying them so they started with that.  Natalie wrote "Nat" and then ran out of room on the one side of the egg.  She did fit "Nata" on another egg.  Amelia wrote an A on one egg.  I don't think Noah pushed hard enough with the crayon because nothing showed up on his eggs.  When they started dying the eggs, they started by just putting an egg in and leaving it and asking for another egg.  After a few eggs, we had to introduce dying them in more than one color and that slowed them down.  The kids got bored after all their eggs were sitting in the dye, so they gave up and the adults took over!  We had fun making the eggs brighter, more colorful and in some cases strange colors!

I forgot to take a picture of the eggs at the end.  Oops.  Happy Easter!

New Cousin

Brian's brother and his wife had a baby on Sunday.  They had a little girl named Chloe.  Brian and I have both seen her earlier in the week but N2 got to meet her for the first time yesterday.  She is such a cutie and all we've seen her do is sleep!  Here are some pictures that I took while we were there.

Dress Up Time

My kids LOVE to dress up.  They have a few outfits that are their favorites but sometimes they surprise me with what they come down wearing.  Here are some pictures from the last few months of them dressed up.

 I'm surprised the overalls fit because they were Noah's Halloween costume in 2012.  The hair is actually a grass skirt that has shed ALL over.  But she was adamant that she had to have straw hair. 

They also played Wizard of Oz after Brian's musical.  Here they are the Winkies (the ones who sing o-wee-o-weo-o).

 Here Natalie is the Wicked Witch of the West and Noah is a flying monkey.

Alas we have no Dorothy costume nor any frilly big costume that could pass for Glinda.  Natalie's stuffed dog is named Ham Biscuit Toto Weidner.

More Nashville

We met up with Julie, Abigail and Jonathan at a park on Monday morning as it was too cold for the animals to be out at the zoo.  This was quite a random park!  There was a mosaic concrete dragon that wen in and out of the ground.  There was a random hill with stairs and rocks on the side and a large sewer tunnel going through.  Then there was playground equipment.  My kids spent most of the time climbing up the stairs, climbing on the rocks and going through the tunnel.

Here's the dragon and some up close pictures and I really liked the mosaics!

We ended up going to the zoo after we grabbed lunch as it warmed up and the animals were out.  Abigail ended up taking a nap so they couldn't join us at the zoo.  We did meet up with them at their house and play some more.  Abigail and Noah liked the road puzzle and they would crash their cars into each other.

Our visit in Nashville

Over spring break we went down to Nashville to visit David, Julie, Abigail and Jonathan.  When we got there the kids had a great time playing in Uncle David's and Aunt Julie's backyard.  Abigail and Natalie had a good time swinging!

Eventually Natalie ended up pushing Noah on the swing.

Aunt Julie got out the tunnel and the kids had a GREAT time playing with the tunnel in the backyard (which is slanted).  I'm not sure how it got started but the kids started to roll down the hill in the tunnel.  This translated to lots of fun!  It's hard to get good pictures but here are some plus a video of Noah rolling down the hill.  At times they would roll with their feet or head out and sometimes they would be all in.  Noah was probably the one who rolled the most.

When they would get to the bottom, they would often ask someone to drag them back up to the top.  Most of the time we didn't oblige them but Abigail tried to drag Noah back up the hill!  After rolling down the hill, they came up with another game where one of them was a monster and wore the tunnel and tried to get the other kids.  David and Brian even got in the tunnel to be the monster.

Olympic Party Photo Booth

I wanted to get a picture of each kid in front of the American flag with their medal (I forgot to have a medal ceremony at the party) and send it out with the thank you note.  Some of the kids really didn't want to pose for a picture (the younger ones) but the older ones were pretty cooperative.

Olympic Party-activities and games

I wanted the kids to be able to play some Olympic sports at their party.  I was really hoping we could go outside so that we could go luging (sledding down our mini hill) but it turned out to be too cold-around 20 degrees.  I thought that some parents might think that was a little cold even though it has been much colder around here more recently.  So we did indoor games.

We started out by having kids make flags for their countries.  That really didn't last long!

Then we made torches with paper towel rolls, aluminum foil and tissue paper.

Then we had the parade of nations and had the kids walk around the house while we clapped and cheered.

Then we had the biathlon.  We gave the kids swiffers to ski around the house.  Then they had to throw an arrow through a hula hoop.  They did about 3 laps of our house.

After that we set up the slalom course.  We set up cones and the kids had to run in and out of them.  At the end of the race, they got to ring a bell to show that they are done.

After we slalomed, the kids ice skated.  They took  turns being the ice skater and doing a dance in the middle of the living room.  We had some Olympic music playing.  The kids had fun but the floor was a little slippery with just socks on.  If it had just been family, we probably would have let each kid dance for longer but I was nervous about N2's friends possibly getting hurt.  The other kids watched and clapped for the kid who was performing.

After ice skating, we took the kids out to the garage to play hockey.  We had purchased a net and hockey sticks.  We had tried to put a space heater in the garage but it didn't do anything.  It was a little cold outside in the garage so we didn't stay out too long.  We could have put on coats and played a lot longer!  The kids took turns shooting the puck into the net.

We came in and played curling.  I put a tape X on the floor and we used N2's drums from children's music day as the stones.  The kids really had fun sliding the "stone" to the target!

 After curling, we decided to give kids a snack and have cupcakes.  After kids had finished eating but others weren't done, we let them do a ring toss with Olympic rings and "snowballs" (mini marshmallows).

They got a little antsy with this after a while so I moved some of the kids over to playing pass the torch.  If they had the torch when the music went off, they had to run around the circle carrying the torch.

After that N2 opened their presents.  We still had 30 minutes left before parents were coming to pick up their kids!  I had thought that the games would take longer as would the crafts but I severely underestimated the amount of things that I needed to plan!  We let the kids pick what games they wanted to play-some went out to play hockey, some played curling, some jumped through our biathlon targets!

It was a really fun party and the kids had fun!