Happy Mother's Day!

We had a very nice Mother's Day weekend here. I got to relax for much of Saturday and was treated with Starbucks and a fun video the girls and Andrew made for me. It was sort of like the Newlywed Game. He asked the girls questions about me and they answered. While I was watching the video he paused it after each question. I had to try and guess what the girls' answers to the questions would be. Examples: "Where's Mommy's favorite place to shop?" Target. "What is the first thing Mommy does in the morning when she gets up?" Bathroom and then coffee and email. The kids actually were spot on!

My mom and Dave came to visit and we went to Santorini's for a nice dinner on Saturday night.

We visited Grandma Betty on Sunday:

And here I am with all my kiddos on Mother's Day!

Eden Prairie Rocks!

Hey, do we know how to pick 'em or what? Money Magazine voted Eden Prairie as the #1 Best Place to Live!

Here's a link to a nice video about the city.

And a link to the article about Eden Prairie.

The only "minus" they could come up with: cold winters. Yep, I would agree with that one. But fortunately, all the positives outweigh the one big negative.

Art Journal Wednesday: Project Three

We created our third art journal project on June 30th so I wanted to find something related to Fourth of July or America. In trying to keep our projects inspired by artists, I remembered Jasper Johns created artwork using the American flag so I looked him up. Here's a little about him and his work if you're interested. The explanation behind Johns' work is a little "heady" for the girls so I merely showed them images of his flag and number paintings (we might try a version of his number paintings in the future, also his Works in Progress could be interesting multi-layered projects).

Johns' "Three Flags" was our inspiration for the first part of our art project:
I just asked the girls to tell me about what they saw. They said, "three flags" "stripes" "stars" and "red, white and blue". We then talked about why we have 50 stars on our flag (for the 50 states) and why there are 13 stripes (for the first 13 states). Although, interesting I just realized while writing this that Johns' flag above only has 48 stars because this was made in 1958. In the deep recesses of my brain, I remembered Alaska and Hawaii were added around this time, but couldn't remember exactly when. A quick google search informed me that the 50 star-flag was adopted on August 21, 1959. Okay...sidetracked....moving on.

This project was fun because the girls got to work on their ruler skills. I helped a bit by putting dots on their page for them. So they just had to line up the dots. I figured it might get too frustrating for them if I expected them to make 13 spaces on their page.



We used a star punch to make the stars. Of course, we didn't have room (or the patience) to put 50 stars on each of our flags. But the girls got the idea.

Here are the girls' Three Flag inspired journal entries:

Above is Ella's, and below is Lily's.


I had also come across this kid-friendly craft while blog reading. I know how the girls love fireworks so I thought this would be a fun and easy thing to do. We used coffee filters and mini muffin paper wrappers. That's all I had in the house. We just cut down the coffee filter's to make medium sized fireworks. Just color, fold, and cut. Viola! Fireworks! You can had glitter glue too to give them some sparkle.



Here's Lily's. She REALLY liked this project.

Here's Ella's:

Kellan's Third & Fourth Months

Kellan at Three Months:

Kellan loves the Dinosaur books by Jane Yolen. He's been intrigued with them from the first time I showed them to him.


The Many Faces of Kellan:



Don't you love that Engelhart double chin he inherited from me?

SIng us a song, you're the piano man....






Kellan at Four months:



We hung a swing from our deck for Kellan so he could play outside too when the girls were out.

Kellan had his four-month check up May 20th. He did fantastic! He weighed 15 lbs, 5 oz. (75th percentile) and measured 25 3/4 inches (90th percentile). His head was 16 inches (25th percentile).
Ella's stats at 4 months were: 14 lbs, 9oz and 25 3/4 inches
Lily's stats were: 14 lbs, 12 oz and 27 inches(!)

All of his percentiles were up from the 2-month check up where they were 50th, 75th, and 10th respectively. The doctor was very impressed with how well he was holding up his head and his "trunk" support (or how well he holds up his head and chest when he's sitting on your lap). Also, she was amazed that he was already grabbing at toys, putting weight (or standing up) on his legs, and rolling over from tummy to back. She couldn't believe how strong he was. The same day as his doctor appt., he grabbed and held his toes for the first time and was very close to holding the bottle on his own.

April Randomness

One morning Andrew announced that he was going to go hit golf balls and Lily decided she wanted to go with him. So we grabbed Kellan's golf clubs out the box and she loved it (see the video I posted eons ago...).

Of course Bear made the trip as well! :-)



April was "If You Give A..." month at Lily's preschool. The theme was based on Laura Numeroff's books. The last day of the month they had an "If You Give A Pig A Pancake Party" where everyone was supposed to wear pink or brown (for pigs in the mud). She came home with this cute hat and pig nose she made. :-)

We had an absolutely gorgeous spring this year and I asked Andrew to take some photos of me with the kids. I'm hardly ever in any photos unless it's a group family shot. So I thought it would be fun to just take some photos while we were out playing.


I LOVE Kellan's face here. Like, "Get away, enough with this kissing!"



This is hysterical! Look at Kellan's hand and Ella's face. It looks like he's punching her.