Fall Break

Against my better judgment, we ended up taking a fall break alongside the public schools in the area.  We spent the week relaxing and cleaning house.  I was completely thrown off the cleaning schedule I created last week, but in a good way.  We worked through the living room, kitchen, hall and bathroom over the course of the week.  Now, we didn't declutter as much as I would like.  I feel like we did more of a deep clean than a purge, but the house is looking nicer and I'm not spending as much time each day picking up in the rooms we hit.  Because of that I'm happy and not complaining yet.  Since school has to resume next week I'll go back to the original plan of one wall a day then floor and maintaining are the rest of the week.  This weekend I'm going to take a break and just maintain what we worked so hard on all week.

While most of our activities were called off because of fall break, we did still have lego club.  The kids were asked to make their favorite thing about Halloween in a mosaic style lego piece. 

 Icy made a cat face.

 Boo made a piece of candy, but then decided it looked like a spider, so it is a candy spider.

Robear made a zombie trick or treating.  Sorry its sideways, the zombie is in the top left corner.

 

We also had some fun with the cats this week. We only got a picture of Tammy in the sombrero this week, but she's so funny.  She'd stay very still, then jerk and the hat would flop down and she couldn't see.  Then we had to rescue her before she freaked out.  Poor old girl.  She's a good sport though. 

 

We're finishing up Icy's Halloween costume this weekend as well. I feel like I'm cutting it close, but really there's not much left.  She's going as Evee the pokemon if I didn't mention that last week.  We tried using yarn and brushing it out as her tail.  That process took virtually forever and I was not enjoying working on the project at all.  We sat back and thought about it and decided to make a felt tail. I'm loving the way it is turning out. I'm sewing it by hand though so I have a bit to go.  I think her costume will be adorable.

 

Are you still working on costumes?  I hope you're almost done if you are.  I hope you're enjoying this fall and the beautiful weather.  I'm glad you stopped in for a visit and I hope to see you back again next week.

 

 

Decluttering and Kitty

 

Wouldn't you just love to be this comfortable sitting around? I would, but usually when I try to sit around I remember all the things I should be doing right then. There's always something.  We should take more time to be like Oreo though... well, relax in the chair, not draped across the top, the kids might look at you funny.

 

This week I decided we were going to start slowing decluttering the house before Christmas this year.  Why I decided that and to participate in Nanowrimo this year I will never know, but here's to the fun times.  I've looked at many different cleaning schedules and nothing ever seems to stick for me.  A large part of my problem is training my children though.  They are sweet girls, but they do not understand how to pick up after themselves (surprise surprise I know)  This time around in the decluttering we decided to do a wall of room each day, then the floor/middle and a day or two for pickup and maintenance.  We should hit every main area of the house before the week of Christmas.  We started today with wall one of the living room where we went through movies and reorganized the tv stand.  That cat up above was so excited about the cleaning because it meant all his toys came out from under the tv stand. He was surrounded by six toy mice last I counted.  He's not spoiled at all.  Neither are the kids, promise. Or me for that matter... nope not spoiled at all. 

 Last weekend our city had a STEM festival outside the library. One of the activities there were these building blocks.  The girls had a blast.

 

 

Most of our activities are off next week for fall break.  A part of me wants to use that extra time to tackle some of the decluttering project, but I also don't want to burn out like usual.  Not sure what to do on that front.  If you have a fall break next week what are your plans?

 

Hope you have a great week and I hope you'll visit again really soon!

Corn Maze

So this week was the corn maze for the Girl Scouts. We had a blast.  Three of us never actually made it though the corn maze.  Daddy and all of us started out and we let the kids pick directions.  After half an hour we made it back to the beginning.  The younger two and I gave up but Icy and Dad went back in again and made it through that time.  We also had a hayride and a cow barrel ride thing, and some little tables set up with cute little Halloween crafts. 

This excursion wore us out so much we're still dragging todaythree days later.  We did have a blast though and it is just once a year so it is all good.  We've gotten lots of outside play in this week also.  How is your weather? We're still cruising in the 90s. Not cool, literally.

 

That's all from us this week. Let me know what fun fall things you're going to be doing this month.  Its my favorite season, now where's my favorite weather?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fall again

It has been a long time, but time just slips away sometimes we've been up to so much I just lost track of something things in my life.  I hope you have been doing well. 
We're back in the full swing of things the girls are in sixth, first and kindergarten.  It is my first year with everyone officially in school and juggling things is just as crazy as I feared it would be.  Sadly the busyness means that we're slipping behind on the fun things in school. We're spending a lot of time inside and lots of running to different activities. This year we have girl scouts, STEM club, lego club, Tech club, PE, basketball and Ballet.  No one wanted to give up anything and the timing all worked out. 
My middle one Ro-bear has gone through testing for autism and speech and its been such a long drawn out process. We're still waiting for the final meeting, but from what I gather she is right at the doorway of the spectrum and probably won't quality for service outside of speech.  We'll see when we get the final meeting though.  I do believe speech would do a world of good for her though. 
Icy breeze still has her Youtube channel and while it takes up all of her free time she's loving every minute of it. 
Boo has started getting into art and crafts and wants to share a few of her perler bead creations...

 She loves making little flowers.

and this is a mini fidget spinner. So Boo says, I think its a little flower, but not telling the five year old she's wrong about her own perler picture.

 

 Randomly the kids bought the cat- Oreo (he's grown a ton since you saw him last) a tiny sombrero for Halloween.  Being a typical cat he hated it and gave us evil death glares.  He is so cute though.

 At Lego Club Icy made Jack Skellington from the Nightmare before Christmas.  The theme for the month was a scene from your favorite movie.  For some reason I forgot to take pictures of Boo and Ro-bear's creations.  Boo made Elsa's castle from Frozen and Ro-bear made the school from Descendents... or so she said, it was pretty creative.

 Icy Breeze wanted to have a YouTube theme birthday party for her 11 birthday earlier this month. Daddy had a great idea for doing the cake.  He used food coloring to dye some coconut red and used a paper to mark out the play button triangle shape.

 We started a new subscription box this month called Yume Twins.  We did a video on it for YouTube, but just wanted to share the girls cute picture with you with their soft kitty pillow.

 

And just so you don't think its all hard work, here's the girls all helping Ro-bear make a volcano for her science.  We've been doing lots of experiments this year.  Now I'm going to try adding in some of the history activities from the book. As we get that down we'll start adding back in outside time or organized crafts etc.


I hope things have been going well for you as well.  Feel free to share your school journey with me in the comments. I love to hear how others are doing on this crazy adventure.

Fall is here... why's it 90 outside?

Sorry to miss a week again.  We took a trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa for Icy's birthday.

This is Icy using some of her new birthday presents. 

 Her new fox robe, her new fox mug and her new tablet.   She was so happy to visit and celebrate with her family.  After we got home from the trip she got her blue streaks she's been dying for (pun intended).

Yeah I know you can't really tell, but there are two shocking blue stripes in there.  For anyone concerned, we used Manic Panic which is a vegan semi-permanent hair dye so nothing chemically or permanent.

Speaking of hair, the other day the girls all sat down to curl their hair.  They lost patience a little too fast though and the curls all fell out immediately. 

They made quite a cute bunch though.  Ro-bear only got a couple curlers because her hair is naturally curly and well, we ran out of curlers in the package.



 The girls have been going to science club every chance we get.  This month was super hero science.  The girls had a blast doing experiments and talking about super heroes.  That's one of their favorite subjects in the whole world and even Ro-bear jumped in yapping away. 

 Here are some random clay figures that's Icy made recently.  Sadly the purple cat got squished under the couch and the rainbow got cracked.  We tried to fix him, but it just didn't really work out.  I'm very glad we got pictures of them before they bit the dust.  She worked really hard on them. 

 Icy had a diorama she was supposed to work on for science class.  She had to two weeks to work on the project, and she started off pretty well.  She drew the random Mr. Octopus above, but erased him for some serious work.  Below is a picture of our notes and some pictures we drew for ideas.  That lovely sea dragon in the center was all Icy. It's my favorite up there.  My second favorite was my octopus, but the flash makes it impossible to see.  Oh well.

 

 

 This is the picture she doodled for a model for the shoe box.  Sadly, the air dry clay was not working, it wasn't exactly dried out, but was crumbly when you worked with it.  I'm not sure what was wrong with it.  So she decided to make the animals out of paper... then got distracted building the cat a cat house out of boxes with a scratching post and doors and a window etc.  Finally I told her to just draw me a lovely picture of a coral reef and tell daddy something she learned about the coral reef environment.

Every Thursday Icy and I go to Urban Ninja class and Daddy spends time with the other girls.  I came home yesterday to see Daddy spending time with all the girls.  He had two little girls and a kitty girl in his lap.  The kitty girl looked so happy sitting there I had to take a picture. 

Things have been both busy and slow for us right now.  We joined a girl scout troop and have been getting used to the idea of going to meetings on top of everything else we do.  Then we've gotten in a nice swing with school work, except for the occasional day when we're still working at 4:30 in the afternoon... that day was the day that the AC was out and we spent a few hours in the morning waiting on the repair man.  Then after he came we spent another hour outside talking to him and asking him questions about the AC.  Sadly we still had some stuff to do when he left and we had PE to go to etc.  We made it though. 

I hope you are having a wonderful fall so far (yes I know it just started).  Our neighbor's tree is changing already and we heard some geese flying south.  I hope the weather will soon fall into place and all will be lovely and fall.  

After Much Hiatus

Icy (or L-bug) just turned ten.  So hard to believe she's getting so grown up already.  We had a very eventful day.  We'd done a small party with her friends at the park on Saturday and had such a good time.  The weather was perfect and even being Labor Day weekend it wasn't overly crowded. Then we had cake with family on Sunday.  Tuesday was her actual birthday so we went out to dinner and went window shopping for her birthday money.  She chose to save it for now, so we'll see.

Boo has been fighting some tummy issues lately.  She ended up going to a GI dr who found out she had a parasite and it caused some lactose intolerance.  The dr. said it should clear up now that the parasite is gone, but so far it is still acting up.  She does a great job avoiding milk and ice cream and even yogurt, but cheese is her one weakness. While at her last visit she was playing with blocks and said look mom me made hulk.  She'd put a Y and a V together to make a person then realized it was green and purple just like the Hulk.  It was

We took a trip to the Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio last month with my family.  The girls seemed to enjoy everything except there was just too much to see and do.  Out of four hangers we saw one and a half if I had to guess.   Ro-bear started freaking out anytime we walked under a plane.  No idea why, but she wasn't happy about that.  She liked walking through the presidential planes though. 





A few weeks ago we went to the Farmer's Market and there were pallets of strawberries and buckets of peaches so we bought some to make jam.  Sadly we got sidetracked and had to start the next day and half the fruit seemed rotten at that point.  We did still get plenty of jams canned and ready and the chickens liked the scraps. 

We also took a trip to the Ripley's Aquarium last month.  We had a blast.  Even though Ro-bear got tired of looking at fish all the time.  Luckily we were about to the penguins and they don't count as fish.

We saw two rainbows that day and it was Grandma's birthday too so we sent her a picture of a rainbow.  There was a WWII exhibit at the aquarium as well, we enjoyed it a great deal.  We hit a mirror maze and Ripley's Believe it Or Not as well.  The younger girls didn't like it because it was too scary, but Icy and us grown ups had fun looking around. 

Aside from taking more field trips this year, I'm wanting to do more crafts together with the girls.  We bought some little craft kits online and each Friday we pick one to do together.  We've made a 3d puzzle, wooden tents, origami etc.  The hardest thing so far is finding crafts that are good for a wide range of ages.  4-10 is a hard range to find something that everyone can do and enjoy doing.  We tried to make wooden covered wagons today, but the directions were very unclear and Daddy is going to help us tomorrow.  The girls are also working on sewing together.  The younger girls do lacing and Icy does hand sewing.  She got a little machine for her birthday she's still working on figuring it out. 

Thanks for stopping by.  Hope you're having a good September so far.  I'll leave you with this random but cute picture of Boo from the other day.

Come back soon! Bye.







End of Summer or And there was Much Face Painting

We've been so busy switching gears that I've not been online very much in several weeks.  This gives me time with the family, but wreaks havoc on blogging, Etsy and YouTube.  However, I'm back and refreshed now.  Here's some of the things we did to end summer this year.

Food Truck Rally

L-bug, who now wishes to be referred to as Icy or Icy Breeze, is obsessed with food trucks, so we went to the food truck rally.  We ate from local trucks, got out faces painted and listened to our neighbor's band play.  That was a coincidence, we had no idea they were playing there that day.

Mardi Gras

Every year to start off Funfest they have a day called Mardi Gras, I still don't understand why its on a Friday in July, but oh well.  There are bead tosses, bouncy houses, and a parade.  And yet again, we got our faces painted.



Maker's Faire

We go to this event every year. There are activities to do and vendor to look at.  We got to walk on a non-Newtonian fluid or sink if they went too slowly.  Even Ro-bear joined in and she dislikes mess.  We also got to sit in a replica jeep that was totally created with a 3-D printer and is totally functional.

Yet, while there was a face painter present, we passed this time.

Around the House the Past Few Weeks

My husband had a week vacation during Funfest.  We mostly stayed home and rested, but one day he decided to fix the leak in the bathtub.  What was supposed to be an easy one hour project turned into a two day and half a new bathroom project.  At least the leak is fixed now.

After the bathroom repair he took the left over wall and cut the girls out new white boards which they have enjoyed drawing on.

Cardboard House- One day Ro-bear took Icy's washi tape and made an elaborate house on the floor for their little dolls.  The tape house quickly became a mess magnate, so we took a cardboard box, flatted it and made a new house.  This house can be picked up off the floor each day and helps keep the floor clean.

Folk Festival

This year I realized there is an events calendar for the Folk Festival, so we chose to go later in the day to see the Native American dancers.  That is something the girls haven't been to before and we all greatly enjoyed watching.  And just like other years, we got to throw hatchets and watch people doing old time crafts.  We also got to try walking on stilts this year, which is something else the girls haven't had a chance to do before.

New Kitten

A few weeks ago the girls found a little kitten out by the chicken coop.  They wanted to feed it, and came inside to get it some food and it marched right in the house after them.  It was covered in fleas and so hungry so we let it stay, while keeping and eye and ear out for anyone missing a kitten.  We got him all cleaned up and named him Oreo.  He's a little dog of a cat.  He likes to swim, and play fetch and steal food off people's plates when they aren't looking.  He's already growing like a weed. 

That's all for this summer.  In a few days I'll be back with a recap of our first school week.  Sorry for being gone so long and thanks for visiting with me here at the Blue Rabbit Academy.