Father's Day

We did not knock do a lot of our Summer Bucket list this week but we still had fun!

1. I spent the week doing crafts with 3rd graders at a local VBS and all 3 of my children attended as well.

2. We had a date night with my 2 older kids that included dinner, donuts, and Toys R Us.

3. It rained a lot this week so in the afternoons the kids and I completed some Father's Day projects.

We made a candy card for the Papaws in our lives that turned out like this :

All 3 kids made cards for their dad. Jax's was an interview about his dad, Sawyer's was about how his dad is a super hero including a picture of them building Legos, and Isabella's was a Father's Day Mad Lib (I will find the links later)

We also filled up a cookie jar with Seth's favorite chocolate cookies and made a chalkboard label (we just spray painted a name tag with chalkboard paint) that said "Daddy's a Cookie Monster"

Last but not list we made a big poster with reason why Daddy is the best.

This weekend we went on a road trip. Let me tell you, my children are SPOILED! We almost always fly if the trip is longer than a few hours. Well, this time we were going to West Virginia for a wedding and we DROVE for a whole 5 hours and I thought they were going to die! They made it though and here is what they did at 10:30 pm when we made it to our motel:

We have a rule that you can only jump on motel beds so they were supper excited when we got there!

The wedding was beautiful and so is the scenery in WV and Virginia. Tennessee has mountains but they have MOUNTAINS. The drive up and back was so beautiful!

To finish off our great road trip we went to Pigeon Forge and used our season passes to Dollywood, it was a perfect day. Hardly any lines and we got to watch an awesome new bubble show!

Pin-tastic Saturday part 2

While all my children were playing nicely I tried out another Pinteret idea I had really wanted to do. Pretty much the only toy that Isabella still plays with are her dolls. Some of the dolls have some ratty hair! I had seen a recipe for doll hair detangler so I decided to try it. Here is where I got the idea : 

http://buttonsandbirds.blogspot.de/2012/03/majic-doll-detangler.html

I had a 6oz spray bottle and I used 1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon fabric softener and filled the rest up with water. I decided to try this recipe out on one of my old dolls (Kid Sister who is 25+ years old) rather than trying it on an American Girl doll first.

Scary huh? I covered a table with a towel and started spraying. I used the entire 6 ounces and the hair was dripping wet. 

I first just started brushing away but realized I needed to do it in sections. I separated out a section sprayed some more spray (I had made a new batch) and I brushed and brushed and brushed some more and it finally ended up looking like this:

I used a dog brush and a detangler brush but if I did it again I think I would try a wig/extension brush. The brush I used pulled some but not a lot of hair out. I ended up doing it in 4 sections and I was very pleased with the results.

After you have all the tangles out all you need to do is rinse the hair until all the fabric softener is washed out and then wait for it to air dry or blow it dry on a low setting. We decided to blow it dry.

I decided to put the hair back into the original hairstyle and she ended up looking like this  (Kid Sister is also wearing one of my favorite dresses that Isabella wore when she was about 9 months old.)

I need to trim the ends a bit but Isabella was so excited that her doll wasn't scary anymore she ran upstairs with her and played for 2 hours. This project took about 45 minutes to complete (including making the solution and blow drying and styling) but it was all worth it. I will try this on one of her American Girl dolls next!

Pin-tastic Saturday

We had a lazy Saturday today so I decided to try some Pinterest ideas. First up was an experiment!

I recently saw an experiment involving pennies and since all three of my children are obsessed with money I thought it might interest them. Here is where you can find the original idea : 

http://www.momto2poshlildivas.com/2012/02/penny-experiment.html

I had Isabella find all the pennies in our piggy bank and then pick out 40 of the dirtiest pennies. I then asked them how they thought we should clean them. 

Jax said water. (We used 10 pennies)

Sawyer and Isabella both said water and soap (we used 10 pennies)

I also had Isabella put in some pennies in a mixture of 1/2 cup vinegar and 2 tsp of salt that the experiment suggested. We put 20 pennies in this cup.

We waited 5 minutes and took out 10 of the pennies from the vinegar and salt solution and put them on a paper towel without drying them. Then after another 5 minutes we took all the pennies out and rinsed them. Honestly they did not look much different. The kids all thought that the soap and water solution cleaned some and that the vinegar solution cleaned best. In the original experiment I found the first 10 pennies that were not rinsed from the vinegar solution oxidized but ours did not. One cool thing we did though was stick a penny half way into the vinegar solution and this is what happened. The kids thought that part was neat!

The experiment was a little bit of a bust but they all enjoyed it and I was able to sneak some counting in there too!

Summer Fun 2014

I have decided to take this blog in a different direction. I am still trying to become a super Flab-U-Less Mom but while I am trying to do that I am raising 3 wonderful kids, trying to be a great wife, helping my parents who are up in years, and hopefully I am being a good friend as well. I want this blog to be something my kids can look back on and say "We sure did have a lot of fun doing that!" I love facebook but I don't necessarily want to put EVERYTHING on there. I hope that if people want to read this blog they can but if they don't they don't have to see my crazy life unless they want to. I hope some of you want to go on this journey with me but if not that is ok too!

This summer we decided to do a "Summer Bucket List" We did this last year as well but to be honest I didn't think through a lot of the kids choices and we were not able to do a lot of things. Here are some of the fun things we did the past 2 weeks.

1. We started out at the zoo (We got a groupon for a zoo membership and unlimited carousel rides for $45). The kids had a blast and we even got to go to an educational show.

2. Swimming with Daddy at the Y (this is a rare treat because he works so much)
3. A visit with Ms. Katie and Isabella's recital weekend (we went out to eat, got ice cream, watched a big girl movie, and went to Jumpin Junction).
4. The boys went to a super fun VBS and Isabella went to her first tennis camp.

5. We decided after bathtime and the kids already had their PJs on to go eat at Orange Leaf (the kids thought it was hilarious that we were leaving the house in their PJs and with wet hair!)

6. We made rain clouds

Here is the link where you can find out how to do this experiment:

diy-rain-clouds

7. We spontaneously decided to go to the pool (looked at the radar and there was NO rain!) but when we got there it started pouring! The kids ate some pizza under the umbrella and then I sent them to play in the rain

8. We had a bonfire and once again it rained but we had a lot of fun with our friends!
9. Today was National Donut day so we went to Chattanooga with some friends to Chick-Fil-A and McKay's and also went and got a free donut!

Not too shabby for the first two weeks of summer break. I know you are on the edge of your seat to find out what we do next week but you will just have to wait a week =)