Week in Review: January 31st

We have been struggling with naps. The older two especially don't always need them, but sometimes they do. And it's hard to know when. Hannah generally still needs one. One this day she didn't get one and fell asleep at the table.

One night we were playing with balloons. The red balloon stuck to the ceiling, probably because of static electricity. The kids thought that was amazing (and it kind of was) and hilarious and enjoyed throwing the white balloon to get the red one down.  We couldn't figure out how to get it stuck again after it came down.

One day when I went to pick up the kids, Clara had to go potty. So before I grabbed Joshua and we left, I took her into the classroom to go (they play outside at the end of the day and that's where you pick them up). She was really excited to show me their hand-washing area.

This Week at School

This week, the school set up a tinkering station where the kids could take apart broken appliances and see what's inside. Joshua especially was excited to check this out.

They also froze magnets in the ice-play area so that they could move the ice chunks with the magnetic wands.

They did some fun art with paint, glue, and epsom salts.

A Full House (and Car)

Today my friend Callie needed me to watch three of her kids so she could go to a school meeting for one of her foster kids. Because she has to do school drop off like we all do and then had to be at the meeting at 9, we met on 435 between our homes. She installed her kids two car seats in our third row (Vincent sat in the front) and we went back to our house for awhile before meeting her at Chick Filet so we could eat and she could pick the kids up. Her kids are pretty low maintenance so it went really smoothly and was no problem, and it was nice to have a little in the house again since we are kind of done with that now. And Vincent was super helpful in getting them in and out of the car so I didn't have to climb in the trunk too much.

Play Date at the Aquarium

Today we had a play date with Halie and Alaina and all the kids. We decided to go to the aquarium. Getting there was an adventure because I thought it was in crown center, which it is not. It is across the street. So I parked in the crown center garage. Which wasn't a big deal, we just needed to go downstairs and across the street. Well I didn't realize escalators were going to be a gigantic problem for my girls. They were basically terrified and I couldn't carry them both while making sure I stepped off and on correctly. So it was kind of an ordeal to get everyone down the stairs. We definitely took the elevator on the way back.

Joshua really loved the aquarium. He was really interested in all the facts. He especially loved the touch tank.

Hannah was less enthused and was only willing to touch the water.

This was the best tank. There were actual sharks and sting rays. We listened to a brief talk here about all the fish in the tank. 

The favorite part was the last room which is a play area including a climbing structure with a slide and a sand box. Joshua was really pumped about exposing the "fossils" and Hannah just liked playing in the sand. We had a really fun time. We'll have to do it again sometime.

Week in Review: January 24th

 Joshua loves domestic chores. Clara loves some, but she is a bit tiny to really use the vacuum cleaner. I let Joshua use it for awhile and he was so excited.

 The kids were playing bus, but then they took a break to watch a show and so Clara rearranged the bus so she could sit by Joshua so she could see well.

My parents got us a three month membership to Olathe Community Center for Christmas. This is going to be great because it's something indoors that's active. I didn't want to go right in the beginning of January because I thought it would be really busy with all the new year's resolution people, but I decided this week was a good time to go in and get that started. I took Hannah because I didn't want to take all three kids. She had fun playing at the indoor playground while she waited for me to get the paperwork done.

Hannah decided it's always summer in her heart. She wanted to wear her dress from last summer, which we decided would be okay in the house only. She was also totally pumped about playing with a balloon. She likes batting it with her spatula.

Guess who can peel her own orange? That's right, this girl. (I usually still get it started for both her and Clara). She was so proud. This is the day after her original dress photo. She loves the dress, but the top is elastic and it started to pinch her. She decided the only solution was to wear it over jammies.

Joshua really wanted to "do science". I really didn't have time to do anything with him that day so he and Clara just played with water in the bathroom. He really wanted food coloring. I am going to try to figure out a science project we can do in the coming week that has some sort of immediate payout. So many of them for that age are like, "Grow crystals". Which is fine, but it takes a week or two and I am looking for something a little quicker.

This Week in School

The kids have been working a lot with ice this week. They guessed how long various containers would take to freeze, they have used droppers and paint brushes to make it melt, and they have tasted and felt it. They have also enjoyed playing in the snow outside. They have a steep man-made hill in the back and the kids love using saucer sleds on it. Joshua and Clara are famous in their class for loving to sweep. Hannah is less excited about ice, but she was excited about finding the H.

Dinosaur Bones and Ferris Wheels

For our date day today, I asked Joshua what he wanted to eat, and he said tacos.  He remembered that we had previously had tacos on a date day and that that would be fun to do again.  Although we went to Taco John's last time, this time we went to Taco Bell, which in my opinion is better in every way.  Because Taco Bell is the best fast food restaurant on the planet.  He chowed down on a lot of food before we made our way to our next stop.

This morning when I asked him what he wanted to do for our date day, and he said he wanted to see dinosaur bones and go on a Ferris wheel.  There were two random and seemingly unattainable goals, until I realized I could actually make both of them happen!  First, we went to the Museum at Prairiefire in Overland Park, which I knew actually had dinosaur bones (or at least replica ones).  First we went to one of the digital boards where you can learn about dinosaurs and then design one, such as by choosing their skintone (since nobody knows what they actually looked like).  Joshua chose an iguanodon, and correctly answered in the on-screen trivia question that the iguanodon ate plants, not meat or fish.  Nonetheless, when it came time to name his iguanodon, he said he wanted to name it Fishbiter.  I said, "Fishbiter?"  He said, "Yeah, like someone who bites fish."  I said, "But we just decided that this dinosaur didn't eat fish."  He replied with, "Yeah, I know.  But I just want to name him Fishbiter."  Alright then.  Fishbiter it is.  Here you can see Joshua at the design screen and then a rendering of Fishbiter the Iguanodon.



When you walk into the main lobby area, there is a giant screen that projects a live video feed of the lobby area, including all the people standing in it.  They then overlay it with digital renderings of dinosaurs (and dragons, apparently), but they use the ones designed in the other room.  It's a pretty cool effect, as it looks like the creatures are moving among you, potentially stepping on you or breathing fire on you.  After a couple minutes we did in fact see our new poorly-named friend Fishbiter ambling through and around us, going about his busy day of not biting fish.

They have a t-rex skeleton (a re-casting based on actual excavated bones) in the lobby, which Joshua thought was awesome.  And with that, we achieved our first goal: we saw dinosaur bones.

Everything we had done so far was free, but they have a discovery room that charges a small fee, but I thought it would be worth it.  He got to use brushes and chisels to uncover bones in a sand pit, and then do a puzzle using the metatarsals of a dinosaur.

They had an exhibit on historical masks.  Joshua didn't love this, probably because it's not necessarily as fun to wear a mask as it is to look at someone wearing them, but I had him do it anyway, and I then showed him the pictures afterward.  My favorite was the gold theater mask, but he liked the white one the best.  He laughed and said he looked like Old Man Fookwire, one of his favorite book characters.

There were a lot of insect-based exhibits, including some gigantic bugs.

There was a live bearded dragon, who looked like he thought he was pretty tough.

And he even got to hold a Madagascar hissing cockroach, which he thought was great.

The building is somewhat famous locally for its pretty stained glass exterior.  He we are in front of it.  It was a cloudy day today, so it wasn't as bright as it normally is.

We saw dinosaur bones, but that still left us one item short of our goal.  Where would we find a Ferris wheel in January?  At Scheels, the new sporting goods store.  I'd heard of Scheels from my childhood, as there were some in Iowa, but until recently there were none around here.  But now there's a new one, and its trademark attribute is that in addition to being a massive sporting goods store, it has a 65-foot high Ferris wheel.  It's $1 to ride it, and that's exactly what we did.  I tried to recreate one of my favorite pictures with Joshua that I took at Old Settlers Day last year, with only marginal results.  Oh well.  That wasn't the point.  The point was to find a Ferris wheel, and we did it!

It was another awesome date day, and it was extra fun in a way because as of early this morning I had no plan whatsoever, and based on two seemingly impossible requests from Joshua, we ended up with a really fun day together.