The joys of dressing.

 With school starting one week from tomorrow (ah!), I decided our last free day (with a car!), we should do something fun! It wasn't very hard to talk the boys into a trip to IKEA!

Imagine our happy surprise when we walked in the doors, only to be told that kids eat free on Tuesdays! Double score! We had fun browsing for a bit and letting them play in the kids area before breaking for lunch.

Happy boys! Zakkai got the macaroni which came with a huge pile of steamed veggies. I was really surprised when he didn't say a word but gobbled up every bit of them! Way to go, Z:)

Cheese face! Eliana had a good time munching as slowly as two year olds do. Which is slow. We looked a bit downstairs in the home goods section before heading home. Two hours of fun at Ikea! You honestly don't need to buy much to have fun there, although you can usually find a couple little dinky things to brighten up your house:)

Tonight, Eliana decided to one-up her brothers in salad eating at an earlier age by gobbling up lettuce dipped in salad dressing! I was impressed. All my kiddos really got into salad dressing this summer. Samuel had finally started eating his salad with Italian this past year but Zakkai faithfully munched on his dry salad with zero dressing. Ick.

But then they discovered the joys of Ranch! There are so many good veggies you can dip in ranch! Gone are the days of Samuel moaning over having to eat raw carrots. He gobbles them up! They both prefer the Italian for salad whereas Eliana wants any dressing that she sees on the table. She will often have three little piles on her plate and there is NO limit to what she will dip in it! Which can be gross but hey, whatever floats her boat. As long as she's eating and not arguing over veggies, I'm happy!

I finished the day with a rousing game of Mouse Trap with the boys (woohoo!) and some Zumba. Not bad for a Tuesday!

Cinderelli...

Today I was the wicked stepmother and my boys were Cinderella. In boy form. Oh yes, I made my miniature slaves work their tails off this morning! Muhahahaha! Oh, sorry.

My boys suffer from the usual "messy kid" syndrome. It comes in different forms for each of them though. Zakkai just doesn't clean up after he gets toys out and it snowballs into a huge, gigantic, overwhelming crush of legos, books, papers, crayons, puzzle pieces, you name it! Very overwhelming. Especially to a little boy who has ADD tendencies!

Samuel's form is more along the lines of "pack rat." I may or may not have possibly been one in my former life. Maybe. Although his is extreme. I am talking not only the usual little boy treasures of rocks and special cards but trash. TRASH. Milk carton rings. Wadded up napkins. Ripped open envelopes from mail. Mulch pieces. Dead leaves. Plus rocks, cards, special notes, special teeny tiny toys that are never played with, socks with holes in them, papers with random drawings or scribbles on them. It drives me crazy! And it has gotten worse lately. No idea why he is doing this but we are trying to distinguish with him the difference between Trash and Treasure. Trash=bad. Treasure=good.

So you can imagine what their room often looks like! I worked my wicked motherly ways and we spent a good two hours in there cleaning! I even finished up with vacuuming to pick up those bits of toilet paper, dust bunnies and scraps of paper that were everywhere! Let's see how long it stays this way....I should take a picture for proof that it was clean once!

We went to the park before dinner last night. Here is Mr Z, fresh off his bike:)

And showing off his reading skills! He has really improved over the summer and I can't wait to see how he takes off with reading this year!

Ben and Samuel spent the whole time throwing the baseball in the field and Eliana did a little swinging. "Cheese!"

She's a keeper! She looks so big these days. Sniff.

Here's her funny "cheese" face:) She knows she's being cute when she does this one! Yesterday she started to have an accident in her panties. After we got everything finished and cleaned up, she was running around half naked. She said, "I don't have no panties!" When she said it a second time, I said, "You don't have any panties." She insisted, "I don't have NO panties on!" I repeated my correction, to which she replied,

"I don't have no ANY panties!" Gotta love this kiddo!

I scream, You Scream, We all Scream for Ice Cream!

 I was SOOO tired last night and could not even stay awake for half of a movie, let alone blogging! My weeks are full and busy now and apparently I am old and get tired more easily;)

Yesterday I packed up my three kiddos, the baby and even one of our neighbors and headed out to a nearby park. It was a beautiful day, not too hot!

The baby fell asleep on the way there and slept the whole time. Here are the other four playing basketball with Eliana's pink ball:) Look at her right in the middle of the fray!

I got the boys a new pair of jeans and a shirt for school and Samuel was dying to wear his. Because it has skateboards on it:) He's easy to please!

Here's Samuel thinking that he's going to climb a fence to get a random, trapped ball of somebody's. I nipped that one in the bud!

Here is Eliana showing Baby C some pictures in a book:) He just loves our kiddos and watches them closely. They get big smiles out of him, especially Samuel!

Today we had a really fun, relaxing family day, which we needed! Ben didn't sleep well last night due to too late coffee-consumption (ha) so we left him slumbering and the kiddos and I hit a few garage sales looking for "treasures." I didn't really find anything that I was specifically looking for but we got a couple of small things~ a book, a $2 rug for the boys' room, some shoes for E and a camping chair. Garage sales are fun!

Then we came up, ate lunch while Daddy got ready and we headed out to the splash park!

The boys took a few minutes to get brave enough to get all wet but they had SO much fun once they took the "plunge" if you will. Haha:) Eliana took a long time to get brave but she was having a blast!

Whoever invented splash parks was brilliant! Free summer fun!

There was this bucket that would fill up and dump water out. It took a LONG time for anyone to be brave enough for that! Here are the boys, back to back:) Ben even surprised us all and ran over and got dumped on to get cooled off, clothes and all!

Eliana kept running over to show us how wet (or not wet!) she was:)

Daddy and Samuel took a break to play catch, which Ben just LOVES to do! Samuel is getting really good!

I love that they can bond over baseball:)

Crazy Z-man. The other night at dinner he said, "Mommy, sometimes I wake up and there are monsters in my room and I yell and yell for you but no sound comes out of my mouth. I can't hear myself!"

We all looked at him and I said, "Zakkai, that is a dream that you are having! Sometimes we have dreams like that, too. I have dreams that I am trying to run away from something and I can't run; my legs won't work." (sidenote: I really HATE dreams like that!!!)

Zakkai protested, "NO, mommy! It isn't a dream; it is real! I just don't know why I can't hear myself yell!" It took some convincing but I think we finally got him to believe it was just a dream!

We followed up our park fun with a little ice cream cone for the kiddos. We found a new place with cheap prices, which was nice. Sometimes ice cream places are SO expensive! This one was more than reasonable so we may go back. Nothing like an ice cream cone to put a smile on a child's face!

Now I'm off to have my ice cream....

Socks, Green Bean Cake and Denzel.

 I am a lady of few words these days. I get to my computer at night and often all of the stories, thoughts, observations, highs and lows of the day just disappear in to the spaghetti jumble that is my brain. And sometimes, I'm not quite sure what to pull out and share. Sometimes it is silly and feels worthless to share, meaningful only in that moment to us. Sometimes it is too heavy to share. Too private in its pain. Sometimes it's funnier in person than it is on paper. Or blog screen, if you will:)

I was really dragging this afternoon, due to a poor night's sleep. Eliana cried out for me at least 3 times last night, which is unusual, but the broken sleep really was wearing on me. I was tempted to take a nap but I realized that this was an opportune time to do our weekly laundry. I always know it's time when the boys start complaining that they have no socks. Their sock supply is dwindling quickly! Most of them are getting holes from the constant running and playing that they do. Several have been tossed in corners and under beds or in the black sock hole, never to be seen again. Either way, that is my cue to make my many trips up and down the stairs for a few hours with loads of stinky boy clothes!

The funny thing today was that I realized I need to start checking the boys pockets before I wash the clothes. Especially the pockets of my treasure-keeper, Samuel. Today I found mulch, a quarter, 7 rocks, a dried cranberry and some bits of paper in the washer after a load......

Eliana occupied herself with some play dough this afternoon. She got a really fun sweet shop play dough set for Christmas that she just loves. Here she is making "Green Bean Cake" for me for my birthday. It's a good thing she will not be trying to sell this concoction!

She refused to put on her skirt after nap, exerting her very opinionated two-year old opinions! We just love her soft, chubby little legs anyways so as long as she covers the other parts, we can pick our battles. For now anyways!

Tonight, I left my family finishing up dinner and once again, ventured into the crazy land of Cardio Boxing. I kind of dreaded going, even though I really loved the class last time, because I don't like the time. It's at 6pm and I hate not being able to sit down and eat the dinner I made with my family. But then, of course, I'm always super glad that I forced myself to go and do it! It is like a Jillian Michael's level 3 workout, except for one hour instead of 20 minutes!

Our instructor's name is Damon and he reminds me a lot of Denzel Washington with the way he talks. He's really funny but he has us moving non-stop for the whole hour. He is literally DRIPPING sweat within 10 minutes of class starting, that's how hard we're working!

But it feels so good to push that hard and then to come home to the excited cries of "MOMMY!!!," like I haven't seem them in a couple of days rather than an hour:)

But I am beat and ready to go rest my weary head. Hoping Eliana sleeps better tonight so I can get some good rest! Good night.

The Three Amigos

 Three Blessings:)