Laundry Day

This is how we do laundry day at our house: wash and dry all loads, take down to the couch, dump in a big pile to fold while watching television. Basically, folding is saved to the very end as a relaxing activity to do in the evening hours when Soyboy is asleep and I can indulge in some rare television time. Only on this particular night, a little boy who wasn't in bed yet decided to have some fun first with all the clothes. Can you tell what he is doing?

How about now? 

He's piling everything on to our poor dog Moxie. A reverse dog-pile, if you will. 

She wasn't terribly amused, but put up with it nonetheless for Sawyer's enjoyment and laughter. 

 Since I had the camera out I set the timer to capture a photo of me with my two babies, the pajama clad one and the one with the fur. 

1st attempt: Belly baring shot and no smile. Let's try that again.....

Take two: Someone (not myself or Moxie) didn't get the memo in time. 

Take three: Mommy smiling, Sawyer beaming! Only to be ruined by Moxie trying to sneak a kiss in. 

I give up. 

:)

More Choklet Plzz

On actual Halloween night we were planning on taking Sawyer trick-or-treating around the block, but weren't quite sure how the whole thing was going to work. We wanted to both take him, but then did we leave our light off at home and look like bahumbugs who didn't want to hand out candy? Or did we leave a bowl of candy on our doorstep and hope the first kid that came along didn't dump the whole thing into his bag and call it a night? And then when we did get home and actually handed out candy, how much do you hand out? One piece? Two? A handful? Ahhh! Obviously we were newbies at both taking a child trick-or-treating as well as having a place where trick-or-treaters actually came to your door. Well, in the end our dilemma was solved when we were invited to go over to a friends house from church. 

*Sigh of relief*

It was us, the couple whose house it was and two other couples with six kids between us and ALL of them boys! We ate chili and cornbread and visited before deciding it was finally time for the kids to don their costumes and head out before it go too dark. Sawyer wasn't too interested in wearing his costume when he had got it for him earlier in the month, but he wore it just fine that night, hood on and all. I'm thinking that seeing all the other kids dressing up in costume made it okay in his mind. He carried his pumpkin bucket and tried to grasp the concept that he was supposed to walk up to the doors of houses where strangers live, say his plzz (a.k.a please) and they would put candy into his bucket. Finally around the fourth house he had it down. 

Below is his dino costume in all it's glory, tail and all. 

At one of the houses in the neighborhood as soon as the door opened Sawyer darted inside! He was long gone before I could even grab onto his dino tail and keep him from entering. Luckily, the house turned out to be someone I knew. Brittany Lewis, who I went to high school with, had answered the door. Finally after retrieving both Sawyer and his candy bucket we were back on our way again and with a full size Snickers bar that Brittany had given him. I don't know if it was the size of the candy or what, but at the dismay of Matt (who really wanted to eat it) Sawyer refused to let that thing out of his little dino hands. He would not put it in his bucket so instead of letting it melt in his hand, I finally gave him a few bites of his favorite thing ever a.k.a. "choklet" as we went to a few more houses. 

Here's a photo of all the boys before we headed out. So cute!! At the top left there is Braden who is dressed as a goat (yes, a goat. I like that kid already!), next to him is Micah the Tiger, then Jesse the Pirate, next row down there's Sawyer the dino, Ben the firefighter and Cody the frog. 

Waiting patiently for the first candy of the night! 

It was a really fun Halloween night and much more fun spending it with new friends, friends for both for Matt and I and LOTS of little friends for Sawyer. 

Halloween Eve

The day before Halloween we decided to finally carve the pumpkins that we had gotten from Sawyer's birthday train ride. Earlier we'd bought a carving kit that came with little plastic carving tools and stencils. Matt started cutting into his pumpkin first and the itsy bitsy teeny weeny carving knife that came in the kit was bent in a matter of seconds and no wonder, his pumpkin was close to 4 inches thick! We broke out the big knives and really got to work. 

Sawyer did his part in scooping out some of the slimy insides. 

And Moxie helped too. 

Nothing captions the photo below better than what my Grandpa Hansen wrote after seeing it on Facebook, "Hey you guys threw away my punkin guts!" 

Both of our pumpkins had guts galore! We probably could have made a few batches of roasted pumpkin seeds with it, but neither one of us wanted to pick the seeds out one by one from the goopy mess (as you can see below). 

The second thing we discovered after taking all the goop out, was that WE WERE NOT CUT OUT to cut out complicated shapes into our pumpkins even if we had a stencil. I'd seen the amazing carved pumpkins many of our family and friends had done so we thought it was going to be easy. WRONG! It takes a lot of patience and skill so we both opted for much, much simpler carvings, as in two eyes and a mouth or in Matt's case, his pumpkin got only one eye and a mouth. 

After the lighting ceremony we took a photo of our nose-less masterpieces.

Then we set up the camera to get all of us and the pumpkins in a photo together. 

First try...
Nope missed the pumpkins entirely. 

Second Try....

Yea that didn't work either. 

Third Try....
 Okay, that'll do. 

Birds Need Baths Too

I've been trying to put together a bin of activities for Sawyer. Coloring books, crayons, finger paints, etc. Most of the stuff I found at the dollar store off of Eagle and Fairview in Meridian which puts our dollar store in Kuna to shame (the things at that one are actually MORE than a dollar. How does that work??)

A lot of the ideas I got off of blogs like Counting Coconuts and Chasing Cheerios.  

Below is the sensory tub I made from rocks, rice, little plastic dinosaurs and a few other odds and ends like a thimble, a small truck, etc. I also added the black dish (which is actually the drip catcher from our pancake grill ;) and he liked to put the rocks one by one into the dish and then take them back out again.

Here's a closer look below at what was in it. The mom on Counting Coconuts uses the same tub and changes it's contents out each month to keep it interesting for her son. She always has way cute themes for them too like seasons, holidays, the ocean, bugs.... The idea is to put in a lot of things with different textures for them to sift through and play with. Then depending on the theme you do you can use the tub to teach them different subjects. If you are interested in making one go to the Counting Coconuts blog, she does a way better job at explaining it than me! All I know is that every time I've brought it out it's kept him occupied for quite a while! 

This was another thing that was super easy to make and he loves playing with. It's just one of our glass food containers and I poured some sand and shells in it. He used the measuring spoon to scoop up the sand and pour it into the small red container. 

I just watch him as he scoops and pours, scoops and pours, scoops and pours, and the only time I have to intervene is when I see the scooping going outside the perimeter of the glass container and ready to be poured onto his little table. No, no, no, that's not going to happen. He knows now that any time he plays with the 'sandbox' or the sensory tub that all the contents have to stay IN their container. 

And lastly, I saw this idea on Chasing Cheerios and was looking around our house to see what I could use when I spotted the little bird decorations we have sitting on our mantle. I took one down and told Sawyer it needed a bath. I gave him a bowl with a little bit of water in it and a small paintbrush and Q-tip. He used both and would dip them one at a time in the water and then 'clean' the bird by wiping them on it's little face and body. Lately he's been obsessed with 'poo-poo' and points to the bottom of every stuffed animal he has insisting that the little cloth tag on it's bum (that says where it was manufactured) is actually poo-poo and needs to be cut off. So now all his animals are tag less. Or clean as he would say. Anyway, he spent a significant amount of time brushing water onto the birds tail feather region for that particular reason. Then when he was done I gave him a paper towel, he dried the bird off and we placed him back on the mantle all sparkly and clean.