first week of summer vacation

Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Summertime!!!!!!! We’ve settled into a routine that looks like this. AJ wakes me up about 6 am. The two of us kiss M good bye around 7 and have some nice alone time.

At 9, I put AJ down for his morning nap and I wake up the other kids for breakfast. And that’s where the routine unravels and we just roll with wherever our imaginations take us.
On Monday it was woven fairy carpets. I cut a little loom out of a cereal box, strung it with yarn and then the kids brought random materials from the yard; grass, pine needles etc. Then I wove their finds into the loom.

Tuesday it was mud pies. I couldn’t find the camera until later, so I missed photographing those, but trust me, they were great, decorated with sticks and flowers, the works. I did get a shot of the mud soup that S dramatically “poisoned to catch the pirates.” It indeed looked temptingly gourmet with the wildflowers floating in it.

Wednesday it was collage. J mostly practiced cutting & never really got to the gluing part. S spent hours. And yes, wearing a crown and princess dress is a great way to unleash your imagination!

Thursday we tried drawing with markers on paper towels and then misting them to make the ink bleed. No great masterpieces emerged, but we had fun with the process.

Friday we started to work on the piñata for J’s birthday. He has settled on a paleontologist/dinosaur theme that I am having fun with. At first I was going heavy on the skeletal dinosaur image and he explained to me that he wanted “resurrected dinosaurs.” He likes those best because, based on the prophecy about the millennial lions laying down with the lambs, he is betting none of the dinos will be meat-eaters either, thus making them much easier to befriend.

I’m loving the weather. It is sort of the opposite schedule of the June Gloom we had back in San Diego. The day starts out sunny and we play outside then in the afternoon the rain blows in for awhile and then it clears up faster than you’d believe. The afternoon/evening thunderstorms have caught M at work with just his bike a couple of times. It's fun to be able to rescue your own hero every once in a while. We have made some good use of the new rain boots & umbrellas the kids got. J likes to get his boots wet and then leave wet footprints while walking backwards on the dry sidewalk under the eaves and then shout for me to come find him. He is hoping I will follow his tracks in the wrong direction; such a funny kid!

Another newsworthy story of the week is that when M decided to tinker around with the insides of the piano, he discovered that a mouse had made a nest inside it. Ugh! It was made long enough ago that we’ve never smelled it, but not so long ago that everything (read, the dead mouse himself) had fully decayed. And get this; the nest was primarily composed of nibbled up sheet music! HA!