The Yo-Yo Brothers

My boys are in a band. It's called the Yo-Yo Brothers. Westley came up with the name. He is, of course, the lead singer. Caleb plays the guitar and Travis is the drummer. Of course, the guitar Caleb uses is actually the handle of a broken plastic hammer. Westley's microphone is another plastic tool. And Travis is using the straight pieces from his Thomas the train set as his drumsticks on the costume box lid (his drums).

Love it!

They even have a groupie: Eliza. She isn't in the pictures but she is in the video, dancing.

The Creativity of Free Play

I love it when my children have free time and they use it wisely. They find something constructive to do and they work hard at it. Their minds are stimulated in complex thought processes and they are having fun.

This afternoon, Travis spent time working on puzzles. Not board puzzles or simple puzzles, but puzzles with 24 pieces that only had a picture on the front of the box to look at.

Westley got out a book that I loved as a child and found something from it to work on. The book is from the Childcraft series that came out in the early 80s. It's called "Make and Do". When I was a child, I would spend hours studying its pages, but usually nothing ever was created from it. But Westley has used this book several times already and today he decided to make an astronaut helmet for an astronaut costume. Although Halloween is months away, Westley has decided that he wants to be an astronaut and he was insistent that he start the costume today. So he made the helmet almost entirely on his own--he crafted the skeleton of it for the cap part, forming a circle out of cardstock and then stapling several curved strips of cardstock across the top to make a dome shape. Then he took two more pieces of cardstock and stapled them around the base of the dome for the sides of the helmet and we cut a circle in one side. Then we covered the whole thing in aluminum foil.

Caleb spent time building with Legos, making his own transformers out of the Legos.

Eliza, who is now watching Cinderella, yet again, spent time gluing scraps of paper (from Westley's project) to each other. Now that might not seem like much, but she was building hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills while doing that.

All these things are so great for their development, the power of play is so important in the early childhood years. But I especially love it when they are spending their time, of their own choosing, in such constructive ways without me telling them what to do.

Love it!

(pictures to be added within the next few days of the astronaut helmet)

An Evening Out: Chuck E. Cheese

A few weeks ago, we met up with some friends of ours for a night out with the kids at Chuck E. Cheese. The night was fun, but I don't think we'll be going back there anytime soon. It was exhausting! Not to mention that it was definitely NOT cheap, even with coupons!

Here are pictures from the event:

Game Day

The other day the kids were being awfully quiet while I was up in my bedroom reading, so I tiptoed downstairs and peeked in the family room to find this:
I love seeing my kids playing well together!

The Cutest Little Girl in the World

Well, we think so anyway. I have a lot to blog about and catch up on and I hope to do one or two posts every day for the next several days. Today I'm going to blog about Eliza, who is just so darn cute.

Eliza is 2 years and 3 months now. A couple weeks ago figured out how to both climb out of her crib and open doors in the same day. We would just use doorknob covers, but the problem is that the boys still can't open those, so we wouldn't be able to just send them upstairs to get something because we'd have to open the door for them. So, we're just trying to teach her to not go into the rooms with the doors closed. As for climbing out of the crib--we went shopping today for a new bunkbed for the kids and a new mattress for us. As soon as we get that tax money, we will go buy the ones we looked at. They are at IKEA and always that price, so a few more weeks will be fine to wait. We are going to have Westley and Eliza share a room for now and Travis and Caleb share the other one.

Eliza is also talking up a storm. She loves to sing and dance too. She is just such a joy and everyone who meets her tells us that she is the cutest little girl ever. Her brothers adore her and hug and kiss her any time they get the chance.

And she is SO girlie! She loves princesses (Cinderella is her favorite) and loves to dress up. She's funny because she'll ask me to make her hair pretty and then she cries when I do it because she doesn't like all the pulling and combing. But she insists on a bow every time I do put her hair up too. And she loves shoes and spends hours just trying on all her different shoes--real and play shoes.

Having a little girl is SO different than those boys, that's for sure!

Eliza on the little carousel at Chuck E. Cheese. She loved the pink horse.

Eliza on our walk around the block

Showing off her pretty hair on Sunday (after church, so it's a little messy)

I was trying to take a picture of her hair, first time in low pigtails (it's getting quite long in the back!), but she wouldn't hold still, this was the best I could get.

Our Resident Ghost

Today I was putting on my makeup and Travis was climbing up onto the counter to watch me. He slipped a little and hit his knee on the corner of the counter and cried a little. When he finally got up to sit on the counter, I asked him if he was all right and told him that it must not have felt very good to bang his knee like that. He told me that "the ghost had pushed him".

For some reason, the kids all think that there is a ghost in our bathroom. Apparently, the ghost pushed Travis this morning and no reasoning with him will get him to believe that he just slipped.