Recovering from the tummy bug

Not sure what hit me but Saturday night I was so sick. I was in bed all day Sunday just trying to rest from lack of sleep and from my body just feeling tired. The girls enjoyed an extreme lazy day with us. We watched lots of Netflix and I slept a lot! Monday I felt much better. We were all back to the daily routine. Claire and I did some preschool together on the computer, she colored and we read books together. The rest of Monday went well. The girls went to bed just fine and we watched some shows together, things seemed fine. Then poor Chris was hit all of a sudden and was up just about all night really sick. It was awful. I feel like he's the strong one and should be invincible so I just hate when he feels sick. Sure enough after hardly any sleep he still got up and went to work all day. Today is a bit of an off day still since I was up some of the night too. Not exactly how I envisioned the first day of fall going. The weather is awesome which is a nice change. It's chilly, rainy and cloudy and it makes me so happy! We are feeling better as far as I know! Fingers crossed all goes well tonight!

Sleepy Claire. She napped with me on Sunday!

Kellyn mostly wanted to just snuggle and goof off.

No idea which munchkin took this of me but I think its kind of funny to find pictures of myself on my phone that I'm unaware of.

I don't remember the next couple pictures either. I'm the bump under the blanket so maybe I was sleeping?

This morning we went to the library. We picked up some new books and one of them is even for me. I'm looking forward to starting a new book. I finished Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn last month and haven't started another one yet. I'm looking forward to the movie coming out in October.

Claire is always making new friends everywhere she goes! She's always asking other kids to play. I love that about her.

She mastered sliding down the pole all by herself at the park after the library. She's been nervous in the past so I'm very proud of her to conquer her fear!

Kellyn is that child that likes to hog the top of the slide just to swing from the bar! She's such a rebel.

Since we are still learning about volcanoes I had hopes of making clay volcanoes and having lave erupt from them with baking soda and vinegar. I bought some fun colored clay at the dollar store and we started. What I forgot was that clay is really hard to work with, especially for little kids so it was a flop. We will just figure something else out tomorrow instead. We ended up rolling the clay into bouncy balls and looked up how to bake them. We were going to try to make clay bracelets, I suggested making beads and they could make necklaces but they just wanted balls of dry clay.

I put them in the oven and sure enough it failed. The oven started smoking a little bit and the clay is still as soft as clay can be so now I'm not sure what we will do with it all. I'm pretty sure clay from the dollar store isn't the kind you can bake. No fires were made so that's all that matters.

Claire worked on some preschool on the computer today because she wanted to. I'm not super strict with her needing to do lessons on the computer. I prefer playing and crafts instead but computer time is still fun to do together. We read lots of books, colored some more and I printed of some fun little project ideas for the ABC's that I hope Claire will like. The girls' neighbor friends also came over to play after school for a couple hours and they had a lot of fun as usual. Tonight consists of cereal for dinner and entertainment for the evening is a Barbie movie from the library! It's been a laid back week and will continue to be. We have family coming to visit and I'm so excited. Lolo will be here tomorrow afternoon and Sandy will be here on Friday! Should be a blast. Lots of playing will be involved and the girls are always learning while they play. Win/Win!

Mt St Helens

Today was a beautiful day for a family trip to check out a volcano! Chris wanted us to take the girls since we are learning about them for school. It was about a two hour drive. We packed some water and snacks and hit the road. The weather was warm and breezy. It was a great family day!

We made it to the Science and Learning Center at Coldwater and were actually kind of disappointed. It wasn't really a science center. There was a gift shop, scary mannequins that told a story that didn't keep a 4 year olds attention and one small volcano model that some kids made a while ago. I'm pretty sure there was dust on it. We bought a couple post cards and a super sweet magnet for the fridge and went out to the outside area. It was a beautiful view.

Inside there was a spider demonstration about where they put it on the volcano. I wasn't able to listen too much. The girls were ready to go. Next time we will catch the speech that goes along with it.

We drove back a little ways to a view point. It had a really great view of the volcano so we stayed for lunch. Claire is our little goober.

Another little goober.

While we were eating Chris opened up the hot sauce bottle (yes we had to pack hot sauce) for his lunch, sadly hot sauce shot out all over his white shirt. Not cool. Claire happened to say, "It looks like lava is on your shirt!" It was pretty cool that she thought of that at that exact moment. Yay for learning about volcanoes!

The next place we stopped was the Forest Learning Center. They have exhibits and more information about Mt St Helens BUT the exhibits were closed as of Labor Day so we were bummed. The gift shop was open still so I was able to buy Chris an awesome new shirt since hot sauce ruined his other one. There was a nice play ground next to it with a volcano slide so the girls had a blast playing.

Behind the playground was a little trail to walk. It just looped up around back to the parking lot but it was nice to go through the woods. There was another trail you could take but we weren't really prepared well enough for a longer walk.

We saw a little shop on the side of the road that was all about Big Foot. Of course we had to go check it out. We got a couple Big Foot postcards and a shot glass. Gotta keep an eye out for Sasquatch.

Overall we had a great time. It was a long drive home and Kellyn wasn't happy toward the end but we are happily home and relaxing for the evening. It was fun seeing a volcano so close and I just couldn't even believe how scary it would be to see an erupting volcano that close! Claire thought for sure we were going to be hanging out in the back of the X-terra to watch the lava flow down a volcano! I'm looking forward to our next family adventure!

Salt Volcanoes and La La Loopsy

I'm not really sure what's going on with our little peanut but she isn't feeling well but acting somewhat normal at the same time. Claire also sounds a bit stuffed up as the day goes on so we are having a mellow day. We did some much needed grocery shopping this morning and got some fresh air outside before lunch time.  I haven't done many crafts yet this week yet but we will get to them this weekend or next week for school. I found this little experiment online so we gave it a shot. It was pretty cool. I'll post the link at the end. I added water to the jar and we poured in vegetable oil and watched how it separated.

Claire added "lava" to it since it's a volcano experiment.

The beads of "lava" just sat in the oil for about a minute before it went through to the water.

Next you shake salt on top to see what happens.

So little balls form at the bottom of jar once the salt passes through. Then air comes up and makes a little bubble in the vegetable oil. It's kind of hard to explain or capture in pictures.

We added lots and lots of salt and just watched and watched and watched. Very quick, easy experiment.

http://www.whatdowedoallday.com/2008/10/salt-volcano.html

It was nap time for little Sis and Claire wanted to work on the computer on abcmouse.com. She did a couple lessons about the letter P and printed out a picture of a pencil. She wanted to practice writing some more. I'm just so proud of her. We are still working on the sounds of the letters and writing seems to be helping her learn her letters faster then just singing the ABC song or looking at the letters on their own. She likes to write and that's awesome!

They have those cool Bingo markers at the dollar tree so I printed off a fall dot worksheet. She loved it and just dotted all over her volcano picture. We will have to get more colors the next time we go.

After computer time and coloring she wanted to work on a puzzle. La La Loopsy is a favorite and I put a La La Loopsy movie on Netflix too.

This weekend Chris has planned a day trip to go to the Mt St Helens Learning Center to show Claire a real volcano. He hasn't told her yet but we know it will be a lot of fun! I'm really excited that Chris is excited to be involved in her schooling and to plan something fun!