Boston in prayer

We have not posted in a while. Frankly, because we have not been doing specific projects.  We have been trying to have a little more patience, show a little more love, and be more thankful of what we have.  

The horrific events at the Boston marathon were very emotional for me. As a child, growing up in New England, I have always felt safe. I have always felt blessed to have the feeling of safety as I know many others in our world do not. And I have always thought one day that I would run that Boston marathon.

I do not hide these events from my children. In fact, I dont hide much of the world from them, except for "Reality TV" as it is a poor representation of how people should treat one another, treat the world, and treat themselves.  We talked to our children about what happened at the marathon before they heard from their preschool, with a very basic description.  We prayed for the victims and we were thankful for the heros.  I am still with a heavy heart, as I am with many of the global events. But this was just so close to my home (as New England will always be my home), so I am still trying to comprehend what has happened.

We are forever grateful for all the first responders. We are thankful for all the runners and community who supported the victims, donated blood, supported those stranded with food and shelter. We are thankful for all the medical staff who worked around the clock and, in some cases, straight from the finish line to help the victims.  And we are thankful for the heros such as Carlos Arredondo, who ran toward the victims without thinking twice,  Jeff Bauman who lost both his legs and still identified the bomber and delivers a birthday gift to another victim, Sean Collier, the MIT police officer who died in line of duty, David Henneberry, who noticed the fugitive in his boat, and so many others.

We are deeply saddened by the events, but it is uncomprehendingly, another event that we try to remind ourselves and our children (what Mister Rogers has said) "there are always helpers"..."find the helpers" and to be prepared to BE a helper.  

15 Ways to Play in the Sand with your Kids

There is something inspiring and undefinable that makes sand such an amazing medium for kids to explore, learn, and play in. We have a place where the kids play with sand. It is my special place to go when we have all had enough.

There is so many things we can do with sand. Here are just a few that we have tried:

1. Touch
Let the baby touch the sand and feel how grainy it is. Let her see if fall through her fingers.

2. Dig
Let the boys just dig holes in the sand. I dont know why or what causes this amazing phenomena, but they will actually dig a hole for hours. (If they didnt bicker here and there, and if the baby didnt need love and attention often, I might get a free moment to clear my head.)

3. Play pirate
Let me roam around or run around the sand area and make believe they are looking for treasure. Or burying treasure. You can even bring out the paper and crayons to draw the map and hide and bury the map as well.

4. Play Olympic volleyball player. 
We loved to watch the Olympics. We can watch a youtube video of our team

5. Play Dora or Diego. 
We can make believe we are rescuers and there is an animal that is hurt that we need to rescue in the desert. Ideally, we would bring our doctor kit and a designated sand stuffed animal that we would find and take care of, but currently we just use our imaginations.

6. Play farmer. 
Take sticks or leaves and "plant" then in a row to make believe they have grown in your garden. They we harvest our vegetables into our wagon or buckets.

7.Build a sandcastle. 
This works best when at the beach where the ocean wets the sand to the right consistency to stick together. When at a play park, this may not be the best option, but after a rain it is lots of fun to use every shape and every size bucket to help build their castle.

8. Play construction
What boy does not own a toy bulldozer, front loader, or dump truck. This is THE PLACE to put them to work. Ideally, you would not want to bring toys into the sandbox and into your home, but if you can designate a "sand box" toy, this is where they can build their city. Boys will gravitate to just destroy, but I try to promote the amazing thing of destroying old buildings to build new ones. (and keep a few old ones to remember "history")

9. Play world explorer
We draw the shapes of the continents and pretend to travel to other parts of the world. We have books that we read, but sometimes it all comes together when they can physically move and pretend in a new way.


10. Sand Art
Take a little bit of sand home and paint on glue and sift sand to let their drawings come to life.

11. Experiment with different size funnels
See how fast each funnel can fill a bucket with sand. Let the siblings pick a funnel and race to see who can fill the buckts the fastest.  This will most likely work once. After one time of racing, they will identify which is the fastest funnel, but it is fun to see them test, observe and remember what they see.

12. Water wheel power
Talk about how fascinating a water wheel is and show previewed youtube video to get the concept. They let them try out a water wheel with sand.

13. Write in the sand
We write our names in the sand with a shovel. Or create a mound of sand to create letters for our 3 year old. In either case, sometimes it seems much more interesting to them to learn than with paper and pencils/markers/crayons/paint/etc.

14. Play tic-tac-toe
This seems to be a game that just became fun at the age of 4 and 1/2 years.  We play on paper in restaurants, but being able to play an extra large game and sometimes step on each others Xs or Os proves to be much more fun and silly.


15. Just play. 
Sometimes, I just enjoy letting the kids teach me what they want to do. Let them create the game and the way they want to play the game. Or most times, I just let them play no particular game at all. No rules (outside of no throwing sand) and I just watch and learn.

Glow LAB Explored...with a 3 and 5 year old

We decided to try out the Glow in the Dark Lab kit. Yes, they are only 3 and 5 years old, but with a little help from a device called a "lollipop", I can achieve their complete focus and attention outside a few licks of sugary goodness here and there.

We decided to limit ourselves to just 1 or 2 experiments. So we started with the first one - Glo Water.

Before starting any lab, we read through all the directions. An important step for all mad scientists....

Step 1. Obtain and build all your lab equipment. 

This was a little difficult for the 5 year old, but with a little patience he got it put together. Obtaining all 3 sets of our measuring spoons and cups was not a problem, however.

Step 2. Set up both test tubes. 

This proved to be a little difficult but a little help from mom was accepted.

Step 3. Add the florescent ink.

I did not want my kitchen table or floor to glow so I assisted here.

Step 4. Pour tonic water into second test tube. 

Here is where we had a slight problem...as parents of young children, we do not get to enjoy many drinks...especially gin and tonics, and therefore, do not have any tonic water.  Thanks to a generous neighbor, we were able to secure some with a short walk across the street.

Step 5. Turn on the light from the kit and see what happens...

Well, it was not the excitement that these boys usually show as you can see from their faces, but it was not that exciting for me either. I think we were expecting it to glow a little more.

So we tried the next experiment, but now it was now with 4 boys (2 of our neighbors) and the curious baby. So it was a very fast paced experiment with 4 paint brushes and one bucket of fluorescent ink....

Overall, the lab is to create ink with just a tiny bit of florescent ink, that you can barely see (just 3 drops) and then paint on paper. You should not be able to see the color when it dries and therefore, it would be invisible. Then it should "appear" when the black light is shined on it. Due to the increased number of children, I miss judged and we added a little too much ink, so it did not exactly disappear.

It was fun for them to paint but not that exciting to shine the little light on it.  However, we do live in AZ, and we do have quite a few black lights for scorpion hunting...so next week, we will try it again with our industrial black light flashlight...

Pillbugs provide hours and hours of fun

We are 22 days into the beautiful season of spring. What better way to celebrate than with....bugs.

Older brother's interpretation of his
pet pillbugs

We decided to go find some pillbugs today.

The pillbug is probably one of the best bugs for a child because:

1. They do not sting (that is an important one for us living in the southwest, where fire ants and scorpions are plenty).
2. They move slow, so little hands can catch them.
3. They are "fun" because they roll up in a little ball.

The pillbug is probably one of the best bugs for a parent because:

1. They do not sting (a positive for everyone)
2. They move slow, so parents can catch them if they get out of the jar that your child may have snuck in their room to "sleep" with them.
3. They are "fun" because it can result in hours of free time while your child is happily digging in dirt and you can enjoy going through the lists in your head of things you still to do...

Almost 2 hours of digging and playing

A trip to the dentist

There is not many things that I really critique myself on...unless it involves anything with parenting. Then I critique pretty much everything that I could have done a little differently --
Maybe I could have foreseen that temper tantrum coming a little sooner
Maybe I could have stopped that temper tantrum sooner.
Maybe I could have been more consistent.
etc. etc.

 But yesterday was probably one of those times that I just did not see coming.

Looking back, it was probably blaringly obvious to everyone else, but ...
bringing my 3 kids to the dentist with me for MY appointment was not a great idea.
Bringing them to the dentist with me when they were hungry was not a good idea.
Bringing them to the dentist with me when they were hungry AND tired was not a good idea...at all.


The highlight was a brief moment when the baby was quiet and little brother and older brother stood by me looking in amazement as the dental hygienist cleaned my teeth with the tooth brush.  Somehow, I truly had pictured this as how it would be for the entire visit. But I guess that would make parenting too predictable.

The lowlight was when the dental hygienist was flossing my teeth and the baby was screaming from not taking any nap (for the first day in her life) and was now being held by the 4th sweet front desk lady.  Meanwhile, littlest brother was creating a swimming pool with the water tank at the front of the dentist office, and oldest brother was screaming to share the horrific news to the entire dentist office.

Therefore, the 2nd attempt to clean my teeth was paused to stop the dental hygienist from wiping the small river of water flowing down the hallway, so I could clean it. Following that, a quick visit to the front desk to make sure that the baby was ok. (Yes, she was finally happy with the front desk lady #4 while she was helping patients.) But after that, I was quickly finished....no fluoride this time. I am not sure why...but they didn't even offer it...

Yes, next dentist visit will be scheduled when my mom is visiting so that I can pretend my dentist visit is a trip to the spa and relax and enjoy my teeth being cleaned...as if I am getting a facial or massage at the best spa in town.

Making Edible Paint WITH the kids

I have been meaning to do this for 5 years. In fact, in the last 5 months, I have said "I need to do this" at least once a week.  Finally, today we did it. We created our own paint.

I figured we would try one of the "edible paint" recipes. I call this a recipe, but to be honest, the kids measured.... so it was just a conglomeration of 5 ingredients.  If it didnt work out, we figured we would see what happened. Worst case, we would have fun mixing.

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp of sugar 
• 2 Tbsp of salt
• 1/3 Cup of flour
• 2 Cups of Water
• Food coloring 

However, when doing this with kids we adhered to the following recipe:

• 2 scoops of sugar and an extra helping from younger brother ("EHFYB") 
• 1/2 scoop + 1 overflowing scoop of salt and an EHFYB 
• 1/3 Cup of flour and an EHFYB 
• 2 Cups of Water monitored by mom because we don't have time to clean it off the floor today
• Food coloring 

Step 1:
Have oldest child get materials and put on the table while holding curious baby who does not want to miss a thing.

Step 2:
Take turns with each child to put an ingredient directly in the pot.  Monitor that the correct measuring cup is used, even it sometimes, the measurement is not always followed.  A short review of how to fill a measurement spoon was in order...

Step 3:
Let each of the kids take a turn at mixing...even the baby.  Have them stir for as long as they want but be sure to stop just 1 minute before they get too excited and the mixture starts to fly out of the bowl.

Step 4:
Give each child a distraction, then bring the pot to the stove to boil the mixture until thick like paint.  You will want to stir the pot continuously with a whisk so it cooks consistently or does not start to burn on the bottom.  This should take about 5 minutes.

Step 5:  Let the mixture cool slightly depending on how patient your children are and then poor into containers. We had 8 glass containers, so we poured as much as we wanted into each container until the pot was empty. We ended up with eight 1/2 cups of paint base.

NOTE:  I used glass because I had these great "taco night" containers that I love that have plastic tops that fit on them. (Ideally, you would let the mixture cool until it was just warm and you would pour them into plastic clear cups.)

Step 6:  Closely monitor the addition of food coloring. I highly recommend that this is done for them if at all possible. We added 5 drops to create most of the colors which seemed to work out fine. Some other colors were the result of older brother helping.

Step 7: Let older brother and younger brother try it out. The paint was not as bright as store bought paint and it was not as thick, but they were very excited that they can use as much as they like and just keep layering on the paint without asked to ration the paint for "next time".

Step 8: When the brothers are well occupied, introduced baby to the paint.

I guess we should have bought edible paper too.

This is where the creativity of my kids is so much better than mine. I took away the half eaten paper and let her just draw on the high chair.  Then oldest brother took a blank piece of paper and laid in on top of her "drawing" to transfer the image.  And now we have her first official painting....

Painting with Brown and Gray

We do lots of fun things with the kids, but most times (ok, ok, almost all the time) they do not end up like a pinterest picture or the wonderful pictures of fellow mommy bloggers. I am completely inspired by these pictures. And I truly do think they are wonderful.  But, it just happens a little differently in this house.  I think it is due to two rambunctious boys needing to outlet there creativity AND energy, and one arm dedicated to a curious baby who wants to participate as well.  You see, we dont actually accomplish anything that is not a big messy exploration.  Therefore, I figured I would take the time to write a little about some parts of our day -- to rejoice in the fun of messy exploration and learning (and a little bit as a reflection for myself), but more actually as a little journey of how a mom can enjoy the messes as a reminder of the miracle of creativity at play.
 

As an example, we decided to just do a simple painting pirates project. What little boy does not love Jake and the Pirates. Paint is always a winner in our house over crayons. After some joking around with fellow mommy friends, we discovered that there were many other moms out there whose children LOVE to make the colors gray and brown.  We spend lots of money on all these bright beautiful colors...and they spend minutes on minutes to make.....brown, brownish gray, grayish brown, reddish brown, brownish red....etc.