Snow Caves

Today's assignment was to go outside and make a shelter that you could survive in if you were lost in a snow storm.

We established that Wyatt would not survive long.

(notice the missing glove....insert "face palm" here)

Hopefully if he is ever stranded it will be with his sisters...

They found a great drift to make a nice deep cave in.  And although Lydia did take off her hat, she worked long and hard making sure their cave would be big enough to fit three people.

still digging

The finished cave.

(it's pretty high inside and much larger than it looks in the picture)

Watch out Aunt Lindsay...

....Amy may put you out of the hair styling business with her talent for unique hair styles.

This one is her current favorite. 

 She spends most days at home with this headband in.  However, I have yet to let her wear it this way to preschool...mean mom that I am.

Salamander Collection - August 2012

We have this little problem at our house.  Whenever it rains, our basement is invaded by salamanders....Y.U.C.K.!!!  I can't stand the things.  When we first moved in and I would find them crawling around, I just covered them up with a canning jar and let Greg deal with them when he got home.  Lucky for me I now have a son that LOVES to catch them.  At the end of August we had a couple of days with some rain so Wyatt hit the jackpot and started a salamander collection.

(He actually ended up catching 4 more after I took this picture.  Again, YUCK!)

Creepy, disgusting little things!

He lined them up next to the grasshopper he kept for about two weeks.  It ate a baby carrot stick the first week so Wyatt thought it would be a good idea to feed it a strawberry next.  It made for a nice discussion on mold.

After a couple days, he decided to free his salamanders back into the pond. 

He dumped out two at a time to see if they would race each other.

He told me that a few of them just sunk to the bottom and didn't swim away.  I guess next time he decides to collect them, we better work on keeping them alive.

More BOX fun - July 14, 2012

I took advantage of the shelves on sale at Costco this month.  I bought my limit of 5 because I knew it would be much easier to get Greg into Costco to help me load shelves rather than convince him to help me build them from scratch. 

The best part about buying all 5 shelves is that it provided LOTS of boxes for the kids to play with.  A large top and a large bottom box per shelf.  I put the shelves together on a day when we had some extra kiddos running around here (2 Bowen and 2 Crump boys...there were A LOT of boys...and Amy).  It worked out well that I had enough boxes for each of these kids.

These four crazies were waiting patiently for me to assemble shelves and open up the next box.

Luckily they were willing to share for a while.

These three were the first to claim the empty boxes and quickly turned them into cars...at least I THINK that's what they were supposed to be.  They sat in them making "vroooming" noises for quite a while so I'm assuming they were cars.  You never know with boys and the noises they make.

(side note:  I WISH that flooring in the background was for my house, but it's not.  I'm just the current storage facility for it.)

I did get all of my shelves put together though and they look great in my garage and basement storage room.  I'm a pro at assembling shelves now.

I should also point out that on this particular day I was reminded how much boys stink.  Serioulsy, you let them play outside for a while and they just smell...it was more noticible with more boys around.  But on the plus side...look at how they enteratined themselves.  Can't beat that!

Blackmail - July 9, 2012

Last night Wyatt thought it would be funny to dress up like Lydia...

He wanted to know why I was taking a picture.

My answer led to another long question/answer session for this very inquisitive child.

We can now add blackmail to the list of things he's curious and fascinated about.

Homemade Bug Trap - July 7, 2012

Wyatt bought himself a little bug catcher last week.  This inspired Lydia to make bug catching a little more exciting and this is what I found on my lawn Saturday:

Apparently it's supposed to blend in with the rest of the landscape.  They hid behind it and tried to be sneaky while catching those bugs.

On the back of it was a list of what was appropriate to catch and what was not wanted!

Wyatt was disappointed that they didn't really catch anything except flies.

Good Effort Kids!