2012: Year of the slacker

It has been a crazy year.  I have been a complete blog slacker.  That is all.  Maybe as the year comes to a close and a new adventure begins for our family I will be less of a slacker.

Dinosaur Resource Center

On Thursday this week I took the boys to the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center.  Since we went in the middle of the day there was only 2 other families in the museum with us.  I loved that.  It meant my boys could wander around without bothering people.  The tour guides were super friendly and knowledgable.  The boys asked so many questions and were thrilled with all the cool dinosaur bones and fossils.  We were able to see one lady putting together a cast of a T-rex skeleton.  I learned somethings I didn't know.  Did you know there is a dinosaur named Denversaurus?  Or that the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus had a wing span of around 50 feet?  That is huge!  We had a pretty good time.  

On the drive up we passed the Cave of the Winds and the Cave Dwellings.  Shaden saw a bit of the cave dwellings and got excited about the "houses in the rocks," so I think we might have to take a day and see those. 

Easter 2012

We have had a busy spring.  Easter was great.  On Saturday we went to an egg hunt with the FRG.  They are really good about separating the kids by age.  Shaden and Jayce were so excited and ready to go.  (I have been a bit scatter brain lately and forgot to bring baskets, so they had to make do with plastic bags.)  It was pretty chilly, but the boys didn't seem to mind.

On Sunday we went to church before having any Easter candy, but you would have thought the boys had a bucket of it before hand.  Shaden was bouncing off the walls in anticipation.  Our Sacrament meeting was wonderful.  The youth sang a beautiful song at the beginning that brought tears to my eyes.  

After church we went up to my parents' house and the Easter Bunny brought baskets filled with toys and candy.  Both boys got Leappads and eggs filled with candy.  The Easter Bunny was thinking of my sanity when deciding to give them the Leappads. Shaden and Jayce keep stealing my iphone to play the games on it.  Then I have a hard time finding it when I need it.  Now they have their own cool thing with games (and I don't have to worry that they are going to be trying to buy stuff or delete things).

I'm really impressed with the Leappad.  Shaden actually gets excited to use a pen (stylus) to write letters on it.  That is a big win!  

We also dyed eggs and tried to tattoo them.  I wouldn't recommend tattooing already colored eggs... all the dye kept running off and on to my hands.

The sun was shining and we had dinner outside on the deck.  It was a very nice day.

Jayce's i-spy quilt

I finally finished Jayce's i-spy quilt!  

It took me longer than I wanted but I finished.

I'm still learning all the tricks to quilting and that means my seam ripper is used quite a lot.

The design for the quilt was inspired by Jeni from In Color Order.  She made this beautiful plus quilt and I thought it would be fun for an i-spy quilt.

Here is Jayce's (finished) i-spy quilt:

It is a twin size quilt.

Here is the top of the back.

I used the blue dots from the front and the stripes from the binding for the 3 big plus signs. 

Here's a shot of the back, binding, and front.

Here is Jayce with his new blanket.

Jayce and Shaden love playing i-spy with their blankets!  Yay!

T-shirt Scarves

Another cool idea I found on pinterest is changing a old t-shirt into a scarf/necklace.

You take the t-shirt and cut the body of the shirt into strips about 1inch thick.  Then stretch the loops you now have.  Then you can wear them in different ways.  Here are the two I chose.  

I wrapped another part of the shirt around the seams.

These are for me, but it is easier (and cuter) if I have my boys model them for me.

You can wear it long.

Or doubled and short.

I love this face.

 Here I took the big loops and wrapped them around my hand then tied them together.

This is doubled.  It is really long if not doubled.  

You could make it smaller by leaving out some of the loops.

This is Shaden being Shaden.

Now to figure out what to wear these with... hmm.

Breckenridge Snow Carving

Every year Breckenridge, CO holds the annual Budweiser Snow Carving Championship.  Chris and I went a few years back with my parents and it was pretty amazing.  On Saturday we got to go again.  It is impressive to see the huge block of snow (20 tons) the teams start with and then to see what they have turned it into.  The weather was great.  It was nice and sunny, but still only 24 degrees; we bundled up and were fine.  

Jayce all bundled up, playing in the snow castle ruins.

Shaden all bundled up, playing in the snow.

Jayce said this sculpture looked like cheese.  

It made the people around us laugh pretty hard.

I think it would be a little cold on the bottom to ride this carousel.

Here we are standing in front of the block the sculptures start from.

My boys.

This one was my favorite.  They even did his claws out of ice.

The one downside to the whole day was the drive back to Denver... 2 multi-car accidents.  Ugh, we were stuck in traffic for an extra 3.5 hours.  And being the perfect mom that I am (sarcasm, if you couldn't read it), I forgot to bring a binki for Jayce.  He was cranky, stuck in his carseat, and tired, so he wanted a binki and to go to sleep.  Poor thing.  Also, poor Nanna and Papa (my parents) stuck in the car with a crying, cranky little guy and no way to help him.  We made it back to their house and grabbed a spare binki from them and the drive home was nice and quiet. 

Name Signs

I love pinterest.  Have I mentioned that before?  So many fun ideas in one place.  I was thinking about all these neat things to craft and I was also thinking about registering Shaden for pre-school.  I decided I needed to do something to help Shaden learn to spell his name.  I wanted to make one of these cool name signs.  Example here, here, and here.  I've seen a bunch that use wooden letters covered in paint or fabric or scrapbook paper.  They turn out so cool, but I didn't want to scour the city trying to find all the different letters.
So the boys and I used what we had on hand.  Canvas, paints, a printer, scissors, and mod podge.  I think they turned out pretty good.  I had the boys paint the canvas.  Shaden picked yellow (of course, it's been his favorite for the past 2 years).  Jayce picked green (his favorite for the moment).  Then I printed and cut out the letters to their names.  Shaden helped me mod podge the letters on.  They added their hand prints and I sealed it with more mod podge.
We hung them up in their room above each bed.  Shaden loved to point to each letter and tell me how to spell his name.  This morning he even told me how to spell it without looking at the letters.  I was so proud!

Slacking

Okay it's been way too long since I've posted anything.  I've been slacking.
I have great goals for this year... including blogging more.  We have had a rough start to the year.  Everyone has been sick.  Ugh.  But life goes on and so we are taking lots of medicine and trying to get better.
A small recap of the past few months:

Thanksgiving was GREAT!  Chris got back from training just in time for us to drive out to Iowa.  We loved hanging out with some of Chris's siblings.  The boys couldn't get enough of their aunts and uncles.  We got to see the University where Jonathan (1 of Chris's brothers) is now a professor.  His office is really cool.  It has special walls that can absorb sound or make it echo.  My boys loved that.
We also visited a small German village for breakfast one morning.  YUM!

Chris took two weeks off for Christmas.  It was wonderful having him home.  Unfortunately we all got the stomach bug that was going around.  Thankfully none of us had it on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.  Christmas Eve we went over to my aunt's house.  We had tons of food and did a silly, fun gift exchange.
Christmas Day was spent at my parents' house and was wonderful.  The boys loved everything Santa brought them.
We are so lucky to be living in Colorado Springs.  One of the reasons is that we get to see Jonathan and Kate every year at Christmas instead of every other year, because Kate's family lives here too.  We enjoyed having them over on Boxing Day (Day after Christmas).

We took it easy on New Year's Eve.  We did have a feast of crab legs, twice baked potatoes and asparagus at home.

So there is what we've been up to.