Adventures in Teeter-land.

While our trip to Washington was great, it's always more than good to be Home.

The kids wasted no time in getting back to "normal"--helloooooo Flour Fight!!!!

They had almost as much fun cleaning it up with the hose as they did making the mess!

We've been having fun showing Shelan (who shall hence forth be called Lanny--her given name round these here parts) around.  We went for frozen yogurt and showed her one of our water fountains.

 When we went to the Gingko Petrified Forest, although the museum was closed, we picked up a couple of geodes at a nearby touristy store for Russ to break with the kids.  They turned out to be really pretty!

Another day we headed to the Oakland Zoo.  Unfortunately, I was in a funk and it didn't help that there were masses of children on field trips running around the place.  But we still had fun showing Lanny our favorite exhibits!

Sam wanted to hold his hand...????

Ahhh!  A ring-tailed lemur is upon me!

Brooklyn busted out her architect skillz for this bad boy.  I was pretty impressed--I have a really tough time visualizing something like this.  I have to search for images online that I want to try to replicate!

Lanny has missed her sun.  She spent the past 7 months in the icy caves of Rexburg, Idaho and hissed the first time she saw the sun.  After realizing that it wouldn't hurt her, she can often be found in this position in the grass somewhere.

More CitiBlocs.  He wanted to make a ramp for his newly-constructed motorcycle to jump off of (we'd been YouTube searching "world records" and found some pretty awesome ones.).

It was an overcast, warm day.  This is what the kids requested we do.
Gah, I love them.

Ever since the kids found mass amounts of caterpillars while hiking around the Quincy Valley, we've been entomologists--caterpillars, pill bugs, spiders, earwigs, moths, slugs, snails, crane flies, ants, flies...yeah, they've all been in my house for extended periods of time being poked, prodded, and identified.  Some make it the 24 hours to release...sigh.

I switched out a bunch of the toys on the kids' shelf and this has been getting played with Every.Single.Day.  Just today I found Brooklyn drilling her teeth with the drill!  Awesome, huh?  (No worries, it's not a real drill.)

I have found that I really enjoy doing puzzles...so long as they aren't too difficult.  My Master Plan is to raise two kids that are talented puzzlers so they can do the hard parts for me when I get frustrated.

Sam was playing around in my room while I was doing laundry.  He caught sight of this shirt and asked what the plastic loops were for.  I showed him, and he gave me the expected "I know." that conveys 'I understand.'  I left the room, he went back to bouncing on the bed, the shirt got tossed into the pile of clothes.  I came back in a bit later after Sam was done jumping and found this.  He knows how to get on his momma's good side!

Marbles!!!  I'm amazed this hasn't gotten old, even for me.

We found these water shooters at The Dollar Store and picked a couple of them up.  We have since gone through 5 more--they're popular!...and given the quality of Dollar Store items...don't last long.

Poor Sam, doesn't even get his own birthday post.  Given that we'd just had a party in Quincy, then just got home, a few of us were a big exhausted.  Sorry buddy!  He was thrilled nonetheless.

Daddy make the cupcakes and Sam decorated.

We'd been scouting the creek that runs along the trail by our house for awhile for polliwogs, but without much luck.  We took a bike ride and Russ and Sam found a TON of them!!  So Russ and Brook went back with nets and containers.  There were some itty-bitty ones (that aren't so itty-bitty now!) and some HUGE ones!!  Sam is holding one of the huge ones here.  So far so good, they're all alive and well, even after 2 weeks.  They get a small portion of frozen boiled lettuce every few days.  Voila!

Sam's "big" gift--walkie talkies!!  It's fun to watch him and the neighbor boy running around yelling, "Abort! Abort!"

I love that all of the kids play so well together--they are outside adventuring for HOURS.

Mini-marshmallows and toothpicks, again courtesy of our local Dollar Store.
This is Brooklyn's artwork entitled "Man Walking A Dog".  Nice, eh?

And this is Sam's artwork entitled, "Maraudhghgeahah!" ...better known as "I Need A Drink."

Another Brooklyn creation.

I had some Office Max bucks that I needed to spend, so we picked this bad boy up for $7 (originally $29).  The outside globe rotates, and you can write on it with dry-erase markers.  The kids would turn it on each night to fall asleep...until it died, at which point it turned into a death chamber for any spiders that happened to pass my kids' paths...sigh.

Sam declared it a Pancake Morning one morning and said he wanted to help.  And help he did...I needed to wipe those counters down anyways, I suppose.

"S...A...M.  Sam!"

Back to business...don't forget the berries!!!!

 Aaaaaaaand this about sums up how I typically feel after baking with an energetic 4 year old...

It's a good thing his mommy loves him.

Another block creation...I think this one was made with dual-kid effort.

Brooklyn and I talk often about money.  She gets $2 in allowance each week, and she's often thinking of ways to spend it.  This particular moment we were figuring out how many more weeks of allowance she would need to save up for a Chinese Water Dragon.

She's been on a big lizard kick lately--we've been to all of the pet stores at least once, we've read books, we've YouTubed, we've looked at Craigslist, we've measured out how much space one would need, we've discussed nocturnal vs. diurnal, food needs, other needs (basking rock, specific lights, etc.).  It goes on and on.

We've since moved off of the lizard topic...I think.  And have moved onto something a bit different...yesterday we were adding up how much money and how long it would take to save up for a Go-Kart!  First it was a Bumper Boat, but we finally wrote that off when we figured out she'd be able to afford the $1300 machine on her 19th birthday (with just allowance alone).  HA!

She is such a good sleeper--I love that she loves to make herself "nests" to sleep in.

And here's Sam being Sam.

Still not quite caught up, but much, much closer!!