Felt Tent

So I was recently inspired by one of our friends blogs (Missy and Lyndon to be precise) where she made a tent for her girls out of felt. I have long had a fascination with the little felt food I had seen on etsy and thought that the idea was great but I really didn't have the desire to actually make anything out of felt until I saw Missy's blog and the wonderful job she did. I looked online and found some ideas and this is what I came up with. I have been working on it for a while and just recently finished (for the most part) it. (I still have to make the corn to go on the stalk.)
Front door, mail box and bird feeder
The garden, with carrots, cabbage, soon to be corn, and flowers. All the pieces remove and that is the kids favorite thing about it.
Apple tree with basket, the apples are supposed to go in the basket when not on the tree, but they usually end up as ammo for the boys to throw at each other.
The fish pond, the fish have paper clips in the mouths so the boys can use their magnetic fishing rod to catch them.
The boys enjoying one of the windows, as you can see the flowers didn't stay in the flower box either.

This was a fun project but I am glad it is almost completed, it took a lot of figuring out. And don't look too close because I made a lot of mistakes, but the kids don't seem to care.

Relaxing Saturday Morning

Alan has been pretty busy with school, his thesis paper, different conferences, looking for jobs, making posters, giving talks etc. that we don't have a lot of family time. But last Saturday Alan took part of the morning off from his usual work to just hang out with the boys and they loved it. Here are the boys in their pjs reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Alan built the boys this marble ramp thing we saw in a Family Fun magazine. It didn't really work but they had fun making it. And we are still having "fun" picking up all the marbles that can be found in every crevice of the house. It's a good thing that there are not any little ones about yet to eat them.

It's Baa-aak!

Since I have lived away from Michigan for pretty much the last 12 years of my life I thought that I had lost most signs of my Michigan accent. I know sometimes when I am excited or talking too fast little hints of my accent come out. I can hear myself speaking like that sometimes and have to stop and correct myself. Especially on words like back or bag which I tend to say with a long a at times. Alan occasionally will catch me too and will laugh a little because he knows that it annoys me. Well apparently I must speak this way much more than I think I do because recently I have noticed my son Samuel speaking with the same long a on the same words I tend to say in my accent. I have to admit it grates on my nerves a little.

Anyway, I would like to hear from all of you Michiganians who have lived away from Michigan to see if their kids do the same thing. I would especially like to hear from all my sister in laws (because I doubt my brothers would actually write anything on here) to see if their kids have picked it up too.

Let me know!

S'more fun

Our little Jacob is such a funny kid. He loves to watch commercials on tv, well both he and Sam do really, but especially Jacob. They always ask me if we need to buy the stuff they see being sold on the infomercial type shows or tell me we need to get a snuggie or other new fangled gadget. But on Sunday his little obsession really showed its colors. We give our kids a little bag of snacks on Sundays during sacrament meeting if they have been good until after the sacrament. Alan gave Jacob some teddy grahams, some wheat thins, and a couple of little marshmallows in his bag. Jacob preceded to take out the teddy grahams and put a marshmallow inside of them and eat it like a s'more. I was very amused and he kept doing this throughout the meeting with his wheat thins too. I wondered where he got the idea to do that, but really didn't think too much of it because we had had s'mores before. But this morning we were watching some program on tv while the boys were eating lunch and Jacob yelled at me to look at the tv. I looked and saw an advertisement for this:

It is a microwavable s'more maker. He kept telling me that is why he made the "marshmallow cookies" that he had made in church because he wanted one of these. I had to laugh, it was pretty ingenious of a 3 1/2 year old to put all that together, at least I think it is.

Anyway, this past week the boys had a lot of fun going to BYU games (the BYU baseball game vs. Baylor and the BYU basketball game vs. TCU in Fort Worth), and they also got to go to the zoo, it was finally warm enough to go outside.
Jacob wanted to show his stuffed animal (a leopard named Jack) the real "leopard" (really a jaguar, but we told him it was a leopard because of his stuffed animal). So he brought Jack along to see him. Sam also brought his bear to show the bear at the zoo too, but I couldn't get a good picture of them together. The Jaguar was really active that day and was close to the glass, the boys were a little nervous about that but we got some good pictures of them with it.


Here the boys are at the new orangutan section of the zoo, they love jumping on the chimes and swinging on the ropes, they seemed more interested in that than they did with the orangutans which were also out and about, we hardly ever see them moving around. The lions were in good form too, we saw them roar which is something we have only heard from far away before, it was awesome to see it up close.

First Baseball Game

Last night we went to the boys first baseball game, Baylor was playing BYU and so we had to go out and support our cougs and the bears too. Sammy decided he was rooting for the cougars and Jacob wanted to root for the bears. I totally forgot the camera but our friend Hallie took some pictures of us at the game. Thanks Hallie.


Sic 'em bears!

The boys had a lot of fun until the last hour or so when their tiredness overran the funness factor. BYU won 7 -5 but it was a little hairy there at the end when Baylor made a run for the win.