This summer I'm trying something new. Now that the boys are a little older, there's a lot more things I can do with them. But in addition to outings, I wanted to try and keep some academics in our activities (while disguising them as something more fun). So we're doing themed weeks, where some of our outings and activities we do during the day will all have the same theme. This first week our theme was dragons. We played a game where I hid easter eggs (some one color, some different color on top and bottom) and then gave the boys pictures of dragons. The boys then had to find the egg that matched the dragon's coloring. The boys both loved this game, especially Gavin. We spent over an hour playing different variations of the game. We also made our own dragons by painting toilet paper tubes and connecting them together. And over the weekend, we went to see the movie "How to Train Your Dragon 2."
I didn't get a lot of pictures of our dragon activities, but we did a lot of other things this week as well. Take a look!
We went to the Round Lake Children's Museum this week, and we go there a lot, so I rarely take pictures anymore. But I just love the expression on Dec's face paired with that crazy hat!
The kids love to help me bake, so when the bananas looked like they might turn on us, we decided to make banana chocolate chip muffins. I took video of this as well, because the pictures don't really do justice to the giant mess these kiddos made. Gavin even took flour and patted it all over his face, much to Declan's delight!
Showing off his messiness.
Painting dragons.
Declan really liked using all the colors, and he looks so cute in Mommy's old t-shirt as his smock.
Dec doing some reading while I walk him down Midlothian to watch the cars. Gavin has camp two mornings a week so Declan and I get the chance to hang out just the two of us. We spend a lot of this time just going on walks, playing at the park, or running errands.
On today's walk we saw a worm crawling across the path. Declan was enamored with the worm and we watched it for a good ten minutes. He even asked me to take this picture of him with the worm.
The walking path by our house has a part that faces out to a busy road. Dec likes to sit on the bench and just watch the cars go by. He loved to do this last year too, so I wasn't sure if he would have "grown out of" this passion or not.
As you can tell from the worm picture, Declan really likes nature as well. We spent a lot of time watching the ducks, geese and crane that were in the pond on this morning.
Declan has become a really good climber. We try to hit up new parks and whenever we do, Declan always challenges himself to climb everything there. This crazy rope structure is actually at our neighborhood park, but because Dec is a little short for his age, he can't get to far up this rope course...yet.
Gavin had been asking to make smores, so here he is enjoying his first one! Dec wasn't too into them (both the boys don't like eating messy foods, although Gavin has obviously gotten better at dealing with that).
We also went strawberry picking! Last year the boys weren't into picking the strawberries at all, and the crop wasn't very good. This year the berries looked great and both boys really enjoyed it. Gavin liked learning from the farmer how to look for strawberries and he did a great job of evaluating the berries before picking a good one.
Gav showing off one of his picks.
Declan wasn't as into the picking process because that got in the way of eating all the strawberries. We just discovered that Declan loves strawberries, and he ate at least a dozen while we were out in the field picking!
Might be hard to tell here but he has a mouth full of strawberry!
After picking our strawberries, we stopped in the farm shop for some fresh donuts. The kids decided that we were having a "donut picnic."
The farm also has an area with attractions for the kids: a petting zoo, slides, tractors to climb on, a big jumpy thing, etc. Here the boys are meeting Norman, a cow that was only 10 days old!
Dec looks like he is running in fear here, but both the boys really loved the goats.
This is the big jumpy thing they have, its pretty fun, and Dec had more fun jumping and landing on his butt then just continuing to bounce.
Dec about to slide down a very tall tunnel slide. He HATED it and screamed and cried, but then asked me to go up again with him. So I did and we went down a different slide, and he screamed and cried again, so that was the end of that :)
Gav on the other hand LOVED the giant slides and went down over and over.
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