the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth...

The tooth fairy will be making her first appearance at our house pretty soon. She's been waiting to come for weeks actually, Brighton is a bit of a non-wiggler. Her permanent tooth got tired of waiting for space and came in behind. She has orthodontia in her future, that's for sure. :)

But I was wondering, since a precedent will be set here for the whole family, what's the going rate for your tooth fairy? I remember getting a buck a tooth and $2 for molars. One glorious week I lost four molars and was rich!

But ended up with bus tokens. (love that book!)

So, how much?

If you give a child a chore...

they're going to get distracted. :)

Golly, do kids have the shortest attention spans ever?! I'm not asking a lot from them. We don't have to be ready to catch a bus at 7:30am, or to really ever go anywhere before noon. (Which is one of the reasons I home school.) I just want them to be ready for the day by 10:30, so we can start school.

Is that so hard?


Apparently. :)


If I send Brooklyn upstairs to get dressed, she spots the dress-ups and decides to be a ballerina.
If I ask Brighton to make her bed, she finds the book she hid under her pillow and reads for a half hour.
Logan is better, but I have to help him with his responsibilities. Get dressed, brush teeth, comb hair, clean room. I help him with all that.

The girls though- come on! I made them responsibility charts, so I can just ask them to check their charts instead of constantly nagging.

This is one of those kid things that I think is funny bordering on frustrating.
I'm not really complaining, just venting. Kids! :)

Fairy Tea Party

I went to a Fairy Tea Party a few years ago at the Provo Library. It was so fancy, it was more like the fairy prom! I thought it would be really fun to do on my own, with my girls and their friends. I need something to look forward to during the ugly months of February and March. My family swaps valentines every year, and the kids and I always have fun making valentines. But after that fun is over, I'm just waiting and waiting for spring to get here.

So I decided that the first Saturday of March will now be the Fairy Queen's Annual Tea Party!

I invited six of my little girls' friends and asked three older girls to be my fairy helpers. I even sent save the date's out before the invitations.

{So posh!}

My three fairy helpers came over a few times before the big day to help me plan the menu, make wings, and plan the activities. My helpers were so great, and I could not have done it without them! Thanks to Fiona, Camilla and Ella who definitely do not read my blog. :)

Brighton and Brooklyn were really excited for a looong time, and had fun helping me with craft ideas and fancy food planning.
My helpers came about an hour early to help set up. After all the fairies arrived, we sat down and each fairy introduced herself and told us what kind of fairy she was. Then we had a talk on fairy manners before sitting down for lunch. I made little sandwiches (jam, ham and cucumber) and cheese scones served with lemonade. My fairy helpers were great here serving everyone.
This little girl on the right, Anne, was such a cutie! She stayed in character and always referred to me as "Fairy Queen". So sweet, I loved it! :)

We did two crafts- fairy wands and crowns. I liked the crown idea - using foil to make designs, but the wands didn't go well. I got out glitter, and it turns out that I can't handle the glitter.

After the crafts we had treats. I made little cupcakes, little cookies, cake balls and raspberry mousse. Fancy and fun! We had time for a little parade/dance and that was it. Two hours was a good time length. I have plans to make a fairy dress in the future, but this was the best I could do with limited time. My girls loved my skirt, which is actually a slip. Don't worry, I was wearing pants underneath. :) I also didn't get to decorate my house like I wanted to, draping tulle and putting flowers everywhere. All of my kids took turns being sick and throwing up the week before. Brooklyn actually spent the party watching from the couch because she had thrown up that morning. I'll have to make sure they know not to do that next time.

Now I get to plan for next year! :)

Back to the routine

We've been on vacation to Utah (yay!) We got to see most of my family, all of James' family and to be a part of his sister Jennifer's wedding. Crazy fun!

I need to get my pictures off the camera - all five of them, I am so bad at remembering to take pictures!

I'm off to unpack and get settled, but will leave you all with this thought:

I was getting out applesauce as a snack for my kids, and they like to have cinnamon sprinkled on top. I grabbed a spice that looked like cinnamon out of the cupboard and sprinkled some on. Wrong one apparently. Cumin is NOT a good substitute for cinnamon. :)

Five in a Row

No, this is not a pregnancy announcement. :)

Some of you know that I was home schooled and that I currently home school my children. I wanted to post about what I do, and some of the curriculum that I use. I am in no way an expert and I've only just begun. But we're having fun and I wanted to share!

We start off our day with Five in a Row.

The idea behind FIAR is that we read the same book every day for five days, and each day we pull something out of it to discuss. For example, one of the books we read was The Story of Ping. On Monday, we talked about China and the Yangtze River and found them on the map. The next day, we talked about things that float and tried finding different things around the house and testing them to see if they would float. The third day we talked about the illustrations, how they were done with pencils and made our own pictures. And so on.

This is something that I can do with all the kids (a plus) and is what they enjoy the most. Here are a few pictures of what we have done.

After reading Papa Piccolo, which is set in Venice and has a lot of water in the pictures, we talked about all the colors the illustrator used for the water. We did a little experiment making our own colors. We took blue and added a little green, black, and other colors to see what color would turn out.

I found this painting idea here, and for some reason using q-tips to paint make me feel less stressed. Otherwise I am a bundle of nerves, knowing it will get all over the table, clothes, chairs and possibly the floor. I reeeally dislike having carpet under the table.
We read The Glorious Flight, which is about Louis Bleriot who invented the first working airplane in France and flew the English Channel. Of course we made paper airplanes!

Five in a Row is great for us. By the way, I got the manual used off of amazon for about $25, and get the books from the library. Much cheaper that way. The manual just gives lots of suggestions/ideas for their book list, so I suppose you could even come up with those yourselves and do it for free! But I like someone to do some of my thinking for me. :)

I'll post later about the rest of school. But this is the start of our home school day!

Silly Kidlets

We might have a problem...

Alternate title: The New Printer

Our old printer (that had been given to us several years ago) had started to die, and I was tired of never being able to print in color. I mentioned to James that it was very important to me to have a good printer, preferably one that could scan and copy. I find myself wanting to do that a lot as a homeschooler. I swear I only casually mentioned this, but I forgot who I was talking to. My husband is a bit of a tech nerd- he loves to research the newest gadgets and gizmos. For example, this is our computer:

He built this himself.


Twice.

And I have to say, although I was skeptical about the double monitor thing at first, now I don't know how I did without. Could we do three? Or four?



And now this is our printer:My old printer used to sit on top of that black filing cabinet. The new printer takes up my entire end table. Look at that thing! Yes, James reassures me that he got an unbelievable price, lowest one on the internet and then even lower because it was open box- but lookatitlookatit! It's huge! Practically commercial size! Am I running a marketing office? I might even have to name it.

Conclusion: Don't idly mention things like this anymore. Like wanting a new camera. I can only imagine what he would choose. Let us not speak of it.