Today's Pics: Bubbles, Bugs, and A Bad Attitude

Get the bubbles, Kyle!

There are bubbles on my head!

Playing with pill bugs

She's the only one not afraid to touch them.

My car!

Don't touch my car!

Taking A Walk With Kyle

When taking a walk with Kyle, there's not much walking going on. But there is...

Stopping to look at bugs

Standing on every man hole

And sitting on neighbor's benches

Love his curiosity...it just takes a long time to get home!

This evening we walked to the elementary school after dinner. Can't believe we are one summer away from Karis going to kindergarten!

Dying Easter Eggs

Dipping 

Double dipping

Kyle tried his hand at dying eggs. He was pretty good. He patiently held the egg in the bowl. 

He only spilled colored water twice... =P

Need. more. glitter.

Almost done

Colored eggs. Happy kids. 

Learning To Read

Karis has been learning lots of sight words in pre-K. She often points them out to me when she sees them in a book, on a sign or on random things around the house. But I wondered when she would start reading when her sight words were words like me, "go," "my," "he," "with",  and "I".

The other night, we were working on her homework. She had to find the word "has" on anything around the house. We scoured some books and found a few. When she started looking through the book "Are You My Mother?",  she realized she could read a lot of the words on the pages. She started reading, sometimes guessing the words with the help of the pictures and knowing what the first letter sounds like. To my surprise, she was reading a lot of the words! It was pretty exciting. She was thrilled that she was reading. Here is a video of her reading a couple pages. 

Easter Fun

Last Saturday, we took the kids to a local church's Easter event. We were all excited to spend some family time together. Daddy worked a lot this past week in preparation for Easter, so we didn't spend as much time with him as we would have liked. 

Kyle participated in his first egg hunt. He was excited to pick up eggs and fill his bag (I forgot to bring the kids' Easter baskets!). He didn't even know the eggs were filled with candy!

 

 Kyle was excited to show off his goodies. 

The girls decorated cookies while waiting for the older kids' egg hunt. 

I loved how someone shared with the kids the Easter story before the egg hunt. They used Resurrection eggs and Makena got to open the last egg. It was empty -- He is risen!

It was a very windy day, so the girls' hair covered their faces in all their pictures of the egg hunt.

Afterwards, the girls did a scavenger hunt and got to take home a prize. 

Kyle happily played on the playground during the scavenger hunt. 

My crazy kid!

There was a small petting zoo at the event and that was our first stop. Makena was disappointed that there weren't any bunnies. Right before we left, I found out they had a bunny inside the church. She loved it and now wants a pet bunny. Look at that face!

There were also crafts, popcorn and bounce houses. I love taking the kids to small events like these. They have a blast and we don't have to drive far, fight crowds or pay a lot of money. It was perfect!

A Day in the Wild

Well, not "the wild," more like a wildlife center. On Friday, we drove about two hours away to Fossil Rim. It's a place where you can drive through the center in your own car and see lots of different animals. We arrived later than we had hoped (11 am), so we were worried that all the animals would be napping far away after their morning feed. But the weather was beautiful, it was the first sunny day after two days of rain, and all the animals were out. We saw so many different animals and it was such a fun time!

We drove two cars but we left one in the parking lot. We took out all the car seats and piled in the van. Kyle chose to sit with Grandpa. 

We checked off all the animals we saw in the brochure. We didn't see any wolves... but no one complained!

First off, the ostrich. We were all a little wary about these guys.

Karis waving to some ostriches in the distance.

Makena enjoying the view.

Fallow deer waiting for some feed. We were only allowed to hand feed the giraffes. For all others, we were instructed to throw the food onto the ground. 

So excited to see all the animals!

An Addax which are critically endangered.

Derek drove us through the center. It took us about 3 hours to make our way through it.

The Aoudod approaching.

Happy chaos! The kids loved being able to move around the van without seat belts.

I loved watching this guy see all the animals for the first time.

Waterbucks

This guy just opened his mouth and lapped his tongue around, waiting for some feed. 

We were all excited to see the giraffes. They were towards the end and we were saving our feed for them. When we got there, they were all hanging out in the distance. We thought they weren't going to come to us. Then Jeremy hung out the window and started shaking the brown paper bag of feed.

And then one by one, they started making their way to us!

There was a giraffe in our car! It was awesome!! 

And then we met up with some zebras. 

They weren't shy either and stuck their heads in the van.

They were beautiful!

We saw other animals including white rhinos, (caged) cheetahs, gazelles, other horned deer-like animals, cranes, and turkeys.

On our way back, we stopped to eat at a steakhouse. Grandpa wanted to celebrate Julie's birthday!