Grandma Barb

We had such a wonderful visit with David's mom last week. She and her husband came in on Saturday and stayed the whole week. Cyrena loved having company. She even used her grandma for show & tell on Thursday. Her clues were "she loves me, I love her, she's a girl." Then she called her grandma in and all the kids were giggling...too cute. The highlight of the trip was spending all day Friday in Mesa. David took the day off (hooray!!!) and we went to the temple then Sweetcakes for lunch and then to the Arizona Museum of Natural History. It was an excellent day and full of fun memories.

Natalie was enthralled with the Christus, she just kept pointing, babbling, and smiling. We think she recognized Him.

At the last minute I grabbed a bag of plastic dinosaurs from my preschool stash. I kept them in the stroller and every time we saw a specific dinosaur, I got it out of my bag, and gave it to her to put in her little purse. She thought this was awesome! She's really good at identifying dinosaurs so this was another way to reinforce that.

They had all kinds of wood floor puzzles throughout the museum. They were hard, but fun! We love puzzles.

Natalie loved this aquarium, we had to tear her away. This one fish just kept looking at her....

She....had.....to......touch....EVERYTHING. Luckily this was a kid friendly museum!

We love Grandma!

During a break, we had to take a few trips up and down in the elevator.....Cyrena loves them.

Here they're 'making' a clay coil pot
We also got to hold some pottery from the B.C. era....very cool

Cyrena and I in an old Arizona jail cell

We got to pan for gold! This was so fun. The water was stocked with all kinds of gold flakes/nuggets. And they give you a bag to keep it in.

Cyrena showing me a good-sized nugget

She was not to be left out. She was SOAKED by the end of this

Relaxing while we let Natalie run around and dry off

"What a great day"

Next we went to the 'light and color' room. Grandma made a cat with tangrams, cool!

David fulfilling his dream of becoming a weatherman

Blacklight

Watching a movie by turning a crank

We were so lucky to spend such a fun day together. It makes me look forward to next time!

Our little Valentines

Ever since David and I were dating, he has always made me the same Valentine dinner. Steak, baked potato, salad, the works. So we made that dinner again this year, but on the night before Valentine's. On Sunday, we had church until 5 and then a stake choir practice from 6-7:30. So we celebrated the night before. David's mom and stepdad flew in Saturday afternoon then we enjoyed our awesome dinner all together. It was so tasty.

Beautiful tulips!

Valentine pajamas

Every year after the girls are asleep we put cut out hearts all over the walls of their room. They were both excited about that when they woke up. That's the first thing Cyrena told me when she came to wake me up, "Mom I counted 8 hearts on my door!" Then they saw their surprises on the rocking chair....SUCH excitement!

They had to go show Daddy everything.
They each got a book and some chocolates. And Nanny (Aunt Lynette) had sent them chocolate suckers. Natalie's never left her mouth (except for when she let me unwrap it) until every speck was gone. It was the first thing Cyrena polished off as well.

Women and their chocolate

It was a great Valentine's

A bit 'o sports

Cyrena just finished a 4-week sports sampler with her friend Logan. They had so much fun learning soccer, t-ball, basketball and football. I think soccer was her least favorite and football was her favorite.

SOCCER:
Some little blonde girl was all over the floor playing with the goal

They let the kids play a little game at the end, it was crazy and loud and Cyrena ended up in tears. Was I surprised? No.

T-BALL:
Stretching is always SO important. There's that little blonde girl again, she's even got a mitt.

Got to warm up those muscles with a good run. That little blonde girl is beating everyone. How did this post wind up about her??

Basketball:
They learned how to dribble and pass and got to practice shooting, SO fun!

FOOTBALL:
Blocking stance, good times. Love her smile

They learned how to be linemen and had to block their dads while protecting the quarterback

They learned how to properly hold the ball, 'protecting' it with their other hand

This is her mean, football tackle face, what do you think Grandma?

She tackled Spiderman pretty well

Oh, my little sports girl. She was in her element during these classes and is sad they are over. I could look at that face all day. It's when that mouth opens and never closes that we have a problem.

Pink & Red

Those are the Valentine colors right?

Well we've been having fun with them around here. I thought I would post things we've been doing to get ready for the big day!

Yesterday Cyrena made her Valentine cards. She stamped some hearts and put some stickers on them. These are going on top of bags of treats for all her friends! We'll be having a preschool party on Thursday.

She wrote each person's name on the cards and was so proud of herself when she was done!

See that little blonde head just itching to help her sister? She's trouble

Then we made a Valentine Suncatcher. We made these for preschool today. Sometimes I like to have Cyrena try out the crafts the day before just to make sure they'll go smoothly.

This was fun. Here's what you do:

*Cut out a heart outline
--I taught Cyrena how to cut hearts out of paper and she thought it was fun!

*Lay the heart outline on one large square of contact paper.

*Fill in the outline with anything that is semi-transparent. Just stick everything on there! We did tissue paper, small sequins and glitter of course!

*Lay another square of contact paper on top of the outline

*Trim into the heart shape and hang in the sunshine!

And don't forget to try to catch all the dust particles you'll see coming in through the window!

For Family Home Evening we had a lesson about love and talked about how important each member of our family is. We looked at a family photo and I covered up one of us and we talked about what it would be like if that person wasn't in our family. It really made Cyrena think and she said some interesting things.

We brought it into V-Day by saying that we want everyone in our family to know how much they are loved. So we made V-Day mailboxes for everyone in the family. We decorated them with our names, stickers and drew some pictures. Natalie just wanted to put stickers on her shirt. Fun stuff.


Our finished work. Natalie has a sparkly red heart sticker on her neck and Cyrena's holding a twix bar, her FHE treat. Ahh, I'm going to love looking at these in a few years. :)

I have pre-printed notes that I am keeping by the mailboxes so we can write notes anytime we want, or even put a treat in the mailboxes (cyrena was all over that and started getting things out of the cupboard right away).

Here she is copying the big smile she made on her mailbox.

So there's just a little glance at our Valentine fun! There's so much more I want to do but I'm not feeling too motivated at the moment. :)

p.s. Last night I wrote a note for Cyrena and she opened it this morning. I wrote: U R A Q T. Oh my goodness she made me laugh trying to read it. We've been working so much on letter sounds and beginning reading that she was trying to sound out what it said. It was hilarious. "uuhh, rrr, aaaa, qwa" I finally told her to just say the letter names and when she did she thought it was SOOOO silly!!