Who needs toys when you have boxes

First produce day in February + 4 crazy kids = LOTS OF BOXES and lots of fun.

Shuman boys came to play after school the other day (we had soccer, but we skipped!). Great fun was had by all with the boxes. The were cars, trains, building blocks . . . you name it. It was so fun watching their imagination go crazy.
Summer is such a cheeseball these days.


"HAT!"



And our box clubhouse, which had survived since Christmas, went out with the bulk trash at the end of January. It was sad to see it go, but hopefully we'll make another one if/when Lowes ever decides to deliver the freezer we paid for.

Multicultural Day at Garrett's School (1.31.11)

Garrett's school did a Multi-cultural day at the end of January. The kids had a ton of fun with it. Garrett's fabulous teacher let me help dig up materials and activities, which made me feel like I was contributing a little. It turned out great. Its fitting that Garrett's class did Australia. I have always been obsessed with that country since I was a little kid.
Garrett's is the 2nd one down, left hand side, under the word Australia
They got their cute little faces painted like aborigines . . .
and did aboriginal cave paintings . . .
and made boomerangs . . .
and made didgeridoos. It was pretty funny when Garrett came home and explained what they were to Brad--he didn't have a clue about what a didgeridoo was.


Yes, Garrett is the one with his pointing STRAIGHT in the air. He was also the loudest. By far. No surprise there.

And they said "Gooday, Mate" when their friends came to visit. They even made cute little passports that they got stamped.

Weekly lesson plan (fun to have to look back so we can remember what they were doing)

MLK day coloring (G's is 2nd row, 2nd from the right)

And last, but not least, Summer made herself right at home. She built a tower with the duplos and then said "Mommy, take a picture!" She's also saying CHEESE, of course. Clearly I take too many pictures.

Catching up . . .Zoo last Thursday

I have NO IDEA where this week has gone. I haven't gotten that much work done. My house is clean, I THINK my kids have had fun, but I really can't remember details of this week without a considerable amount of effort. I've spent a lot of time cleaning . . . I am a HORRIBLE housekeeper. I'd rather play with my kids than clean. But as I mentioned a few posts back, I started this Motivated Moms thing that has helped me get my butt in gear in the cleaning department. So I GUESS that is where the week is gone. I know a lot of the week has passed with screaming, sitting on the ground tantrums on Summer's part. That certainly has contributed to my frazzled, exhausted state at this point.

Big weekend planned-making some sweet treats for Garrett's class on Monday for their Valentine's day party. Monster Jam for the boys (I am so very bummed not to be going). Hopefully a fun active date for Brad and I on Sunday morning. Since I'm terribly behind on posting pics, I am going to schedule some catch-up posts for the weekend . . .

These are from our trip to the zoo LAST Thursday. Thanks to Jennifer for taking the pictures, I forgot my camera. Its pretty fun to watch Summer's reaction to the animals now, she thinks they are all the coolest things ever. She looked at the huge python and said "Look, Mommy, Snake! I wanna hold it" The thing could EASILY have made a meal out of her, which made it pretty funny.
She likes doing dare-devilish things and demanding "LOOK! TAKE A PICTURE!" All of the bravery Garrett had at this age, and absolutely no sense of self-preservation. Oye.
Garrett with Abby and Gabby
And if THIS doesn't make me want to cry . . . I forget Garrett is only 4 sometimes, it feels like he is far bigger. We have some interesting conversations (example: One day this week we discussed, googled, and learned about the various things orcas eat. Completely random question on his part, and we both learned quite a bit).

Compare that to this one, from WAY back in Dec 2008.Feeding the giraffes was a hit, as always.

Garrett was obsessed with the baby one, for whatever reason.
HAPPY FRIDAY!

Super Sunday

Super Bowl Sunday was awesome, but not because of the Super Bowl. In fact, I fell asleep after half time. It was awesome because we did something that is rare and wonderful-we spent the whole day as a family. The downside of our schedule arrangement with my work is that we very rarely get to have an ENTIRE day together. I usually work part or most of the weekends, and once Brad gets home in the evenings during the week the kids are headed to bed. Family time is rare and treasured.

The weather has been beautiful around here, so we headed to Key Biscayne to hit the beach. Rather than parking at the beach, we went to my office and parked there (I had to pick up some things anyway), then rode our bikes to Crandon Park. We've done this before, but both kids rode in the trailer. This time, Garrett rode his bike. Aside from one yucky place where you have to cross the main road, the bike trail between my office and Crandon park is peaceful and beautiful. Its also one of my favorite running routes, so I took pictures so you can see why its so easy to spend 2 hours on the pavement when I'm working weekends.

This is why I LOVE my truck and am so thankful we have it. How else would we pull this off?
As it turned out, we couldn't get in the water due to a large number of Man-O-War Jellies that had washed up onshore, but that didn't put a damper on our day. The kids played in the sand and at the playground and splashpad. Brad took a nice long nap while we played. We snacked, we hung out, and just had an all-around good time.

After all, you can play with boats in the sand too.
They even played nice.
Palm trees, sun and sand. In February. Days like this cancel out the rude people and crappy traffic.

Here's what the ride back to the car looked like. Again, this is one of my 2 running routes at work. You can see why it just isn't a chore to go.

Leaving Crandon park, entering Bear Cut Nature Preserve

Summer was totally out. She was so good!
Back to civilization-crossing the Bear Cut bridge. I was so proud of G, he had no problem riding up it. :-) Its not a big hill, but still . . .

Seriously, have I mentioned how much I love where I work? This is the view I can see with a 3 minute walk.A view of our campus from the bridge. And the boys pedaling merrily along.
Garrett ended up riding a total of 6 miles, with lots of playing in between. I'm so proud of him, and hope that we can schedule more fun rides like this in the future.

Race Report - Homestead Hearts and Soles 5K

This year I promised myself some actual organized races to keep myself motivated. 2010 was marked by a TON of budget races, but no organized ones. Homestead holds its very own 5K every February, and this year Brad and I did it together. Two years ago, this was my first ever 5K. Its kind of fun to see how far I've come since then. Two years ago I finished in 36 minutes and was proud. This year I finished in 30:03 and was mildly annoyed with the time. I was really hoping for a personal best, and THAT was definitely not it. But oh well, exceedly fun all the same. And a huge improvement in my running from 2 years ago. Big thanks to our neighbor Julie for taking my kids at an early hour so Brad and I could enjoy doing this together.
Of course, when I say together, I use that term rather loosely. We started together. We left together. During the actual race, he smoked me. But after several years of running, I've accepted that he's just faster than me :-) Brad finished in 24 minutes. It drives me crazy how fast he is!! All in all, a fun and fabulous (if sweaty) way to spend some date time.

Next up on the race schedule is the Move It 2011 Budget 5K on 3/26!

Monday Mayhem - Bring on a new week

This past week was insanity. I chalk it largely up to Brad having been gone for 4 days last week and then having 2 meetings in the first half of the week. Add in soccer practice and our produce day and it made for a very insane first half of the week.

Add in the following factors (AKA the bad stuff):
*Garrett hit a classmate at school on Wednesday. Grounded for the rest of the week. No TV, no friends, no fun to be had at all. As most moms tend to do, I took it personally that he would make such a bad choice. Sigh.
*I saw a dog get hit by a car on Wednesday during my run (you really have to know how much of a dog person I am to get why this would be so upsetting to me) . . . we stopped to help, and hopefully the poor thing is recovering well. Of course, I couldn't bear to let my dogs out of my sight for a couple days . . . logically, the entire thing shouldn't have affected me as much as it did, but I'm in this weird stage where I am terrified of losing my dogs and that really didn't help.
*Brad has been sick
*The boy refuses to sleep in his own bed after midnight, which means I haven't slept well in days.

The good stuff:

*Downloaded a chore chart from Motivated Moms on Monica's suggestion, hoping that will help me with the whole balance thing. Because if there is one thing I am TERRIBLE at its cleaning my house.
*Coffee and a nice chat with Shelah on Friday, because darn it, it had been that kind of week for us both.
*We had to break out a lot of the 3+ Discovery Toys this week for Summer. Little girl is getting big, which is both sad and super exciting. Here she is doing the Busy Bugs.
*My boys made me a wicked cool butcher block cutting board. I LOVE LOVE LOVE IT (and Brad made the bread too!)
*Girls Night Out at the Winery. There was a lot of dancing involved, which made me a happy camper!!
*I managed a 20 mile week, and with all of the insanity, I can say that in the fitness department it was a REALLY good week. 2 short, relatively fast runs, yoga, a long bike ride, kickboxing, zumba, and two FABULOUS weekend runs on Key Biscayne.
*The weekend runs on KB get their own bullet point--14.5 miles in 2 days. A gorgeous sunset on Sunday to help me get all nice and centered for this week. Explored some of the trails in Crandon Park on Saturday, saw a spotted eagle ray jump out of the water, and just generally let go for a couple of hours. Absolutely beautiful weather. I honestly have NO CLUE how I remained sane before I became a runner. These two weekend runs have made me feel all nice and centered and ready to tackle whatever comes next.

I am so very glad to be starting a new week. I really hope it is better than the last one.

Zoo Fun

We went to the zoo today and met up with friends Monica, Alora, and Corbin. Garrett and Corbin are good buddies, and we haven't seen each other since BEFORE our trip to St. John in September. Alora and Summer seem to be made of the same naughty-girl cloth, which made the excursion both refreshing (no, I am not the only one with a crazy little girl) and insane (where'd they go???)




This one pretty much sums up Summer's devil-may-care attitude. She is standing on top of an elephant. Insanity.


We went to the Members Only showing of the new "Scoop on Poop" exhibit. I found it to be crass. Picture videos of various animals pooping. Yeah. Really. And then there was this, which Garrett found hilarious:
But the outside part, which I assume was only for this one day, was pretty cool.

Identifying skulls (Garrett correctly guessed this one was a big cat).
There was a matching game involving containers of poop and pictures of animals. Although I did not watch this closely (chasing Summer down), Garrett must have done well because he got a little poster.

There was also a poop race--of course Garrett wanted to do that. You scooped poop and filled up your bucket. Garrett was the smallest AND slowest of course, but he took it very seriously and had a great time. Although at the end, he said "Pee-eww, I am never getting that close to poop again!" When I got home from my run this afternoon, we had a message that he won a $5 gift certificate to use at the zoo for his participation, which was nice.



Leaving the zoo resulted in a meltdown on Garrett's part, but at least he cried and threw a tantrum while walking back to the car. All in all, a decent day at the zoo. I was a little nervous about going, since Summer is such a handful and we haven't gone too many places since she was potty trained. I must say though, I am STRONGLY considering one of those little leash backpack things for her. I simply can't keep an eye on Garrett when she is around, because if I stop looking at her for one second, she will be off. AND she totally doesn't listen, which is not cool. Really, the word "brat" fits her well. Going to have to work on that.

Camera = found

As suspected, it was in the soccer bag.

So, photo catch up.

First day of soccer:
(Thanks Carrie for the hand me downs, he wears them proudly to EVERY practice)
And Summer insisted on her own picture.
Warmups (crappy light!)

You can see how excited Summer is about it all--she really wishes she could play too :-)

And from today, making garbanzo bean and rapini pita pizzas-big hit.
Pardon the nakie girl. She's hard to keep clothed these days. 3 days on my own = tired of chasing her down and insisting she wear clothes.
Garrett got a black eye at school today. He says that one friend tripped over another and ran into him, he fell into another friend and hit his face. You can't see it very well, but he has quite a shiner. (And what a goofy face).
And last, but not least, Summer "swimming" in the bath tub. She loves the water.