Yesterday we headed to Okmulgee, Oklahoma for Jeff's cousin, David's, wedding!
M is ready for the drive!
We started the road trip off right with some doughnuts!
The kids were absolute angels for the drive. Of course, it was just a 3.5 hour drive (instead of our 15 hour treks to Colorado) and the kids had every technology device known to man to entertain.
Still they were awesome. Last year, I wrote about Road Trips with Kids: How to Survive. I will need to revisit this post before we leave for our 10 hour drive to the beach! We are so excited! We are going to Gulfport, MS with Jeff's parents for a nice little beach vacay! The kids are thrilled. Should be tons of fun!
Check out my Road trip posts HERE and Part 2 HERE.
Anyway, we got to Okmulgee and went straight to Jeff's parents hotel to change clothes for the wedding.
Daddy doing a terrific job brushing thru Myla's long hair
My crazy man
This would have been cute it Jeff didn't cut off my head...
Cousin Nate showing Myla his games before the wedding
Noah loved running around with cousin Rayvin
Myla with cousins Wren and Phoebe
Noah and Rayvin
My pretty girl
And my sleep-deprived, silly boy
Jeff with the groom, cousin Chad and cousin Mariah
Myla and Mariah
Jeff with his sweet momma
Family pic!
Noah just wanted to "dunk it".
Heading home with some sleepy kiddos!
He did pretty good considering he played hard at the reception and he didn't have a nap all day.
I had nothing planned for today's Thinking Thursday. Honestly, I am still recovering from my migraine yesterday. Sounds so dramatic, I know, but I'm such a weenie when it comes to my head hurting.
Anyway, I decided that M and I would work on her letters, recognizing and matching capital and lowercase. Reusing these magnets from Monday's activity. Score.
Since M is really into princesses going to royal balls right now, I decided to create a little scenario to make this even more fun.
I told her the capital letters were the gentleman (or the princes) and the lowercase letters were the ladies (or the princesses) and that they were all lined up in the royal ballroom and they needed to match up and dance!
She loved that idea and began setting them up to "dance."
All done! I just had her pick 10 letters to start with and we will do some more another time.
Since she has been pretty good at knowing her letter sounds, we tried a little word family practice.
I went with an easy one.... the -at family.
I first picked out some letters that would work and talked to M about families and family members. This was easy to relate to the word family.
"Oh, so the "m" is like the daughter, like me, since my name starts with an "M"!!!!"-Myla
Exactly. :)
We reviewed each letter first and went over their sounds.
She started to giggle when she put down the "f". :)
Here is a cute video of her reading the words. ;)
After a little word work practice, she was super anxious to research another animal. At first, it was a kangaroo, then she was ecstatic to announce that she wanted to learn more about dingoes!!
Dingoes?!? (my confused expression)
Then she went on about what she knew about them already (and I was desperately trying to recall what in the heck they are) and how she really needed to know what they eat and about some other stuff.
She did know that they are kinda like dogs, live somewhere far away, and that they come out and hunt at "dust". I'm going to assume she means "dusk." :)
Ok, dingoes it is! Looks like I will be learning something too.
Here are the questions we came up with...
(notice the question marks at the top? yeah, that's from me since I don't even know what this animal is)
Checking out some Dingo facts on Switchzoo. (great website, by the way!)
Finding out her first answer...they eat KANGAROOS, cattle, rabbits, insects, small birds, and rodents.
Here is her reaction to the dingo's diet...
Learning some cool stuff.
And this would be her reaction when she learned that dingoes are on the brink of extinction....
She was so sad. Through a 12 minute video and with the help of mommy's google on her iPhone, (don't judge, I was still fighting off my headache), we found our answers.
And now I know exactly what a dingo is...thank you, Myla!
Oh, and this is a dingo, in case you were wondering too...
Woke up Wednesday morning with a horrible headache, no, scratch that...I'm going to call it a migraine. Every squeal from one of my kids made it worse. And then when the kids started arguing and yelling at each other....forget it. 3 Aleves and a dose of allergy medicine later, the headache was still there.
And so was my promise to the kids that we would be going over to Nana's for Wet 'n Wild Wednesday to play water balloon basketball. Dang it. They were not going to let me forget it.
After a good 3 hours being lazy around the house, I decided I'd better fill up those water balloons.
Noah helped.
Thirsty?
After M's gymnastics we headed over to my mom's and brought over our bucket of balloons, basketball goal and some yummy taco salad for dinner.
Then it was pool time...
This is N's new pose when I ask him to smile for the camera.
Myla wanted to play with one of the water balloons first and toss it in the water. Mesmerized that it wouldn't break while in the water....
but right after this pic was taken, she set it on the side of the pool and {pop!}
With the bucket of balloons ready to go, the kids started taking some shots. The goal was to get the water balloon thru the net and into the water so it would't break.
My original idea was to label each water balloon A-Z so that we could shoot in order of the alphabet but I had a headache remember?!
They actually made a couple in the basket but MOST splattered on the side of the pool or broke on the backboard.
And in a matter of minutes, our water balloon supply was half gone!
Jeff was on rebounding duty.
Check out that follow through! :)
Our little butterfly-lover spotted this gorgeous Monarch!
And she caught it! (but then it got away)
After the short-lived water balloon basketball game, we played in the pool for awhile and finally got Noah to put on goggles! He has adamantly refused them. Guess he preferred the chlorine in his eyes?
He loved them! It was a whole new world!
These two make me laugh...headache, what headache?
Jeff and Myla love swimming in their goggles.
Don't mind the little boy in the background...when you gotta go, you gotta go.
Mom took a couple videos of our crazy boy jumping in the pool sans life jacket and I will add those later when I get them.
He has no fear and is really starting to swim!
Doing some lifts...
Despite the splitting headache and the super quick water balloon game, we had a pretty good time.
