Fall Break

With the new school schedule, the boys have a fall break, Thanksgiving break, Christmas break, Spring break, etc... I feel like we are barely into school and we already had our first break! Last week the boys had fall break and it was a great week to do some fun things with the boys. I am starting to have some of the typical mom feelings when adding a new child to the family....I feel like I am going to miss out on time with the boys because I will have a new little one occupying some of my time. So in dealing with these feelings, I really wanted to make the most of our week together and do some fun stuff. Well, the boys were not really feeling well most of the week so we couldn't really go out and do anything like I had originally planned. We ended up staying home most of the week, but we made the best of it anyways!! So.....some of the fun stuff we did.....

Although it was "fall break" it did not feel like fall at all!! The temperatures were still in the 90's! I figured although it was the end of September, it was still blazing hot outside so we pulled the slip and slide back out!! I didn't get any pictures, but we spent a couple of afternoons just enjoying the weather and playing in the water!! This is always a winner with the boys!

Next, I'm sure you are wondering what we did with all of those apples we picked at the orchard....well, we made applesauce!! I have never made applesauce, but I thought we would give it a try.

First, we peeled, cored and cut up all of our apples.

The boys squeezed a little lemon juice onto the apples...

then we added a little sugar, brown sugar and cinnamon sticks...

We then put the whole mixture into a pot to cook down and get the apples nice and soft.

After it was cooked, we mashed it all up and then

you have applesauce!!!

Then we had some fun with a cardboard box... For lunch one day we had dinosaur chicken nuggets. This led us to a discussion of dinosaurs and I thought it would be fun to try and make a dinosaur for the boys to wear out of a cardboard box. (Please note that I am not creative at all, but we made the best of it :) ) We cut and taped for an hour and this was our final product! The boys thought this was the greatest thing and had so much fun playing with it!

They spent the afternoon chasing each other around pretending like they were a big dinosaur!!

Lastly, the boys have been working on the colors blue and red at school. Although the boys have known their colors for a long time, I thought it would be fun to do an activity to incorporate what they are working on at school to something at home. So we did a "red" collage! This little activity actually incorporated a lot of the skills they are working on at school so it ended up being a good "project." I gave them each a magazine and a pair of scissors. They went through the magazine and cut out all of the red pictures they could find. (this was their first time using scissors so it was a learning process!!) After practicing with the scissors for a while, they just started tearing out red pictures. Then they took all their red pics and glued them to a red sheet of paper and that was our red collage!! They were so excited about our "craft"!!

(I just had to post this last picture because I thought it was funny...I tried to lean over the counter and take a pic of both their collages.....but a big ole' belly covered up half the picture!!!)

So, we had a great break and I'm glad I got to spend the week doing some fun stuff with the boys!! I just love hanging out with them!! :)