Vacation Day 3

Today we made the almost hour long drive to Powell Gardens on the other side of Kansas City from where we live. Then we went to a movie - Madagascar 3 - back on this side of Kansas City.

Powell Gardens

7 years ago this November, Justin and I got married in the chapel at Powell Gardens. It is a gorgeous chapel. I went there a couple of times when we were preparing for the wedding but I haven't actually been there since getting married. Today was the first day of their Butterfly Festival and they have Fairy Houses and Forts built around the gardens. This activity had potential to be a lot of fun, but then Claire decided her favorite word today was NO and that if something wasn't going her way (which was everything) she was going to scream about it. In general, that is not fun, it's even less fun when you're struggling with her out in the 85-ish degree humid heat. Also, Claire has a bit of love/hate feelings about butterflies, she LOVES to look at pictures of them, but show her the real thing and she flips out. This is actually kind of new because at the beginning of the summer there were a couple of butterflies that she would chase around the side of the house. Anyways, it was kind of fun, but it was hot and I had a screaming toddler with me (sorry everyone else). Within 5 minutes of getting in the car to drive back home she was sound asleep. I ended up sending Anaya into a Subway to buy us lunch because I wasn't about to wake Claire up.

Madagascar 3

I let Anaya choose which movie to see between Madagascar 3 and Ice Age: Continental Drift. We ended up at Madagascar 3 which was good. I think as a whole that series is easier for a toddler to understand than Ice Age. Claire kept wanting to talk during the movie and not in a whisper. But she was in a better mood for the most part. And she ate most of a movie theater bag of M&M's because she missed lunch since she slept from just after noon until 1:15pm while we were driving.

At Home

We spent the rest of the day at home. We watched one of the other Ice Age movies and played with Barbies. We ate dinner (pancakes, cantaloupe, fake sausage). Then I collapsed on the couch and Anaya played on the computer and Claire played on the iPad. I eventually dragged the kids outside again by giving them ice cream. Then we sat on the driveway and attempted to get Claire to play with the Cicada shells. And after Claire went to bed and I finally cleaned up the kitchen, Anaya and I made Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Frozen Yogurt. It won't be ready to eat until tomorrow but it looks delicious.

I think this is the end of our Kansas City Vacation 2012. I don't have anything planned for tomorrow and I'm not really planning to plan anything.

Vacation Day 2

Today was a lazy day. In fact, I left the house once for about an hour and Claire didn't leave the house at all.

Disney & Donuts

We started out the day laying around in my bed watching the Disney Channel and eating donuts until 10am. Did I mention that we were lazy? Then I made Anaya start her chores and I did a few things that aren't her chores and needed to be done.

Pedicures

Around 11:15am, Anaya and I headed out to get pedicures. I usually get one or two during the summer and Anaya has been asking me to take her with me because her mom hasn't been taking her recently (probably because it is freaking EXPENSIVE, I think my normal place has raised the price since May). But now my feet are all nice and soft and our toes have pretty little flowers painted on them. And sometimes you just need something pretty.

Homemade Ice Cream

Before my mom left for her trip that caused this little Kansas City vacation, I borrowed her ice cream maker. After sending Justin to the store for the 2 ingredients that I was missing, Clarie & I made Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream. It is so delicious. We made it about 3pm and by 7:30pm when we were eating it, it was still pretty runny. Hopefully it continues to solidify tonight/tomorrow. I think it probably needed to stay in the ice cream maker a little longer, but we had some issues and it stopped for some unexplained reason. But it's still delicious, it's just more like soft-serve ice cream which isn't entirely a bad thing.

Shopping

Anaya went birthday shopping with Aunt Kimbi. It sounds like they had fun. I stayed home with Claire and made ice cream and watched...something? I can't even remember what I did for the 2 hours that Anaya was gone. Except lay on the couch.

Vacation Day 1

We're having a Kansas City Vacation. Except it's even better because we get to sleep in our own beds at night and when we all get on each others' nerves we can go to our separate spaces.

Day 1 was Crown Center & Union Station. We had fun. But it was exhausting.

Science City at Union Station

Claire may be a little young for Science City. Definitely something I will have to remember for when she's a little older. I think some 3 yr olds would be fine with it, but not mine. Anaya liked pretty much everything, I think if we didn't have Claire with us, we probably would've stayed longer, but she was done and Anaya had seen everything even if we hadn't spent quite as long as she would've liked at some of the stations. I think Claire's favorite thing was this spinning table in the Astronaut zone. I really thought she would like the water table, but we could barely get her to look at it. It took us about 2 hours to see everything and if I hadn't already decided we were going to do a lot more, we probably could've been done downtown after that.

Crown Center

Since Megan at The Nerd Nest always talks about d'Bronx pizza and we don't have one near our house, I decided to take the opportunity of being at Crown Center to give it a try and it was MUCH cheaper than Crayola Cafe which is where Anaya wanted to go. (She ended up being happy with my decision and has declared d'Bronx her favorite pizza place.) Since we're being vegetarians for the week, I ordered a tomato, onion and green pepper slice (half of which I removed so Claire would eat it) and Anaya ordered green pepper and jalapeno. Then we went down the hall to their free Dinosaur exhibit. It was nicer than some of the other free children's exhibits they have had down there.

Kaleidoscope

Anaya specifically requested that we go to Kaleidoscope this summer. I have to tell you though...I kind of hate that place. And Claire seems to agree with me. But Anaya LOVES it so I managed Claire while Anaya ran around and made a ton of crafts from leftovers from Hallmark. I actually like the IDEA of Kaleidoscope, but in reality it's just too loud and busy and Claire was just not interested to the point that I was picking her up off the floor from a screaming and kicking tantrum TWICE. I could understand her frustration but she wasn't understanding the concept of just deal for 20 minutes and then we'll do something you'll enjoy. Anaya left with a bag full of crafts and Claire had a bag with a fish she colored, a piece of paper with Chipette stickers on it and a 2 black light drawings that I mostly did.

SeaLife Aquarium

What Claire was wanting to do when we were in Kaleidoscope was go to the Aquarium. We got season passes back in April and this is the fourth time that Claire has been there. She saw it earlier when we were eating and all she wanted to do was go see the fishies already. She was making fish faces at me and saying "please" and she just wanted to see the fish. Anaya did not want to see the fish, but Claire dealt with Kaleidoscope so it was Anaya's turn to deal with Claire's favorite activity. We flew through there in less than 45 minutes. (And I took only 19 pictures. I mean, it is our FOURTH time there, how many pictures of fish does one really NEED and we'd already been doing STUFF for 5 hours at that point - I was done.) Claire knew what she wanted to see and where everything was and would stop when she wanted to look but otherwise just kept right on going. Then we had to get cookies at Panera because that's what you DO after going to the Aquarium according to Claire.

So, I just realized as I was looking through my pictures for this post that I had left my camera on the P setting most of the day which lets it pick the Aperture and Shutter Speed and I really should've had it on Shutter Speed Priority because I have lots of pictures where Claire is doing things and her hands are blurs.

Baseball Game

I was planning to work on my Project Life layout last night, then at 4pm, our company receptionist/office manager sent out an email about Royals tickets for that night. I called Justin to make sure he didn't mind and sent in a email to try and "win" the tickets. They do a drawing I think of all the people that say they want the tickets, I'm not sure if not very many people wanted them or if I was just lucky, but I won the tickets. So after a quick dinner, we headed out to Kaufman Stadium for our once a year baseball experience.

I've been spoiled by the company tickets, they are in the Diamond club. There are seriously FOUR actual rows in front of us and then a few rows of dugout seats and then the field. And in the Diamond Club, they have people that come down and take your order for food and drink. There's no way I would spend the amount of money required to buy these tickets - we enjoy going, but not THAT much. This picture - from my seat, no zooming.


I wasn't originally planning to take Claire, but she would've been so sad to stay home while Anaya, H and I went. And I had four tickets. So she got to come too! And she did MUCH better than I thought she would do. I did take the iPad so that she could play with it when she started getting antsy. She and I also went on a walk around the entire stadium.


We ended up staying until the beginning of the 9th inning. At that point, the Royals were ahead 8 to 2 and Claire was crying because everyone was screaming and yelling because someone hit a home-run that got 3 runs in. Then Claire looked at me and said "All Done" and did the sign she does when she's all done at dinner time (hands out facing up and kind of shrugs). So we packed up our stuff and went home, it was about 10pm at that point.


By the time we got home and put Claire in bed and took H home, it was too late to work on PL. Maybe tonight?

Water Table

I almost got rid of Claire's water table last year. We don't usually take good care of it, I think we may have filled it up once last summer (if even that) and then flipped it upside down and then rain water filled the underside and leaves and bugs and crap and someone would've had to clean it and yeah. But last Thursday, Justin cleaned the water table. Ok, the underside is still kind of gross looking, but it's MUCH better than it was. Since the water table only came with three toys and I didn't want to bring out the real pool toys, I brought her LittlePeople Noah's Ark out for her, I need to find the rest of her animals and bring them out too.


On Friday, Justin surprised us when we got home with one of those little plastic pools for Claire. We have a toddler-sized inflatable pool, but we just wanted something small she could wash her feet off in if nothing else. We've had a plastic pool before too, it got all gross and nasty and then I threw it away. I think that was 2 years ago? On Friday, Claire was happy to sit in it and play with her Little People animals. She hasn't gotten in her little pool since Friday, not sure why not, but I'll ask her if she wants to get in the little pool and she'll say "Nooo".


I have discovered that I can read a book while Claire plays in the water table. I could probably do something a little more productive too - like weed a flowerbed in the back yard, or something. But I've mostly been reading ridiculous romance novels from the library. And I have to say, I LOVE that my house faces west, that means the backyard is in the shade in the evening. By 6pm, the patio is in the shade and even though it is warm outside, it is not terrible to sit in the shade while Claire's splashes around the water table.

S'mores (over the stove top)

Maybe everyone else had already thought of this, but I hadn't. It was actually Anaya's idea.

One of the things on our summer to-do list is make S'mores. I had planned on roasting the marshmallows over the grill. I went ahead and bought the stuff for S'mores on Saturday while we were at Target, but wasn't planning to make them this weekend.

When we were coming in from playing outside on Sunday evening, Anaya asked if we could make S'mores. I kind of hemmed and hawed because I didn't feel like dealing with the grill and it was supposed to start storming at some point. So Anaya asked why not just make them over the stove top. I just kind of hemmed and hawed because roasting marshmallows over a burner just seemed WEIRD. But I talked to Justin and decided to give it a try...what's the worst that would happen? We have a flat-top stove so a fire was unlikely and if the marshmallow fell on the burner it make a mess, but could be clean up.



I was definitely right about feeling like an idiot roasting a marshmallow on a kabob skewer over a burner. But it worked!



If we do this again we'll cook them over the back burner, Claire got a little closer to the stove than I liked which resulted in Anaya and I simultaneously telling her loudly to back-up and get away from the stove. She wasn't trying to touch the stove, she was trying to steal a graham cracker, they were just on the counter near the very hot burner.

Summer To Do List

Last week, I posted my Summer Vacation 2012 list. Well, I added a few more things to my list and found a fun way to display it - not only the list, but I included pictures for Claire to pick something to do.



Now I just have to remind myself that we have 2.5 months to do it all. Because I keep thinking I need to do it all NOW. The pool opened last Saturday and we went Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Claire and I went to a park on Monday morning. We played with water balloons all weekend - Claire has learned to say "Water Balloon". We've already been out to Deanna Rose Farmstead - twice this year. I have a concert in a "park" figured out that takes place in a couple of weeks. We had actually already been to the farmers' market before I even posted my list. As we do things, I am checking them off using a dry erase marker on the glass of the picture frame. The actual list is written in permanent marker on the paper.



The underlined things are the things that Anaya is particularly interested in doing. Since she is only here every other weekend and we're not going to just sit and do nothing on the weekends she isn't here and then rush to do everything when she is here; we sat down with the list and underlined the things she really wanted to do. We had to prioritize a little bit. For the pictures for Claire to choose an activity, I made sure the pictures did not include any other people. Seems a little unfair to Anaya that there are now thirteen pictures of Claire on our "to do" list, but at least this way she doesn't think that whenever she wants to go jump on the trampoline that Sissy will be there.



And while I'm glad we're actively trying to do things on the list. And it would definitely be better to do it all early rather than it get to be August and have nothing checked off. I just need to remember that we don't need to cram everything into the first couple of weeks.



Printable Summer To-Do Paper from Eighteen25. They have other color options, I just happen to LOVE teal. My printer only prints up to 8.5 inches, so I opened their printables in Photoshop and trimmed them down to 8.5x11. Then I attempted to line up the pattern of the pages. I printed one top sheet and two of the bottom sheet.

Summer Vacation 2012

Claire and Anaya are both going to summer school, so it hardly feels like summer is starting. Claire is going to the Extended School Year program to continue with her Speech Therapy staring next week through the end of June. Anaya is attending what is called Journey to Summer, in fact, today was her first day. In the morning they do "real" school stuff, in the afternoon they have fun classes - science experiments, cooking, art and pe. I'm not sure what all she will actually do, but she was excited to be going.

I pulled out a piece of paper today and just started writing down some things that I want to do this summer (and things I know the kids want to do).



The different colors don't mean anything, it was just the pen that I happened to pick up when I started writing. I stopped and started a couple of times. I still need to figure out how I want to display this. One year Anaya and I made little books that we each filled in with things we wanted to do. I also like how eighteen25 has made summer lists using a picture frame. Since Claire doesn't read, it might be fun to have pictures of things we did last summer so it is easier for her to show us what she wants to do. I definitely want it out where someone besides me will see it. Well...most of it. The things with question marks that might not work out would probably stay on my personal list - that way I don't have to listen to whining if we end up not being able to do some of the things.

Inspired by: Ali Edwards' Summer Manifesto

UPDATED: See follow-up post with how I displayed it.