creativity

Many years ago I read articles on a blog somewhere about corralling kids' artwork.  At the time Miles was in school a couple of days a week, Audrey wasn't here, or was just barely here, and he was bringing home a few paintings or drawings a week. I liked this cardboard box storage and we started painting.  I used USPS flat rate boxes turned inside out and painted by the boy-wonder himself.  (Of course now that I'm ready to do some with Audrey, USPS has started printing their logo all over the inside.  Guess they got sick of giving away boxes to be shipped by FedEx.) I was guessing we'd fill a box every year or two, slowing down in grade school of course.

Next I started taking a snapshot of everything, saving only the best and recycling or sending grandparents the rest.  I occasionally go back and edit even more.  I save anything with a handprint or footprint on it, and try hard to remember to date them.  I even got one of the old library date stampers, but I'm not very good at keeping up with them.  I upload all the pictures to each kid's online Picasa gallery (yes they have gmail accounts too!)

Miles' Artwork

Audrey's Artwork

Where am I going with this? Miles has become a very prolific colorer! I'm worried we may exceed our maximum box capacity too soon!  He loves to draw stick people and they are evolving very nicely.

This is one of his earliest free-hand sketches, done around his 4th birthday.  It's a self portrait!

 Soon after that he drew this cute hermit crab.  I was really impressed with the spiral.

This picture of his house was this past summer.  The sideways figures in the top left are he & Audrey in bunk beds.

And recently we've had a big series of group portraits.  Many of these have been mailed to the subject, as they were all drawings of Miles with various grandparents and other family members.

 Now we start to see other objects.  This is the crosswalk at the park near our house.

 Here's his Halloween collage. Clockwise from top left: Haunted House; Bat; Mummy; Skeleton; Ghost; Witch; Pumpkin.  But you knew that, right?

 Wayne and I love this tree.  I'm thinking about printing it on some art paper and framing it.

 And he finally drew Audrey in the picture of the family.  Guess which she is.  The other new addition is Apollo.  Poor Chelsea didn't make the cut yet.

 And now he's getting into office supplies.  He likes to make books, stapling many of his works together.  And he discovered my label maker!

 Not sure about this one.  Witch? Pickle? Oopma Loompa?

 This is rain falling on our house:

 He learned about exclamation points this week! Now they are everywhere!

 Sorry, forgot to rotate this one.  Dude has on a fedora!  He's a detective! Love it!

Here's the boy himself. Replicas of the Nina and Pinta were he this week and we went on a rainy day to see them. Still fun!

he likes the arby's shake!

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat....

Wow, it's November!  If I want to stay on top of things, that means I need to start thinking about ordering Christmas cards!!  We have ordered Shutterfly photo cards for the last 4 or 5 years, for everything from Christmas to birth announcements and even party invitations.  Usually I use my digital scrapbooking goodies to create a card and then upload it to Shutterfly's blank template for scrappers, but last year the photos that Angela Acker took of us fit perfectly with one of the photo card templates:

I couldn't complain, it was adorable and saved me a lot of time messing around in Photoshop!

Shutterfly has lots of cute templates again this year.  If I can get my act together and find some cute outfits for us, you might even see a card from us in the next couple of months! If you want 50 free photo cards from Shutterfly - which I'll be getting for sharing this information with you ;) - click here for more info.

Boo to you!

This will be mostly photos, as we're finally gotten our goblins to bed and now we need dinner! and a movie - Diary of a Wimpy Kid, no scary stuff here.

We finished our jack-o'lantern on Friday. I think it was sufficiently "scary" for Miles.

Tonight Audrey was a lion.  There was a lion face on a hood but she didn't like wearing it.  Good thing her hair worked pretty well as a mane.

Miles was an astronaut.  Last night he was sad because he'd mentioned Yoda at one point and I didn't find a costume for him.  I admit I didn't exhaustively search for it, but he had lots of great options to wear in his closet already.  Today he was more than happy to be an astronaut, especially after I pulled out my old early 1980s Space Shuttle book.

We started the day at our neighbors, the McNally's.  They had a fun party, this isn't even all the kids who were there!  Miles is a big fan of their 2nd grader, in the Batgirl costume.  Big fan. He was sort of the ladies man, as he was chasing around both of his girlfriends at this shin-dig.

Then we moved up the street to the Acker's for a hayride trick-or-treat.  This was such a fun idea, we were so happy to join them!  We drove up the street and stopped in front of the houses where we knew the families and trick-or-treated there.  We started early and we were able to hit most of our street.  They had a great time!  In fact, I think Audrey liked the ride more than the trick-or-treating!

So then it was back to home, a quick sort through the loot, a treat (or 3), answering the door a few more times, then ready for bed!

Hope you had a happy Halloween too!

roar!

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Hallo-weekend

And now it's Halloweekend!  We kicked everything off with school parties and pumpkin "patching."  Friday is not usually Miles' school day, so I dropped him off and stayed to help with the fun.  They played some fun games and got some huge treat bags.  Our contributions to the treat bags were these little candy filled mummies.  They were so fun to make with toilet paper tubes, crepe paper and googly eyes.  How will we ever craft such cute things when the TP goes tube-less?


His cute classmates at storytime:

Audrey does go to school on Friday so I stopped in her room to see how the party was going.  That was almost a mistake.  I think she realized Miles was leaving with me and she begged me to take her too.  Poor thing.  But I know she had a blast while I wasn't there and it's all a big show for mom.

Her class made Big Green Monster faces and read the story.

After school we hit the patch around the corner for some last minute pumpkins.  They still had a decent selection, so we got a good one to carve a super-scary face (a Miles request).  More to come one that!

Boo!!

A pretty day at the zoo!

good dinner at Sam's! she ate pizza oranges apples chicken waldorf salad cider & a brownie. score! he ate all but the waldorf.

Miles' turn at the 'nastics place!

she buttoned it all herself!

this is how Miles feels about the finger-prick. And we still have to get a shot!

Hello Fall!

 Audrey and I have had some fun adventures on our days together.  We went to the zoo several weeks in a row.  She loves all of the animals except the monkeys.  Every time we talk about the zoo she says, "But mama, we no see the monkeys. NO. Monkeys." Often she holds both of my cheeks to make sure I am listening to exactly what she is saying.  But the last time we went I snuck her over to the gibbons, which are the monkeys that swing around with their long arms.  She saw the swinging from a distance and was intrigued.  It's a step!  But NO. Gorillas.

Yesterday you saw the picture of us a Tatarus, a gymnastics studio.  We mostly jumped on the trampolines and into the foam pit, but she was curious about a class going on.  Maybe when she's 3.  And these pictures are from the Knoxville Museum of Art.  She liked walking around the exhibits and chose the nude Prometheus as her favorite.  She saw it and said, "He naked! He no have on panties!"  Speaking of panties, she is practically done with potty training - not that I can claim one bit of influence there.  She literally got so tired of waiting for me that she trained herself. She has had a few accidents but they are getting rarer, and she still wears pullups at night.  But she loves her Hello Kitty and Fancy Nancy panties! Yay!!

 Miles has started playing AYSO soccer on Saturdays.  The first week was quite hysterical.  We call it "cat herding." He had never kicked a ball before that day, but the coach had them chasing the ball all over the field.  After the warm up laps Miles came huffing over and said "I'm tiiiired."  By the 2nd game he had a little more confidence to go after the ball.  He scored 3 goals! One was for the other team, but who's counting?  He loves it, that's all that matters.

And someone else loves it too.  She wanted some pink cleats so badly when we went to get his. So we got her a little ball to play with.  She's not bad! Looks like we'll be doing soccer Saturdays for a few more years. 

jumping at Tatarus

A beautiful day at World's Fair Park

Audrey sings

{and picks her nose, but let's just ignore that part, shall we?}

The Backyard Beach

We're back from a last minute vacation at Pawleys Island, SC. We were a little worried with it being Labor Day week that it would be crowded, but Sunday was the most crowded and by Tuesday it was deserted. We had huge stretches of sand with no one around which was great since we were running back and forth and screaming at the top of our lungs all day. And by "we" I mean Miles and Audrey, of course.

Who knew a hole in the ground could be so fun? We thought we'd be building sand castles, but instead we were digging holes along the receding tide so they'd fill up and make swimming pools.

We stayed in a new house this year which had an awesome deck, but was a tad bit farther from the beach. We had to walk over the dune to get to the beach. I mean, come on! It was probably a good thing we had a little division from the waves, as a certain redhead was pretty fearless about storming the water.

We encountered lots of wildlife on this trip.  We have never seen a starfish in the many years we've been coming here, and this year we caught a few live ones in the surf.  Then on one of our last evening walks we stepped around at least 100 dead starfish (no exaggeration) along with several small crab carcassas and even a dead baby turtle.  Ugh.  At least we found some cool shells on that walk. Oh, and Audrey had no qualms about picking up stacks of dead starfish, and another day even picked up a flapping fish and tossed it to a seagull.  Our most exciting interaction was with a possum that crawled into our garbage can.  I was cleaning out the car and tossed some trash in one can, glanced in the other and was greeted with a nasty hiss.  I shrieked and ran.  When we came back down much later with Wayne, it appeared to be asleep.  He lifted the can and set it on its side so the creature could escape while we were at dinner.  Thankfully it was gone when we got back and the lids were then firmly in place!

The adventurous duo:

And the best way to end the day: popsicles!

Lots more photos at the shutterfly site: Miles & Audrey