Letter Gg

Their trays for the week. I tried bringing up this shelf to put their trays on, but Aaron can get to them and make a disaster, so the shelf went back down to their playroom. I have to put all the trays away and take them out every day for school time. There isn't a lot of room in the kitchen for them either - so maybe I'll get clever or find a nice shelf somewhere.

Poking Letter G and g with a large pushpin for fine motor control. They do really well at this, but its probably one of their least favorite 'fun things'.

Putting stickers (gumballs) on their gumball machines. Again, fun and works fine motor skills taking the stickers off.

A clever 'G' book...

Doing Dabber Dot 'G'. They really like these.

They lined their G g's with 'Goldfish' (and then ate them for snack) and then they painted glue in the G g and sprinkled on 'Glitter'.

Using milk caps with letters hot glued on them to match letters 1:1. They still struggle with this a bit by turning the cap upside down, etc. Still an area to work on.

Sorting Capital and lowercase G. Easy for them..

Those were some of their letter G activities from week of June 14th! :)

Day Trips!

This last friday and saturday we planned some daytrips with our close friends Matt & Nicky. Matt and Nicky are so close to us and we really love spending time with them. Matt and Jason met at church when I was on bedrest with the twins. And he and Nicky were married last August 14th, 2009. The super funny thing is that Matt and Jason are like long-lost twins (personality wise) and Nicky and I are a lot alike in our likes/dislikes/opinions. I think its so funny how we married the same type of person too.

Anyway, we wanted to keep our budget low but do some fun tourist things in our own state. So friday morning (June 18th) we drove to the Cave of the Mounds near Mt Horeb, WI. The story is that they were blasting some hills on a farmer's property for sandstone (?) and when they blasted they were supposed to wait 3 days for the rubble to settle. Well they heard sounds like glass breaking and they waited a few hours and went in to explore and found they had uncovered this huge cave. It was originally filled with water when North America was covered in ocean and the water made these pockets in the earth as the earth changed. So as the water receded, it formed these caves. And the stalactites (from the ceiling) and stalagmites (from the ground) are formed from dripping water from the underground water. It takes something like 50 years to make a marshmallow size stalactite. So you can imagine how old some of the really large ones are. We even saw the fossil of a huge squid in the wall of the cave from prehistoric times. The cave is a constant 50 degrees and very dark. They turned the lights off so we could see total darkness (aaron wasn't thrilled). N&C enjoyed it as much as I think a 3 year old would.
We had lunch and drove home, put the kids to bed and had a bonfire with Matt & Nicky that night.
Saturday morning we went to Green Bay to Bay Beach. It's a little amusement park run by the city of Green Bay. The rides are generally 1 ticket each and 1 ticket costs .25 cents. An awesome deal! So the kids had their first merry go round and other rides.

Matt & Jason

You can hear Aaron was ready for a nap and done waiting in the stroller...


How Aaron spent 90% of the time... Is that the look of boredom, or what?

Thank heavens he is a content lil guy...
Nicholas was in heaven with these car rides.
Celia can hold her own around the curves. Just like her momma.


This slide made me really worry! Once they went down 1x I knew it was okay. Then Jason asked if Aaron and I would like to go down.... uh. no.
Sorry the camera didn't focus so well...

We had lunch there and then went to Jason's parent's house (a 15 min or so drive north) for a great early dinner. The kids really liked visiting and seeing their beach too (they live on Green Bay right near the Door County county line). It was a quick visit cause we headed home soon after. We stopped at Aunt Brenda's house to visit her but she was out. Aunt Brenda (Jason's oldest sister) had a stroke in May and so we just ask that everyone keep praying for their family and the recovery/adjustment from this stroke.
The kids fell asleep in the car on the way home so we transferred them to their beds and then we had another bonfire together (adults) and made lots of smores. A great weekend!

Aaron's 1 year old birthday

Guess Who turned 1? Baby Aaron did. So now are we supposed to call him 'Toddler Aaron'. Nah. We'll stick with baby aaron for a bit longer.

At 1 year old, he is pushing walking toys, but not standing or walking on his own just yet. I really think he can, but he's too cautious. Which isn't a bad thing, really. Hopefully it means slightly less injury if he waits until he knows he won't topple.
He is 'talking' a lot. He's a jabber mouth for sure. He signs - fish, all done, ball, bird and says - momma, daddy, hi kitty (which is now 'hi /t/', celia, uh oh, papa, and we heard him attempt 'grandma' a couple times. I know there are more words too.

For his birthday, we knew he didn't like cake and his most favorite thing is chocolate chip cookies. I had every intent to make them from scratch like I do almost every week, but time escaped me and we bought the pre-made dough from Papa Murphy's (they have awesome cookie dough anyway, so I wasn't sad). Papa made smoked pulled pork for the party and we had coleslaw, baked beans, and some other appetizers.














Our guests were Grandma and Papa Maus, Aunt Angy, Uncle Russ, Lauren and Sam, and our friends Matt and Nicky. IT was small, but it was nice. We even put a candle in Aaron's birthday cookie.
The weather was nice so we could be outside for dinner and his cookie ceremony. He cried a bit when we all sang to him. Nicky and Matt bought him an outfit and Grandma and Grandpa Velicer gave him some money for his birthday (and a couple weeks earlier we had his baby dedication at church) so we put it towards a bike seat and helmet so we can all go bike riding. I have pictures of that to load into my computer too.















And at Aaron's 1 year appointment he weighed 19 lbs 4oz and 30 inches long. The Dr was impressed with his speech and said he was speaking at about an 18 month level for some things. Nicholas and Celia weren't talking as much as him at this age. Just funny how every child is different and meets their milestones in their own time.

Happy Birthday baby!

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