All in a day's fun

I want to remember how much FUN it is to be a mom. Especially a mom of little ones. I've been lucky enough to be able to stay home and enjoy this phase of life to its fullest. I know this phase is so short and in just a little while I'll hit the soccer mom phase and I will never be able to go back to having just a couple toddlers to care for and play with all day long. To be honest, I have panic attacks anywhere from 2 to 100 times a week when I think about how quickly Brynn will be off to school and how terribly I'll miss her!


ANYWAY, I just wanted to document some of the very simple fun we've been having lately. First of all, the laundry basket. Who knew? I brought stupid laundry basket outside to use as a goal for a game of soccer (we went to a QCHS soccer game and Brynn LOVED it). They played with this thing all day long. The laundry basket became:


a goal:





a stage: (Brynn belts out every song she knows as loud as she can the second she steps outside, it's the weirdest thing)

A Disneyland boat: (I think she must have seen a Disney Cruise advertisement or something)


A pirate boat:

A scary cave:

And a picnic table:
I love this girl's imagination. She could play on her own all day and be perfectly content. Bryce needs constant love and attention to keep him content. But that's how Brynn was a couple years ago and she grew out of it, so I guess we'll just wait and see. All the time I walk past a "display" she has set up, and as much as dirty shoes on the kitchen counter gross me out, I had to laugh when I saw this.

Marty's sister gave us this marble runner game and I thought we'd save it for the summer when we barricade ourselves inside all day. But I couldn't wait, we busted it out this week and it was so much fun.

Brynn and I made Beignets while Bryce napped. I don't know why I feel the need to give disclaimers, but here ya go. We took Brynn to go see "The Princess and the Frog" in the theater and thought that Tiana was a good princess but we were totally APPALLED at all the black magic and scary "spirits from the other side" and what-not. Well, we've got it on netflix and Brynn saw it as we were browsing through and begged to see it again. I told her we didn't want the scary man on in our house, which she was fine with, so we just show here the half-hour version of Tiana (working for her restaurant, at the ball, getting married at the end) and we're all happy with that.

Anyway, we saw "Tiana's Cookbook" at the library and that's where we got the recipes for the Beignets it shows in the movie. I told Brynn that a couple of years ago Grandma and Grandpa Oldham went to New Orleans and had Beignets right by where Tiana made them. Brynn was in total awe, so we called Grandma while we were making them and had a fun little chat and Tiana party after Bryce woke up.

The kids have been working more, too. I remember about a year and a half ago I came to this startling conclusion that Brynn was old enough to start learning how to help around the house. I just barely have come to the same conclusion yet again, "Wait a second, Bryce isn't a baby! He can put away silverware and pick up toys and put his clothes in the laundry basket!" Of course this means that any job I give the kids will take 10 times as long as it would take me to just do it myself, so it's not usually much help to me. But besides the fact that I feel like it's never to young to learn work and money management, the kids have been keeping me company more while I work! Last week on laundry day (one of my least favorite days) the kids helped me load the washer and switch the loads most of the day and amazingly we all had a lot of fun together.

Yep, I just posted that.

All of these things are really little. But I guess I recently recorded a rough couple of weeks, and now I want to record a couple of fun ones!

***I love being a mom.***

My friend gave us their old swing set! More fun!

Yes, well, the camera ran out of memory, but you get the general idea. We did stuff all four in here.