Sewing fun!!

I have kind of caught a sewing bug this summer. I have always loved to sew and I told myself when I was expecting the twins that I needed to put my sewing machine in the closet for a few years since my life would be a little too crazy to be able to find time to sew. Well I pulled it out and I am kind of obsessed right now. First off my mom gave me a ton of fabric that she had laying around so I have just been using what I was given to make all sorts of fun stuff. Here are the two latest....The owl pillows I made for the girls room. I found these cute owls and pattern on makeit-loveit.com (This is my new favorite website)
I also got enough material from my mom to make the kids each 4 pairs of pajamas. So here are the girls in a pair I made.

Arts and crafts day!!

I posted earlier how this year I was handing out coupons this summer for the girls as they finish their chores for the week. So this week they received an "arts and crafts day" We painted bird houses, decorated picture frames, ribbon flip flops, bracelets, and paper towel butterflies.
The girls really had fun and I did it really inexpensively. I got almost all the crafts at the dollar store.

Celebration of life

This year my mom celebrated her 60th birthday. This was a much more special birthday than most to our family. For those who don't know 8 years ago my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. It really was a very hard time for our family, since my mom is the life and glue that holds our family together. It was a hard year full of a lot of heart felt prayers that mom would make it. I learned and grew so much during that time and came to appreciate how lucky I had been to have been able to have such an amazing mother!! There was a time that we thought she wouldn't make it to see 55. So this year on her 60th birthday my mom decided to throw a celebration of life birthday party. She had an open house all day long where she invited all her friends and family to come and share a piece of cake with her and celebrate life. It turned out to be such a fabulous day as our house was full of those who were special to us. What a beautiful day. We also did a little family get together the night before at the park with just our family for her birthday. We sang together, had cupcakes together, and the grand kids all pitched in their own money to buy her this beautiful "willow tree" statue called "the quilt" it represents her so well!!
We love you mom.....You are truly an unbelievable person who has filled your life loving and serving others. Thanks for being such a great example to me, and always being there for me when I needed a shoulder to cry on and someone to build me up and strengthen me when I needed it most. You have shared all my greatest and hardest moments with me. You are such a great grandma and my kids absolutely adore you and they feel so loved when they are with you!!
Thanks for being you!!

Free trip to the dinosaur museum

This year I decided to have the kids join the reading club through the Orem Library. I thought it would be a great way to keep up on their reading through the summer while also having some fun with it through the library. The reading program there is awesome!! Every Tuesday they do a fun presentation about countries all over the world. The separate the kids out into ages and then provide great activities for the kids to do to help encourage reading. The best part is the give out fun little coupons every week for a free ice cream, or pizza. Well this last week they handed out free tickets to the dinosaur museum. I was all over that!!!
The kids had a lot of fun!! Kali decided not to come since her school class just went the last week of school, so Lexi brought her friend Carsen. It is such an amazing place for kids!! We spent 3 hours there and I swear we could have been there 2 hours longer. What a great day.....and the best part was we went for free!!!

Flag Day

Sorry, I have fallen a bit behind on my blog so bear with me on quite a few posts in a row. I will start with flag day. This is a holiday I have never before celebrated much with the kids, but this year I felt like they were old enough to have a little lesson and fun together. So we all got dressed up in our flag t-shirts. Then I talked to the kids about what the flag stands for and how we should always show respect when we see the flag. I also found a couple great little kids stories online about the importance of the flag and how it came to be. Then we colored little pictures of flags to hang in their rooms. We just kept it simple but I think they liked it.

Summer chore incentives

Every summer I like to come up with some way for the kids to be rewarded for their chores, which I think makes them a little happier about doing them, and then they feel like they have earned something through work. So this summer this is what I came up with.
We have a weekly chore chart. Every day when they finish their chores they get to mark them off with a sticker, and then they pick a treat out of the treat jar.
Then at the end of the week if they fill their chore chart with stickers I am going to give them a coupon for a fun activity that we will do sometime the next week.
The ultimate prize for chores this summer is a Lagoon trip. So eveyday they finish their chores they will put a sticker on a day towards going to Lagoon. There are a little over 50 week days this summer. Then at the end of the summer when they fill the Lagoon chart we will take them to Lagoon as their reward for doing chores through the summer.

These kinds of things work so well with our kids. This way they learn how to work with a positive reward, and they feel like they have earned things through their hard work. Just wanted to share something that has worked in our house.