Hair

I love doing Eliza's hair!  We're growing out like three different lengths of bangs, so I'm always trying to find ways to keep them out of her face.  I like this one--it looks like she's wearing a little headband.  Also, I am just lucky and got a kid who will sit (relatively) still for me.  Other moms always ask how I get her to do that.  I don't.  She just does it.  

Independence Day

It sort of bothers me that everyone calls the holiday "the 4th of July" because it skips over the most important part--our nation gaining its independence.  In order to set the world straight, I'll call the holiday by its actual name on my blog.  I expect the ripple effects from that to be both immediate and enormous...

 Zay says "Look at me!  I'm holding matches!"  Not really.  I don't remember what he was excited about, but I do remember he was much too excited to look at the camera. My kids are even sort of wearing red, white, and blue!  Grandma Atkinson gave Isaiah that shirt for his 3rd birthday.  Perhaps I should update his wardrobe?  Whatever, it still fits.  And besides, that bare midriff look is coming back in style anyway.  I bought Eliza this outfit ages ago and she'd just about outgrown it when a friend gave me a bag of hand-me-downs that included the same outfit in the next size up! Perfect!

My kids have a love/hate relationship with sparklers.  Or maybe a love/fear relationship would be more accurate.  But Eliza  was brave enough to do a couple of them.

Jerel, bursting with excitement as usual!

I don't remember what the two different faces were for, but I liked both of them!

Wait, who said you could turn 5?

The birthday boy!

Because you have to clean them off before you can play with them.

Zay's was the third birthday party day in a row, but that didn't slow anyone down when it came time for cake and ice cream!

Aunt Amy and cousin Sophie

Zay chose a construction-themed cake this year.  He really likes the cakes that come with their own plastic toys on top.  Plus, who doesn't like a cake with dirt on it?

Here's Isaiah playing with his new magnet wand.  Sadly, we couldn't find it when it was time to come back to Oregon, but maybe we'll find it next time we visit.

Waiting for cupcakes

Isaiah made this decoration for his birthday party.  Grandma told him the letters and he wrote it all.  The picture is of him in a monster truck about to drive over the little car in front of him.

Eliza's annual haircut

I should've snapped more than one picture in case she blinked.  But I didn't.  Atkinson girls are supposed to have really long hair.  I'm not really sure why this is, and I only comply intermittently.  I'm all for long, beautiful hair.  But some of us don't have beautiful hair once it gets long, so I usually chop mine off.  (Actually, I get really cute haircuts, to which Jerel responds "Kids, looks like your mom chopped all her hair off again.")  Anyway, Eliza just gets trims, not actual cuts.  I'll let her decide when she's older if she wants to rebel against the Atkinson norm or not.  In the mean time she gets trimmed up annually when we visit Utah.  Aunt Mandy does a great job and I'm loving that she blended in the bangs we're growing out.  Ugh, growing out bangs...always a tough part of a girl's life.

A near-fire experience

We were heading out the door for church when I thought I smelled something burning; not like fire, more like melting plastic.  Like I'd left my curling iron plugged in and it was right up against my comb or something.  Turns out it was the motor going out in the ceiling fan.  Of course it totally would've burned the place down if I hadn't noticed, so I'm pretty much a hero.

Hitting the road

Jerel is the designated driver on our journeys to Utah.  And on all other journeys.  Jerel does all the driving for the same reason he does all the cooking--he can't stand the way I do it.  I think I've driven with him as a passenger just twice in our married life--both times when we were test driving cars.  Oh wait, and also when I took him to the hospital with his broken arm.  But other than that he's always in the drivers seat.  Which is just fine by me because it leaves me in the crocheters seat!  I love having something to keep my hands busy while we drive and it makes the time pass so much more quickly.

 This time I was the cool mom with lots of activities for the kids to do on the drive.  As usual, my attempts at being the cool mom were a failure.  But there were a few things that did keep the kids busy for more than 3 minutes.  Zay has used pattern blocks at preschool and loved them, so I picked up a set of magnetic ones along with a cake pan from Dollar Tree for them to play with.  They had fun making patterns and pictures, and having me make patterns for them too.

The memory game was also sort of a flop.  I forgot to
factor in that it would require my two kids to actually
cooperate...

 Next we had a sticker matching activity.  I bought two little notebooks along with a few sets of stickers (2 sets of each kind).  Then I put one set of the stickers in the book, and the kids' job was to find the matching sticker on the sticker sheets and put it next to the correct one in the book.  They really liked it and it kept them busy for a while.  But Isaiah made a few mistakes and got too frustrated to keep trying.  They didn't want to do it again later on.  So basically I spent more time putting stickers in the books to prep them than the kids spent actually using them.  A flop for us.

The beading activity actually went over pretty well.  They both had at least 5 bracelets by the time we got to grandma's house.

I brought a post-it note pad for each of the kids.  They got to draw on the sheets and then put them all over the place to make their own art gallery.  They liked it, it's just that I pictured each of these activities lasting like 45 minutes instead of the real-life 4.5 minutes.  So there was still plenty of movie watching.  Jerel and I could probably quote the entire classic My Little Pony movie.  And the Lego movie.

The best car trip activity ever:

Atkinson beach trip + 4

But first, this!  I found this at the store the other day and since we have a long Utah drive coming up I went ahead and got it.  Then I thought that if matching up animals was fun, imagine how much more fun it would be to match up themselves!  So I put this one together.  It turned out so cute I made another one with pictures of all of the Atkinson aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

I decided to take the kids to the beach since it was super hot (97 in Portland).  They have more fun (and fight less) with extra kids there so I invited another family.  The parents were busy and couldn't come, so I took as many of their kids as I could fit (they have 8 all together) and everyone had a great time.  My kids mostly just watched their older kids build castles, and they were fascinated that if you dig a really deep hole you get water in it.  Not so fascinated that they were willing to help, of course, but they spent a good hour watching.

Traffic was terrible on the way there--they picked the hottest day of the year so far so shut down 1 lane of a 2-lane highway.  Anyway, we were stopped here for a while before I realized what this was on the side of the road--a guillotine!