Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant

I wanted to do a post on some of our favorite books of poetry for kids this April, since April is national poetry month, but April has slipped away!  But I thought I would share one book of poetry we love anyway before the month is completely gone.  It's called "Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant!" by Jack Prelutsky.  It's similar to the book "Scranimals" which I had mentioned in a post years ago. He takes an animal and an object and puts them together, such as umbrella and elephant to make an umbrellaphant, or a clock and octopus to make a clocktopus.  The kids love the rhymes and cleverness of it all.  

A while ago my sister sent me this wonderful CD of music written to accompany the poems in the book. It is one of the kids' favorites in the car.  The San Diego Symphony recorded the songs composed by Lucas Richman, with Jack Prelutsky reading his poems.  Also on the CD are some new poems written by him to go along with Camille Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals.  

Anyway, I just thought I'd share.  It's worth checking out.  

Just my funny girl

I found this the other day while I was doing some organizing.  Maren presented this to me in 2010.

It says "Dear mom, thank you for all the things you do for us. you will find a penny taped to the paper.  yes, it is mine.  I thought you needed more help paying! Love, Maren"

I think the "yes, it is mine" is my favorite part.  

Mom's Library

Hey all.  Sorry, the blogging has not been going well lately.  Here is the mom's library link up if you'd like to browse and add your posts. I will have features next week, promise!  :)

Our Spring Break

*Warning - this post contains a lot of pictures


I haven't been writing on the blog much.  It's been a busy couple of weeks with spring break and other things.  Here is a not-so-brief recap of the going ons at our house over spring break.

Spring break started with our Easter baskets saturday morning.
We hid them and let the kids hunt for them, occasionally giving clues if they were nice to us.

We then headed to the park for a picnic and easter egg hunt with
cousins and friends, hosted by grandma and grandpa

Grandma Pam always measures out the eggs to make sure each child
gets a full bucket of eggs.  

 I didn't get a picture of the kids easter morning.  Lame, huh? I'll just have to dress them up again sometime and take pictures.

April Fool's Day, we asked the kids to go up and get dressed.
Maren and Christopher took an especially long time.
They thought wearing their clothes inside out and putting underwear on their head and
socks on their hands would be a funny April Fool's joke.  Silly kids.  Maren made me promise
not to put the picture on facebook.  I can't remember if she said anything about the blog, but
you better not ask her about it, just in case.

Christopher finished all his sight word flash cards and got his own library card and bag.
Also, thanks to Aunt Angela for teaching my kids the concept of the "photo bomb".
It's pretty much impossible to get a good picture of one of my kids because the others
are always anxious to jump in and ruin the picture.  Thanks again Angela.  ;)

During the week I worked on the mural I've been painting in the school room.
More about that another time. 

On Thursday, we headed up to Cincinnati to cheer on our favorite baseball team.

One of the kids' favorite parts is buying ice cream in little Reds' helmets.
We have several of those floating around our house now.   

Saturday morning we headed to our church to help clean the building.  The kids
are getting to be experts and cleaning the bathrooms.  We watched part of our church's
General Conference at home and then headed up to Grandma and Grandpa's house for
to play with them between sessions on Saturday and Sunday.

Grandpa helped Nathan on the see-saw

Grandma helped Maren sew a skirt for her American Girl Doll

The kids played darts with Grandma

and some air hockey with Grandpa

And then on Monday it was back to the usual routine.  So depressing.  We had a wonderful spring break week.  I sure love my family.