Monday, February 28, 2011

More than meets the eye

Do you know what theme song that's from?
Let me elaborate...

Transformers
More than meets the eye
Transformers
Robots in Disguise
There are times I wake up in the middle of the night with that song playing over and over in my head.  I knew of the transformers when I was young but I am beginning to know the ins and outs of them thanks to Scott's interest in robots and Eric's influence over the subject matter.

These are our two current transformers not including the McDonald happy meal ones we've collected.
I believe these were a gift from me to Eric at one point over the years.  Boy that sure back fired on me!

I finally agreed to make Scott his big robot today.  Scott drew the face. 
He took a minute to sit back and enjoy the view.

It's nice when he can convince Sydney to play along.

He even traveled with us downstairs today.
He's saying, "Where's that arm?"  If you look closely you can see it (purple pipe cleaner) poking out from the other side of the slide.
 got it!

My favorite...the transformer is supervising.

I screm, you scream, we all scream for ICE CREAM!

On our way to the park each time we go, we pass a little cart that sells ice cream and each time Scott asks if he could get some.  This time he didn't ask but just mentioned that chocolate was his favorite and then asked Sydney if chocolate was her favorite.  She said she didn't like chocolate.  This is true.  She's not a chocolate lover.  So that got me wondering if she would eat anything else and perhaps we should branch and let her see that there are other options besides chocolate. 

After the park we swung by the grocery store and they had the perfect block of ice cream for taste testing.

There's some kind of chant or song going on here while they are waiting for me.
I guess I would be excited too if I got to eat ice cream before lunch :o)
Scott gave each flavor a fair taste but his heart belongs to chocolate!
Sydney likes strawberry.  I don't know if it's because it's pink but she ate it and claimed it was delicious even if it was a couple of miniscule bites.

So we polled some family members and recorded the results. 
Chocolate won hands down.

One potato, two potato

I've got spring fever. 
My friend Stormy passed along a new milk bottle idea: planting seeds.  I was so close to buying a bag of soil and carrying it home but I thought on it a few days and decided the lack of broom and vacuum might pose a problem.  I figured we'll do some planting when we get home. 

In the meantime let's see if we can grow some potato hairs or strings or ropes or whatever Scott called the roots yesterday :o)


My children will not eat potatoes unless it's in the form of a fry and even then it needs to be recognizable.  Maybe some activities with potaotes will convince them to eat thier potaoes for dinner tonight!


Scott gave up on the potatoes and did his own thing.

 Sydney took potato stamping to a whole other level while...

changing our paints to a lovely shade of potato brown in the process.
I wanted to give the kids something to visualize while waiting for out potato to sprout so I printed off a picture of one and since I had nothing better to do, colored it.

Sydney just made it a bit fancier, one crayon at a time, over and over and over...

Friday, February 25, 2011

Outing to the Theatre

This morning we ventured out for lunch and a visit to the children's puppet show theatre to see Cinderella.
Lunch was a yummy visit to Pizza Hut :o)

Scott surprisingly ate 2 slices of pizza and then ate a jelly sandwich at the theatre.  Where does he put it?!


 The children's theatre

After a brutally cold and windy 5 minutes of waiting outside it was 12:00 and the clock...

 came to life!

Then it was off to warm up and take it all in.  I was so close to putting Sydney in her sweater dress for today but then I was thinking she would be wearing boots and it would look silly.  Almost every little girl there was in a dress and the parents were brushing their hat hair, changing their shoes to dress shoes, accessorizing them with purses, etc. 

They had a bunch of puppets on display in their mini museum.

After the puppet museum you walk up the stairs to a cafe (loaded with candy and sweets), past lots of fish tanks and into the show area.  We had assigned seats and I think the tallest people in Russia were sitting on the entire row in front of us.  Oh well we still enjoyed the puppet show!  I think we will need to go back again in the summer for sure.  It was a fun day out!


Milk bottle use #13: sports

This milk bottle idea was 100% child created!

While getting ready for out day out today I heard a lot of crashing, yelling and stomping.
Turns out the kids had a nice little game of t-ball going on in the living room!


Really, who needs a ball when you have a milk bottle?!


More creative minds at work...

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Sledding Buddies

I hope they will remember the good times they are having in the snow.
Another of our almost daily outings is to the park nearby for some park playing and sledding.


The other day Scott went down holding onto Sydney's legs and he's just dying to try that again but Sydney is having nothing to do with that.

She will instead let him crash into her at the bottom of the slide which he's settled for for now.

Then while Sydney is still laughing from her slide down the hill Scott takes the opportunity to be silly and fall down hundreds of times to keep Sydney giggling until I finally drag them off the ice.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Tsaritsino Park

Eric had the day off today so we went on another adventure.  This time we had quite a trek (by subway) to Tsaritsino Park.  The park is huge and apparently in the summer all these mounds of snow are tulip beds.  I look forward to coming back when the days are long and warm!

The palace was eventually bought by Catherine the Great and rebuilt from 1776-85 but was then again ordered torn down and rebuilt in 1786.  The building continued until 1797 and was left unfinished.  My understanding is that she never lived here.  The Russians turned it into a park in 1984.

Somebody fell asleep on the train ride over.

I was facinated by the ducks.  They had a few melted areas in the ice where they swam.  They were not lacking for food, that's for sure!


Eyeing the sword...

He just can't help himself.  He throws himself down and rolls whenever he has a chance!

Scott says he wants to ski...

Back through the forest to find a place to sled.

Apparently vollyball is a year round sport!

Ending with the ice slide on the way out of the park.

There goes the other one!

 What you can't see or hear is the uncontrollable deep belly laugh all they way down the slide and continuing as she lies at the end waiting for someone to pull her off the ice.


Milk bottle use #12: the parachute

The other day Sydney took the hotel toiletry basket apart and we discovered a couple of shower caps that made their way into a parachute.

Well the suitcases were suppose to keep children off the box spring but I guess we are well past that point.

The "activity" room--jumping, bouncing, running and falling, rough housing, throwing, etc. or whatever a child needs to use a mattress for to burn some energy!

Monday, February 21, 2011

Milk bottle use #11: car tunnel

Warning: children are in their spaghetti eating attire.

Picture it: 
It's been a long time since Scott has seen a race car race. 
All the forgotten components of racing have been forgotten until now.
"We need a big car, tires, gas, pit crew, race track, starting line...Make it mom!"
The demands of an urgent and excited child go on and on.
Leave it to NASCAR to inspire play. 

There was a lot of frustration, confusion, redoing, undoing, you name it, to get to a happy race track. 

Oh boy mom, that milk bottle tunnel needs some work.

The final model.  Note it even has a tunnel underneath!
I was the only one that thought that was cool.

I foresee big things for the milk bottle tunnel in the days ahead...