What we have been up to...

Our last weekend (not this most current one, but the one before that) was crazy nuts! A few months ago, our upstairs neighbor had her water heater spring a leak. As I am sure you can deduce, gravity did its thing and our ceiling was toast. Our landlord is totally awesome. She told Jacob to go ahead and do the work so he could make some money off of the inconvenience of the whole ordeal. *cue angels singing*

Yuck, huh?

He started this the same weekend I told my best friend that I would help her with laundry. She found yucky black mold in her apartment and had to drop everything and move. I told her to bring over all her laundry and I would help her get it done because I didn't want her taking mold spores to her new apartment.

So you take this:

...plus this...

...and add this...

and you get one WAY crowded laundry room! We made it work though. I tried to stay out of the way and keep the kids busy, so we spent Saturday morning doing this:

while Dad did this:

We had lots of fun coloring on the sidewalk and Taylie is getting really good at recognizing letters and people's names so it was educational as well.

See that slipper, that is my foot. I was trying to help, but this is about the extent of my skills that I could contribute.

and this little chalk-covered bootie was my favorite part of the morning!

It took a good 3 days to get the wash done, and at the same time, it took Jake about 2 and 1/2 days to do the ceiling. Then I thought we should move onto something a bit more fun!

Again, this story begins with the upstairs neighbor. She is a sweet woman, but without fail, she comes home everyday during naptime. She slams the front door and stomps up the stairs and walks around doing who knows what. Everyday, Taylie emerges from her room and tell me that she hears something upstairs. She is convinced that it is Santa Clause and his sleigh on the roof and that he will be coming out the chimney any moment.

I thought that it may be better for her to be able to visualize how many days are left until Santa will be coming to our house, so we decided to make a chain and hang it up in the house.

Luke wanted to be in charge of green and Taylie wanted the red. We did the first link the in chain with glue and it took f.o.r.e.v.e.r. We switched to staples and the novelty of hooking paper together wore off in about 3 minutes.

Taylie did an awesome job of tracing the letters on the paper with glue and they both had a blast with the glitter. I mean, they were encouraged to be messy! It was great :)

So, after hooking together 46 pieces of paper, we were done and they wanted it hung on the wall that is between their rooms. They still do not understand why I ask them to rip a piece off every morning after breakfast. It may just end up being a decoration for this year.

I love doing fun little things with the 2 cute kids! Next, we are going to string popcorn to hang on our Christmas Tree. I hope their interest in this last for a bit longer. :)