Recent Activities

We are FINALLY having some very wonderful, beautiful, warm days up here in Siberia! So we've been enjoying a lot of time outside during the day and a family walk almost every evening.
Most days our lunches get moved out to the patio.
It's so nice to be out! Having survived our first Wisconsin winter, I will say that we loved it. We loved last fall. We loved this past winter. What we did not love were the months of April and much of May. Ugh. Spring does not exist up here! But now that it's warming up, all is forgiven.
In honor of the warm weather, the garage sales are in abundance these days. I made some large-item kid purchases, including a bouncing pony for Owen. We have a bouncing jumper that hangs in the doorway...but we have no trim on our doorways.
He gets very excited about his new role as cowboy. Ava also had to get in on the fun.

That little peanut. She cracks me up.
The other garage sale purchase consisted of a hot wheels play table with a bunch of hot wheel sets included in the storage bins underneath. My intent was to make this a basement toy, but while the novelty is still in play, we've left it upstairs for the time being.

There were a lot of different sets in those drawers, with no instructions or picture of what they could potentially become. I've never put sets like this together, so trying to figure it all out has become a family adventure. Last night during Ava's bedtime prayers, she said "Thank you, God for the hot wheels table," followed by "please help us with the hot wheels table." There you have it.
So in other news, life keeps clipping along at the Cooper house. Last week, for the first time ever, Ava cut with scissors. For all my OT friends out there, I know: shame on me. But here's a pic of her first attempts at using scissors.

Luckily she's right-handed and will not have to endure all of the hardships and discrimination that her left-handed mother had to face as a child. Oh, the trauma.
For some Mommy-Ava time last week we baked some "shining star" cookies. I think they are meant to be made at Christmas time and hung on your Christmas tree. This would explain why they didn't taste that good. But Ava picked this out of our big kid-activity idea book, and we had all the ingredients, so we went for it. Please ignore the pasta sauce all over the chin.

We had to use up the Lifesavers that Steve had purchased to help his sore throat. Sorry, Steve. I thought that if he still needed one he could just eat one of the cookies. ew.
So there's a few random happenings! We miss all of our friends and family south of here! Owen says "goodbye" and "ba-ba-ba."