planes and trains follow up

So here is the last of our plain and train projects.

I mentioned earlier our train that we colored and cut out and were going to put on the wall. this is my new favorite thing.  When the kids are quiet at night time and go right to sleep, they get to pick out a train car to add to the train in the morning. Obviously we start with the locomotive and end with the caboose. But the 10th and last thing we end with is a star, and that means they get a special treat - such as gelatto at Costco. I don't know, Joshua picked that one. He has good taste in ice cream apparently.  Anyway, Abby a little less, but Joshua is TOTALLY motivated to get his cars and his star. (and I have taken advantage of this by warning that I'll take a car down from the train for certain misbehavings - I will have to work hard on not overusing this.) Anyway, it's working. YEA!!! * oh yes, and I decided this is a great time to learn our numbers.

Our shape trains. I got this idea from a book in the train kit at the library. I let the kids pick out the colors for their shapes, i cut the shapes out, and I glued on Abigail's, but Joshua glued his on himself. I did not even tell him where to glue the shapes, he said he could figure it out from looking at mine. I'd say he did pretty well. And if you look really close, you can see he drew some steam coming out of our smoke stacks/steam stacks (whatever those are called).

and we colored pictures of trains. Abigail is exploring a wider variety of colors while Joshua's new artistic technique is shading with the side of his crayon. beautiful.

We had a couple of windy days so we decided to fly home made kites - yes, i promise they really DO work, just not on this day. Once I got one of these dinky kites flying about 10 feet in the air for a few seconds out in Spanish Fork. Since we weren't having much luck, we moved on to paper airplanes.

The next day was the first day of Spring, so to celebrate we took down our snowflakes and starting working on our Spring flowers... which I just put up today because I'm a little behind schedule. and I don't really care. I've been having too much fun.

The following are just some photos of my kids playing dress up.

*sleeping issues -  Ever since my parents had been out for the baby my older kids have stopped going to bed at night. They would talk, scream, laugh, and pull all their bedding off of their beds, but not sleep - until like 10:00 pm and then we were all too exhausted the next day - but not enough to sleep apparently. So I prayed. And this is what we did. Instead of putting both the kids down at the same time, Abigail goes to bed now at 6:30. After she has supposedly fallen asleep, then Joshua goes in at 7:30 and he is supposed to be quiet and not wake her up. the next step, since Abigail wasn't actually falling asleep by 7:30 was to take away their afternoon naps all together. This was horrible and wonderful all at the same time. mostly it was just awful for 3 days but the end result, I knew, would be awesome. Then, step three, I bought some light blocking fabric and made curtains - they're still in the works, and since Derek hasn't put up the curtain rod, I have no photo to show you. I just tack up my two curtains every night and at nap time (which I reinstated for Abigail and she is very thankful) and presto! the room is totally dark and my kids are totally sleeping and I totally love it!!!! And we have the train system to keep Joshua from waking Abigail up when he creeps in at 7:30. Hallelujah revelation!! God helps us out even on the little things.