And so it begins...

Today was the first official day of summer break and we survived! yay!!!

This year I actually put some preparation into our "summer schedule" and fun things we want to accomplish...I'm crossing my fingers that my efforts will pay off and that we can make some good memories as we enjoy our time spent  together this summer...and avoid the oh so familiar "I'm bored, there's nothing to do" choir from striking our home. So last week Bella came down with some wicked virus that lasted a full week, which initially I was grumpy about since it foiled any plans I had to get last minute errands and big things done before school let out...but ended up working to my advantage . I was forced to stay home and make the best use of my time here and I ended up doing the things I needed to get organized for summer break....

Here she is at the tail end of her sickness...starting to smile and feel a little better...So here's what I did while we were grounded....

I made a months worth of meals and spent a full day (seriously from 7-4pm) in the kitchen chopping, baking, blending, assembling... and ended up with a total of 16 dinners, 8 lunches, and 8 breakfasts...it was a lot of work, but very rewarding. If you are thinking about trying this out, go to www.onceamonthmom.com... awesome website.does all the hard work....(well most of it:)

My kitchen has never been messier... but well worth it if you ask me.

After taking care of meal planning, I decided we needed some sort of routine this summer...because well...I'm a little laid back which can be good, but not so good when you have 5 energetic little monkeys , a messy house, places to go and things to do and no systems in place. So we decided we needed a set routine that would give us a general guideline on days we're home. Today was day one of our routine and it worked like a charm so far...here's hoping!!

 The kids and I came up with a list of activites, treats, and places we want to go to this summer that were doable...and we put together these jars to make sure we do it! We adapted it to our family's needs

 orange = places we want to go this for example: the duck pond, round rock express game, go explore the round rock, six flags day, go to a dollar movie, go to grammy and grampy's house, UT natural history museum...etc

 blue= things involving food for example: have breakfast for dinner, make cookies and deliver to a friend, make a new recipe together, go get happy hour sonic drinks, make pudding pops etc...

 yellow= easy and fun activities and games like, play sorry, have a wii bowling tournament, have turtle races (using our pet turtles), hide a treasure and create a map, make sock puppets and have a puppet show, draw pictures with a blind fold on, make a fort and watch a movie in it....etc...easy but fun...

so the plan is...every sunday we will put in a blue and yellow slip of paper ("let's eat" and "games and activities" ) in each envelope for each day of the next week and Mike and I will put in the orange one (places to go) on certain days as we see fit...I will take a peek at what they drew for the week and make sure I have the stuff I need, while they  get to open the  envelope each day and see what is in store for that day... Today was day 1 and for the activity they drew out  "create with magic nuudles"...

 Sav made a flower garden

 Bella made a snake and the letter B

 Z- made an airplane, pyramid and coral snake

Our first summer injury..can you see it? Sav fell and split her forehead open on the corner of an old box tv in the guest room...almost took her to the ER, but the bleeding stopped and we were able to pinch it closed enough to keeping it from healing gapping open.phewwww!!!

and Josh made an elaborate bridge...
so that was a bit of day one of our summer break! Here's to a fun summer!!

and a few random pictures of Lily...just because...Lils didn't make the last few posts. poor girl, all the action usually happens during her naptime...for a good reason too. let's just say our sweet little baby has hit the terrible two's a little early. love her dearly.really we do. she totally thinks she IS one of the big kids which ends up in disaster. so we do most of our activities while she sleeps.!!sweet little messy girl.we love her just the same.