Professor Pennypickle!

Emma & Sophia waiting to get into the museum
Chatting away
Emma & Sophia in the hot air balloon
Typing
Balancing the ball by adjusting the airflow
Cracker stackers
Peering through the periscopes
Perched on a turtle
The girls on the turtle

Today Emma & I spent the morning with our friends Erin & Sophia at Professor Pennypickle's Imagination Workshop! We had a lot of fun. I think the museum is technically geared towards slightly older children, but the girls still seemed to really enjoy it. The idea behind the museum is that it is supposed to be a house - the house of an absentminded old inventor named Professor Pennypickle who had to suddenly run out and left all his experiments running. So the kids can come in and play with all kinds of gears and pulleys, levers and switches. There was a hot air balloon basket with ropes to pull and release heat from the top, periscopes to see through the museum, pvc tubing that works as makeshift telephones, a blacklight maze, old fashioned typewriters, a music room, secret passageways to crawl through, and even a place where Emma & Sophia could build block towers & then hit a button to start an earthquake & see whose creation was the most seismically sound. Doesn't look like either one of them has a future in architecture! The biggest hit was probably the manipulatives room where the girls spent a long time playing with magnets and legos and the heat & electricity toys. It was a fun morning and we got some great pictures!

Little Mommy!

Emma is in love with babies lately! This is my friend Stephanie's little girl, Brooke. Emma just loves her. All she wanted to do was hold "Baby Book" at the playdate yesterday. She is so sweet... but she is still going to need to wait for quite a while before she gets a little sister or brother!

Placemat Crafts!

I recently got a new dining room table from a friend of mine and have been stressing about how rough the kids are with it. I just know it is going to get scuffed, scratched, & trashed before too long. In an effort to delay the inevitable, I decided to turn today into a craft day. We made placemats with pictures of the kids that I printed out from the computer and lots of markers, crayons, and glitter glue. TJ is still feeling under the weather so he was not that into it today and Todd had to help him quite a bit, but they all seemed to have fun. Everyone, especially Miss Emma, was proud of their creations.

Morning Bowling!

I took Emma & TJ bowling with our playgroup Monday morning. Tim, Scott, Katie, Bubby, & Matthew joined us too. This was the first time bowling for most of the little ones, but they all did really well. We only lasted through one game and thank goodness we had the older boys as they went ahead & bowled for all the little ones during the last couple frames. Emma was so cute lugging her 6 pound ball to the lane. She was insistent that she did NOT need help and got very upset when I had the audacity to touch her ball at one point. We were able to have bumpers for the kids but this alley does not use the ramps, so it took the little ones quite a bit of effort to get the ball to the lane and push it hard enough for it to actually reach the pins. You can see how it wiped Emma out. She was asleep within 20 minutes of getting home.

Party in the Park!

We went to a birthday party for the son of one of Karen's co-workers this weekend. The park was awesome ~ carousel themed, a huge play structure, a smaller one under a shade feature, and even a water play area. The only problem was that it was about a million degrees outside! It was so miserably hot out there that it was hard to relax & enjoy ourselves, but the kids still seemed to have a good time. They played in the water ( and of course Karen & I each had to run in after them at least once) and there was a pinata too. And cupcakes. And, in Emma's eyes anyway, any party is a good party if they have cake!

Fun with Friends!

We went to the library (yet again) with our friends Erin & Sophia on Friday. As luck would have it, we got there about 5 minutes before the Nature Tots storyhour began! So the girls got to play in the toddler room, sing some songs, hear a story, and then go outside to make a craft. Emma was less than enthusiastic about dancing around to all the songs this time. I guess that was to be expected as this was our first trip out of the house in days since she had been fighting a high fever all week. She loved the reading part of the story hour of course though. Then they each made a "beach in a bottle" using a recycled water bottle, sand, shell-shaped macaroni, and sea "glass." They turned out really cute! Then we met up with Jen, Charlene, and Hayden for lunch so the girls could eat with their friends and play on the playground. Erin bought ice cream cones for the girls and those were the hit of the meal!

The true face of disappointment...

This is just the saddest face ever! We tried to go to the movies on Tuesday to see a $1.00 kids movie. I should have known that there would be a huge mob of people trying to get out of the heat for such a cheap price. But I didn't think ahead and they were sold out by the time we got there. This was Emma's response to finding out that we wouldn't get to see the movie.