For the Birds

I found this great book about birds at the church nursery. It tells all about how birds develop and how they make their nests. After we read the book we made nests in two different ways. First we made our own nest.

We gathered sticks, grass, straw, hair, yarn, newspaper, and mud and gave it our best shot.

Alice learned all about weaving and we talked about how nest building must take a lot of effort for birds.


After we were done, we put the nest in a tree in our backyard in hopes that a mama bird may decide to make it her home. Yesterday we added some bird seed to make the nest more inticing to potential ocuupants. No luck so far. I'll keep you posted!

After all that hard work we decided to make ourselves a treat-edible birdsnests.
We used milk chocolate chips and chinese noodles. Alice didn't like the noodles without the chocolate, but she sure loved the chocolate without the noodles. I couldn't get her to stop eating it!







Here's our Muffin Tin Monday entry a few days late. The theme was "the ocean". I made tuna fish, an apple and peanut butter boat, a hotdog octopus, star-shaped toast, and gave her pretzel rods to use a fishing poles.


PINK!!

I would have never given Alice a Tootsie Pop at 17 months, but that's the beauty of being the second child. You basically get to do whatever your big sister does. It was the stickest mess ever. At one point Will wiped his hands down the wall leaving sticky handprints all over it. And I thought flat paint was a good idea!



Just had to add this picture. This is Will with his little friend Hope- SO CUTE!! He is a giant beside her. I think I could clean the whole house holding her. I don't even think I could clean the counters while holding Will.

This is Brad in all his glory. Last weekend he purchased 2 inch steaks and made a very labor-intensive rub and sauce. With shopping it was basically an all day event, however it was well worth it. They were really tasty. Luckily the steaks took so long to make that the kids were already in bed when we ate them, so we got to eat them in peace!




I am crazy about making sure that the kids get enough fruit, so much so that I bought an enormous container of oranges on my last trip to COSTCO. In an effort to use them before they went bad, we made homemade orange juice. Both kids enjoyed this activity.





Just a note on all the swimsuits. Looking at these pictures you would think that they were taken in the summertime, or that Alice has been doing a lot of swimming. In reality she would like to be swimming everyday, but we only go once a week. Her friend Phoebe gave her a bag of swimsuits and that is basically her uniform when she is at home!
A typical afternoon at the Andersons...