Goodbye to the Cheat

Today for "Riverfest" the 3 youngest and I went down to the river for the river clean up. We were shown pictures of the various weeds and thistles to pull and given a yellow plastic bag.

We were given this area of cheatgrass (weed) and thistles to clear out.

The kids were real troopers.

2 hours later we finished with almost a bag full of weeds and a small dent in the battle against the cheat grass.

See how nice and clean it is now? No more cheat :D

Our famous boy!

Ethan is on TV! Check it out!

Mission Accomplished

Many years ago my friend Kate introduced me to FlyLady. I LOVE FlyLady and the things she teaches about maintaining your home 15 minutes at a time. I have been on and off the band wagon multiple times, but much of her advice has stuck with me and I know things go smoother when I follow her advice.

A few months ago I signed up for her yahoo group emails, and they never came, so I kindof forgot about it, then a couple weeks ago the emails started arriving again. FlyLady now has a email reminder called "The Riley Challenge" What it is, is a challenge for your kids to do each day. Each day is different, they are not hard, and none take more than 15 minutes. I can NOT believe what a help this has been. Each day I write what I call the "MISSION" for the day on a white board and when the kids come home the first thing they look at is what their mission is for the day. As per FlyLady theory the job is just something quick, but all those something quicks add up (especially times 4 kids!!)

So far the kids have

1- cleaned out from under/behind their bed for 15 min. (that's where those socks were!)

2- tossed their too small shoes in a bucket for me to toss or determine their stay value (now I don't trip over a gazillion shoes trying to get into the house)

3- got rid of all the too small clothes in their closet or clothes they don't like any more (it is amazing how much easier it is to maintain their clean closets now)

4- got rid of 10 papers in their room and/or excess papers in their backpacks (do papers multiply at your place like they do at mine?)

5- they had to find 11 things of theirs that were broken or they didn't play with any more (de-cluttering, yeah!)

6- run around the house and find all the things that are yours in other rooms of the house and put them where they belong (yeah for me not having to pick up 4 kids' stuff, when they can and should do it themselves)

Why haven't I been doing this before?? Please learn from my mistakes. 15 minutes x 4 kids = one hour of my time that I'm not doing THEIR stuff.

I love it. Check out flylady's system here

Find some of Riley's Challenges here, and see if you can't work them into your family's allowance structure, or just a chore that needs to be done.

Have you heard of FlyLady or ever tried her system out?

Ugliest T-shirt Prize

On Saturday I ran a 5K with 3 of my friends, Emily, Brittany and Ryan. Both Ryan and Emily won 3rd place for their age group, and I ran with Brittany who ran her best 5K time ever! Yeah for them! It was called the Salmon Run and officially wins, hands down the ugliest Tshirt I have ever seen for a race!What do you think?

Ben & Jerry's vs. Baskin Robbins

So we mooched ice cream the last 2 days from Ben & Jerry's (free) and Baskin Robbins (31 cent kid cone) and Ben and Jerry's so TOTALLY wins! Hands down!

Luckily we didn't have a line at either place, but Ben and Jerry's gave us this huge cone

while our Baskin Robbins cone didn't even look this big and we had to pay for it!

Of course we enjoyed both and for the price we couldn't lose, but if you have to choose... Ben and Jerry's is the way to go.

Yum!

Thanks to Benji for the heads up on the Baskin Robbins deal.

If you are near a Carvel check out their free Arctic Blender today (May 1st) from 4-6!

Yeah for free ice cream!!

Did you go get your freebie?

Feliz Cumpleanos!

On Elise's birthday we told her we would take her out to eat where ever she wanted to go. However, Samantha had some friends in a play at the middle school and told Elise that her "gift" to her would be to take her "back stage" to meet the cast. Elise opted for the play instead of dinner. It was actually very sweet. I think Elise felt like a cool big kid and Samantha I think enjoyed playing the big sister roll as I dropped them off at the middle school to watch the play together. Kindof like a sisters night out. It was very sweet.
So, it wasn't until this last Friday that we were able to take Elise out to El Rodeo for her birthday dinner. She was dead serious about us NOT telling the staff it was her birthday and doing the big guy with the guitar, and the singing. But... we fooled her :-) As you can see on her face she was a little reluctant to accept the happy wishes and birthday sombrero.

Frontier Days and "'Box On!"

This afternoon for fun we decided to go out to the High Desert Museum Frontier days. Can I just say... I love having an annual pass because we could just go out there for an hour and a half and I didn't feel like I had to stay to make it worth my $. The family who arrived at the same time as we did payed $32 to go to the museum today, and we were right behind them as they left! Crazy! I would NEVER let my kids leave after and hour and a half if I had payed $32!!

Anyway... they had an encampment of the Hudson Bay Company.

Here the kids are grinding the jerky with a stone in a rawhide bowl to make pemmican for this "Indian" lady. She taught us about leather and rawhide and how to make pemmican. I am tempted to have the kids do this at home but instead of fat to hold the stuff together I thought peanut butter would be fun.Samantha is using a digging rod to search for roots to eat

This is the trader and the general in the encampment and some fish and elk ribs roasting on the fire. When Sandra was here we were wondering about how and when the Indians did the beading, since the beading is so prevalent in their clothing that we see, but the beads we saw were imported. So... I asked the guy who was there and he said that before they could trade the beaver pelts for seed beads they used porcupine quills and sliced and dyed them. Wow! What a lot of work! I thought wow... I really am lazy!
Here is a trapper taking the hair off an elk hide. Earlier I had thought I smelled dog poo, but realized there were no dogs in the park and passed off the stinky smell as the lady beside me. Then as we checked out the trapper guy I smelled it again and saw Elise checking her shoes to see if she had stepped in poo. It was then that our trapper friend told us it was the elk hide (and here I had blamed in on the poor woman :-( ) P-U! I surely wouldn't want that job!
This guy showed us how to fire a musket.

Finally we got to see the river otter!

It was a beautiful day and we learned a lot. It was very interesting. Even Samantha who had poo-pooed the idea earlier said she was glad we had gone.

Back to Letterboxing!

After we were done at the museum we decided to go letterboxing. It has been so long since we have gone, I thought it was time we picked it up again. Letterboxing has taken us to so many cool places that we wouldn't have ever found other wise, and it is just plain fun!

Today's letterboxing sent us to Sawyer Park just on the north west edge of town (10 min). It was so neat there, and we never knew it existed before!

There were so many birds it was amazing. Next time we will have to take our bird guide. One of our neatest finds was this pair of geese and their 5 goslings.

Star enjoyed trying to chase after the ducks and geese. What a mess!

If you're not familiar with Letterboxing I highly suggest it. It has taken us to some cool places! Check out www.leterboxing.org

I can't take credit for "discovering" it however. My mom saw an article in the paper a few years a go and we have been having fun doing it ever since!

"'Box On!"