We're Playing Ball

After not having Spring practice, and big conferences cancelling football this Fall, we weren't even sure we'd have a season. Last Saturday, Texas kicked off against UTEP for the much anticipated season opener. 

Our stadium opened at 25% capacity; and had about 19,000 fans in attendance. And friends, it felt empty. However, the university did a great job at piping in noise, having music, and "the band." I didn't even realize the band wasn't there until DJ had told me. 

Our cheerleaders cheered in the stands, so the field was reserved for players, coaches, and essential personnel. 

Tailgating isn't allowed this year, so we didn't see a need to arrive too early. We arrived about an hour before the game, and had no traffic on our way. We literally whipped right in to our parking spot, sat in the car for a few minutes and made our way inside. It was so easy and convenient. 

Masks are required for entry and walking around the stadium. Once we found our seats and felt socially distant from everyone, we took them down/off. 

Here's what 25% capacity looked like. 

The girls were ready to cheer! I was a bit nervous bringing all 3 of them to the game; I mean, I've done it before, lots of times, but while we've been at Texas, babysitting has been an option for the younger 2, and since the stands are always so tight and loud, I wasn't looking forward to having all 3 of them out with me again. Thankfully, because we are spread apart, we have plenty of room for the girls to move around, spread out, and they weren't too terrified of the noise.

Except for when the cannon goes off. Addy wore her headphones most of the 1st half because of the loud cannon. She went with me to get food, and carried our drinks, and anytime she thought the cannons were going to go off, she sat our drinks down on the ground and covered her ears. Sigh. It took a while to carry everything back to our seats.

See all those white things sticking up? They're cardboard cut outs so it looks like we have more people in the  stands than we actually do. 

We cheered on Texas until the beginning of the 4th quarter, realized we weren't going to see DJ after the game, so we called it a night.

And, I have to share these two OU fans bought cardboard cutouts of themselves, and they were placed way at the top of the stands, which is kind of hilarious. 

We play Texas Tech this weekend, and I'll be excited to curl up on the sofa watching the game. 

 

September Happenings

September has kept us busy!!! We are getting in to a new routine with homeschool, football, me working part time, activities...it's been a busy month! 

Megan started a new homeschool curriculum because the one we were going to use was out of stock, and I felt like we were just filling up time waiting for it to arrive. Gretchen's curriculum is going very well, so I started Megan on the same program.

Addy's doing well with hers and is fighting me a little less and less each day. I feel like she's filling in some holes that she had in reading, and I've found that she excels in math. It's been so fun seeing their wins and watching them light up when something clicks. 

Megan is always doing gymnastics.... everywhere. 

She's crazy flexible too. 

There are days when it's really hard to wake up when a kiddo crawls in to your bed. 

DJ's mom came in to town at the beginning of the month, and treated us all to pedicures. 

The girls thought the massaging chairs were the best ever. 

After our pedi's, we took Adalyn to see the turtles at the pet store, and this girl was in heaven. She really wants a pet turtle! 

We're still working on convincing her daddy, but I'm hoping Santa brings her a turtle for Christmas.

We headed to South Congress for dinner with DJ's mom, and ate at our favorite taco spot. 

And on Labor Day, I took the girls to the lake for some splashing around. 

Megan built an epic sand castle. 

One fun thing about homeschool is that it can literally happen anywhere. While both sisters had activities, this girl and I worked on her reading. 

I was able to catch Megan at gymnastics. I love watching her do what she loves. 

We traveled to Arkansas for a quick overnight trip and this girl had tons of room. DJ bought a new truck at the end of August; I've always hated traveling in his car because the girls sit all next to each other, and they always end up fighting. Thankfully, his truck had plenty of room. 

These cuties were great travelers! We met Gee for dinner once we arrived in Arkansas. 

The girls played with their cousin and cuddled up together in bed. They've been sleeping together since Spring and I don't think it will end anytime soon. 

The next day, we saw family, and drove home.... of course, driving anywhere in Texas, means we must have a Bucee's stop. 

This cutie got out of the car with a flower crown on her head; so I had to snap a picture. 

I mean, we should all watch TV like this....

or this. 

We are finally getting in to some cooler mornings, which called for school work on the trampoline! We've tried school work out here a few times but usually can't last longer than 15 minutes. I'm so looking forward to some Fall mornings where we can work out here longer.

I took both little girls to Target, which I haven't done in a sweet while, and Megan came home with her Halloween costume. She is obsessed with space, so we're going to be doing some space explorations in homeschool. 

And Saturday afternoon, the girls had birthday parties at two neighbor's houses and they were playing outside all day long. I was able to deep clean the house. DJ was winterizing the camper so I was home alone, and it was basically the best day ever. I also hung up a sign that I've had for a few months, and put some fall stems in an arrangement. 

Whew! So that's basically all that we've been up to this month! So much! 

 

Amazon Lately

I don't know about y'all, but having a 3 day weekend sure was nice! I know I'll be playing lots of catch up this week, and then we have our first football game Saturday! (#hookem)

 As always, I've been placing random Amazon orders, and I'm so thankful for that easy button. Sometimes, I feel guilty because it's a little too easy, but here's what we've been priming lately. 

A new stopper for the sink. I had noticed that the outside ring of ours was falling off, and had been for several uses, and I was getting tired of fitting it back in, so I just ordered a new one. I loved the look of this stainless one.  Also, this may have been the most random thing I've ever ordered on Amazon. 

Face shields.... I need to be wearing some sort of PPE for work, and the cloth masks are super hard to wear when you're a speech therapist; so I ordered 2 face shields, which basically remind me of a welding helmet. 

My favorite shave gel has been super hard to find, so I'm working on finding another clean brand that I love just as much as my original. I ordered this brand, and so far, I'm liking it, and it's a close 2nd to my favorite. Plus, the price point is perfect. 

My favorite yoga pants are from Amazon.... I actually found them years ago at Marshalls and TJ Max, but I've had a harder time finding them at the store. So, I've been ordering them from Amazon. I had someone tell me they thought I was wearing LuluLemon, so I'll take that as a plus without the price tag. Also, these hold your tummy in and don't ride down. 

We are really focusing on encouraging Adalyn to love reading.... math is her strong suit, and reading is more difficult. She's fine if we read to her, but she just doesn't enjoy it. She asked if she could have the Magic Treehouse books (her teacher read them last year, but didn't finish them because of COVID) so, I ordered her the 1st 4 sets. We also did a fun activity with the 1st book, and I'm hoping to find more activities we can do together based on the books. 

I ordered a package of pom poms to use as the girls reward system with school, per Adalyn's request. We are down for all of the positive reinforcement and each day, the girls earn fuzzies. They'll be able to redeem them for special prizes or even for money. #becauseitworks #whateverittakes

I also ordered one of these tablets and the girls are loving it! It's perfect for working on math, spelling, phonics, handwriting, drawing. I actually need to order a few more- we started with 1, but I think each of the girls would love having one of their own, and y'all, this would be the perfect birthday present or Christmas gift! 

And finally, a set of bicycle lights. Two of our neighbors have these, and they're perfect for lighting up bicycles in the dark.... we've been playing outside well past dark during these Summer nights, so I loved the idea of having the girls be more visible on their bicycles. You receive 4 colors (8 lights) so we actually had 1 leftover, and it comes with replaceable batteries, and a little bag to store them in. These are a hit! 

 

Homeschool: Magic Tree House Activity

Eep! I'm so excited to share a peek with y'all of some of our homeschool activities! Hopefully this can be a regular thing, but I never promise to be on my A-game, so who knows! 

Anyway, this year, I'm really wanting to foster a love for reading with Adalyn. Math is her favorite subject, and she's really good at it, but she does not love reading. I asked her what type of books she wanted, and she told me that she wanted to read the Magic Tree House books, because her 1st grade teacher had started reading them before school ended last Spring. So, I hopped on Amazon, and bought her the first 4 books in the series. I will gladly buy the girls books all day long. 

Magic Tree House is about a brother and sister who find a treehouse in the woods near their house, and it's full of books. He makes a wish, and they magically go to the land of the book they're looking at. In the first book, they travel back to the time of the dinosaurs. 

The book was an easy read, and we finished it within a few days. I usually read to Adalyn while we are waiting at sisters during their activities. 

My plan, is that when we finish a book, the girls will have some sort of STEM or fun activity to fit it's theme. Megan and Gretchen were both super pumped even though they didn't read the book. (Actually, Megan picked it up and read about half of it. )

I had wanted to do our first activity outside, but we woke up to a cloudy, rainy Saturday morning. So, we improvised. I purchased a set of "grow" dinosaurs from The Dollar Tree for our activity. We used the phone flashlights to trace a shadow of our dinosaurs. Each girl had a different dinosaur. 

Megan had the coolest dinosaur shadow! 

After they traced the dinosaur, we measured to see their size before we put them in water to "grow"

The instructions said to put the dinosaur in luke warm water and that it could take up to 6 days to grow 600% bigger. So, we filled up their sand pail buckets with water, tossed in the dinosaurs, and put the buckets outside on the patio so they wouldn't spill in the house. 

The girls have had SO much fun checking on their dinosaurs each day and pulling it out to see how much it's grown. 

For our next activity, we made dinosaur eggs! I used 1 1/2 cups of baking soda and 1/2 c. of water and mixed it together to make a paste. 

We used tiny dinosaurs, and covered them with the baking soda mixture and formed "eggs" around the dinosaurs.

Our eggs were not perfect! I bet you could use plastic eggs though and make them a little prettier.

Addy was enjoying the mess! 

Each of the girls was able to cover 5 dinosaurs. This was messy, but so fun. Once the dinosaurs were all in their eggs, we placed them in a dish and put them in the freezer. It takes about 45 minutes for them to freeze solid.

After lunch, we pulled out our dinosaur eggs. You can see that some were covered better than the others.... and if you want to be real creative, you can use a q-tip and food coloring to paint dots on the eggs, before you freeze them. 

Then, it was time to "crack" the eggs. Each kiddo got a bowl of vinegar and a pipette and used the vinegar to crack the egg. 

Baking soda will bubble when it's mixed with vinegar, so this was a cool scientific reaction to watch. 

Y'all, this activity was fun. Even Gretchen enjoyed it, and it kept the girls busy for a while! The dinosaurs that had the most "shell" around them took much longer to crack open, and it was a great fine motor skill to squeeze the pipette to fill it with vinegar. 

We let our growing dinosaurs stay in the water for about 6 days. Once they had grown, we took the dinosaurs out to measure to see how much they actually grew. 

Adalyn's grew about 3 inches bigger! 

I'm hoping that every other weekend, we can do some sort of activity that fits whatever book Adalyn is reading. And we're looking in to more book units for Fall.... I really want to read Charlotte's Web to them, and we're slowly working our way through the Little House books with Megan, so I've been pinning some activities to accompany the books. 

Since the girls knew I had a surprise activity after Addy was finished with the book, she was really motivated to let me read to her. Gretchen and Megan kept trying to guess what we would be doing with all of the dinosaurs, and they came up with lots of great ideas! I may even have them plan out some activities for us as we get further along because they're so creative!