Shoes are a Girls Best Friend

After a month of chores the girls earned their money for new church shoes. They were pretty excited! Lydia had fallen asleep on the drive over to Payless and I could not get her to wake up until I carried her into the store. Then she excitedly said "Down mommy! shoes!!" They tried on almost every pair in sight. I think they thought they were in heaven...they have never seen that many shoes before. (we usually go to target). After trying several options on they finally decided on the winning pair. Oddly enough they picked the same ones.....

Of course pink sparkle shoes with jewels! Seriously can my girls get any girlier?


We have discovered they have expensive taste though...which isn't good for us. They picked the most expensive shoes in the store. Thank you Disney Princesses. I am pretty sure we spent more on one pair of these then I have spent on any one pair of my shoes...but they are happy....

But Chad and I have agreed that if we do this again they are going to have to work longer.

Archers in Training

For family home evening we took the girls out into the desert to shoot our bows. We have had them for 5 years but sadly have not pulled them out since Sophie was Lydia's age. Sophie was beyond excited to be like Merida from the movie Brave.

 

 

She loved putting the arrows on too...

 

Lydia really enjoyed it too. She helped Daddy pull the string back...

 

 

And they were excellent arrow collectors!

(For the record they picked out their own outfits..I had no choice in the matter)

Lil Miss Stubborn

Lydia has all by herself gone in the potty several times just randomly. So we thought it would be a good time to potty train her. I borrowed a book from my friend in the ward on how to potty train in less than a day. Honestly I had my doubts but after reading the book it seemed logical. So after studying the book for a week I decided to do it. I dropped Sophie off at Grandma Millers so it could be just me and Lydia. I was prepared with snacks and drinks and even a doll that peed. What I wasn't prepared for was Lydia's stubbornness....

I know she is stubborn but because she loves to sit on the potty all of the time I figured she would enjoy this especially with all of the snacks the program included. But she would constantly answer questions wrong on purpose and smile at me. For example "Lydia when you need to go pee pee where do you go?" Lydia's response "outside!!! (giggle)" Me "Lydia feel your pants. Are they wet or dry?" Lydia "Wet!!" me "No Lydia they are dry. See feel." Lydia "wet!"

The doll itself did not cooperate with me eiether. I had filled it with water in preparation and knew that it leaked when it was sitting up so I laid it flat on the counter. When it came time for Lydia to teach the doll, the crazy thing had already wet its pants!! So I had to skip to what we do when she wets her pants...I asked her "Dolly wet her pants, but we still love dolly. Lydia do we love dolly?" Lydia: "No!"

Then when she had an accident we are supposed to practice but all she did was scream "no I don't want to! " and then run away from me. She is supposed to sit on the potty for at least 5 minutes but I could not keep her on there past 5 seconds.

I know that she can do it and she knows she can do it. But apparently we need to wait until she wants to do it. So our diaper free home is just going to have to wait...sigh.

A Day with Daddy

Saturday we had a full day with Chad all to ourselves. It is a pretty rare thing with the station wagon project going on. The girls were really excited and we headed to the zoo. The girls fed the giraffes carrots...

Sophie tried to scoot back as far as possible. She did not want the giraffe to lick her at all. Lydia on the other hand walked right up....

After the zoo we headed to Grandma and Grandpa Millers for swimming and dinner! The girls had a blast having daddy to themselves all day!

On a random note I am in shock that my baby fits into this dress...

I feel like Sophie just stopped wearing it. When did she get so big??

I Don't Like My Shoes

On Sunday as we were putting our shoes on Sophie all of the sudden got really sad because she did not like her church shoes. She was even more sad because it is the only pair of church shoes she has. I explained to her that Lydia only has one pair too and her feet will grow soon and she will have different church shoes. That did not appease her at all. She ended up walking to the car barefoot carrying her shoes...which she luckily put on before going into church.

Chad had a good idea to remedy the problem. We would have them do chores and earn money for them both to get a new pair of shoes. Then we could also teach them how to pay tithing with their money. So we sat down and came up with some chores for each of them to do and I made up some charts...

they get to color a square after completing the chore and then they get to put a dime into their money jar...

We made it so they have to do a total of 30 chores to earn shoes. It will make it much easier when teaching them tithing. So far they love it! They get really excited to do their chores and it seems to be helping Lydia listen when I ask her to clean up.

Princess Finger Puppets

Sophie was invited to a birthday party this last week. She was so excited not only because she absolutely loves birthday parties but she also got to wear a tutu and wings! She immediately picked out her outfit once she got the invitation 2 weeks before. And thanks to Grandma Clayton letting us borrow her angel wings her outfit was complete!

I always have a hard time trying to figure out what to do for gifts. Thanks to pinterest I found a really cute Disney Princess finger puppet tutorial! What little girl doesn't like princesses right?

This is my kind of project because it was a matter of cutting out felt and hot gluing everything together! I love the little castle purse to carry all the princesses!

I found the tutorial here. I bought all of the colored felt squares at Michael's and it only cost me $3! Plus I have plenty extra to make more!

1, 3........a lot

Lydia likes to be like her big sister. Sophie loves to count and Lydia is getting really good at it too. She can now count to 13 although she likes to skip 2 and 4. In Lydia's words: one, tee, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, evan, telve, errteen!

We have had a really good monsoon lately and the water runoff across the street has had a lot of water. The other day Chad took the girls to the park and they wanted to throw rocks in the water. And what did they find??

thousands of tadpoles!! Sophie was very protective over these little guys. Some boys in the neighborhood were collecting them and she followed them like a hawk and kept telling them not to hurt them or step on them. We asked the girls how many there were. Sophie started to count and then said "there's like one hundred" and Lydia started to count 1, 3...a lot!!! Here is the video...

Sadly the water dried out the next morning, luckily Sophie didn't notice or ask about them.