Children's Museum of Alamance

Children's museums are kind of a pricy family outing, but occasionally we like to indulge. I had heard about the Children's Museum of Alamance and I was waiting for a day when Ryan could come with us because taking three kids by myself was a little intimidating. We were finally able to go on Martin Luther King Day and had a great time. It's always fun to see what creative ideas the different children's museums come up with.

Trying out an old fire truck:

Ann Marie's favorite part by far was taking care of the babies in the hospital section. She would have been happy to spend the entire time wearing nurse's scrubs and pushing the babies around in the stroller.

Painting on glass? What's not to love? Every once in a while workers would close off the area and spray it all down with soap and water, which was also fascinating.

Kevin played a long game of delivering mail all over the children's museum. It was so cute.

Heidi enjoyed working as a cook/waitress in the restaurant kitchen.

They had this cool beanstalk that the kids could climb. Can you find Kevin?

We finally gave in and let Ann Marie paint, which she loved. She did get paint on her clothes when we were trying to wash her off, but it all came off easily in the washing machine.

Heidi took a turn being a mail lady.

Other fun activities included the theater area with dress-up clothes and puppets, the farm/grocery stand, and the hospital/dentist office area.

Quiet book

A few years ago I made several quiet book pages, but I never got around to putting them together as a book, which meant it all got scattered all over the house. It got so bad I seriously considered just throwing it all away. In January I finally got around to getting all the pieces in one place and making it into a book, so here is the final product.

Velcro numbers (I had to reattach almost all the velcro):

This is a felt face with various face parts you can use to make faces. The face is glued to the page and the rest of the pieces go in the beige colored bag. This is one of the kids' favorite pages. This was one of the few busy bags I saved from the busy bag swap several years ago (big mess and I would not do it again). I used to have a magnet that could be used to move the paper clips around, but that disappeared and I haven't found an adequate substitute yet. There's also a zipper for zipping practice.

Touch and feel page with several different swatches of fabric.

Left side is a guy eating spaghetti (red yarn) out of a bowl. You pull the button on the image above to make the spaghetti go into his mouth. The downside to the string is that Kevin thought it made a great leash/kite/thing to drag the book around, but now he doesn't do that as much, so it's worked out. Right side is various buckles/things to adjust.

Left side has button flowers (still haven't found one of them), right side is for counting or just playing with the beads.

This was a lot of work and to be honest if I could go back in time I would tell my past self not to bother. Until recently Kevin and Heidi didn't have a lot of interest in it, although Ann Marie does play with it more. It's fun (but a little messy) for sacrament meeting.

January pictures

We've had several technology changes happen in the past six months. Ryan and I got smart phones and we aren't really taking pictures with the camera anymore because it's so convenient to use our phones. So Ryan has pictures on his phone that I haven't gotten around to importing and that therefore will not be featured in this series of catch-up posts. And if you take pictures on your phone it's really easy to just share one on Instagram. Then our computer died and even Ryan was not able to resurrect it, so we had to get a new one. The hard drive seems fine and I don't think we lost any files, but we were using Picasa and Google has stopped supporting Picasa, which means we can't download Picasa anymore. So now I'm trying to find a replacement for Picasa. I'm trying out Windows Photos, which has some basic photo editing abilities, but so far it's making me annoyed and I'm not sure how much of that is because it actually is annoying ("We automatically made this album for you! Isn't that convenient?" "No, that's not convenient! Just let me do that myself and leave me alone!") versus me being frustrated trying to figure out a new program. It's definitely not as good as Picasa and I don't think I'm going to stick with it. So I guess that's why I have almost four months of photos to share on my blog. I'm going to try to get caught up, but there probably won't be much editing or cropping on the photos. Then again, I don't usually do that anyway. Anyway, here are some pictures from January.

My mom found these dresses from when my sister Melissa and I were kids.

Some kids sleep with teddy bears. Kevin sleeps with electronics.

We had some snow days and the kids enjoyed playing in the snow to varying degrees. I was grateful we didn't have two weeks straight of snow days like last year.