Good Boy Jar

Zack keeps outgrowing our discipline techniques. He's just too smart! My sister, Britta, gave me the idea of earning tokens for good behavior. He also loses these tokens for misbehavior. So, we went to the craft store and bought wooden tokens and wrote amounts on the tokens. We have 1's, 5's and 10's so we can teach him how to get change as well. He gets to use his tokens to "buy" things he wants, like movies, toys and treats.

Then we let Zack decorate a jar for him to use as his Good Boy Jar. He had a blast! Letting him do this helped him take this to heart. He loves earning his tokens, and gets very upset when he loses some. It's working great so far!

Happy Birthday Zack!

Last weekend we had a party for Zack's 4th birthday. This was our first party that wasn't just family invited. We had a pretty good turnout of friends from preschool. CRAZY! I know my little guy is full of energy and is all over the place, but to add some of his little friends into the mix and they all just feed off of eachother. Bless their teacher!

Anywho! So, I asked Zack what kind of party he wanted and he told me he wanted a Wall-E cake. This kinda scared me. This was my first year making the cakes instead of buying them, so to throw a pretty complicated one at me on my learning year, I was pretty intimidated. I found a Wilton cake pan, that has a helpful paint-by-numbers instruction on the insert that I figured I could do. I learned last week after doing Lexi's cake, that I would need to make all the frosting along with the cake the night before if I wanted to frost it by the time the party started.

His birthday weekend started Friday afternoon. Grandma and Grandpa Bates decided to take him out for his birthday. They picked him up from school on Friday and took him to lunch and to the bookstore to pick his present (All he asked for this year for his birthday was books!). Then he got to go to their house and spend the night. What fun! This made it a little easier for me to get started on the cake too. We put Lexi to bed at her normal time and I got goin'! Aaron greased the pan for me so well, that it just slid right out. Whew! What a relief, because I needed to used this as a guide for frosting, I am not an artist, so this was important. I made the frosting and seperated it into the colors I would need and got to bed around 11. Not bad!

I got up and got started on the cake by 6 Saturday morning and it took me 3 hours to finish. But look how cool!

The party was a success. I found a few fun robot-themed games to play and we opened presents. I say "we" because I don't think Zack got to open a single one by himself. Overall, the kids had fun, and that was the most important part. And I realized how small my house feels with that many people crowding in for a seat!

Thank you to everyone who came and helped Zack feel special for his day!

We love you, Zack!

Alexis' Birthday

Today our beautiful little girl turned one. It's hard to believe that it's already been a year. It is truly amazing to watch a child grow, and it has been an adventure as well.

We had a small party for her with family. I made a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cake. She LOVES Mickey. One of the things that I remember the most from growing up is the cakes my mom made us for our birthdays. Aaron has the same kind of memories. It's fun to carry the tradition on with our kids.

She loved eating her cake. At first she wasn't sure what we had put in front of her, but after Aaron gave her a taste of it, she dug right in. This just happens to be my favorite part of their first birthday!She had fun opening presents for the first time. It took her a while to understand that it was ok to rip the paper, but once she got into it, she really got into it! It will be fun to let her do it again next month for Christmas. Thank you everyone for the wonderful gifts, she's been playing with all of them this afternoon.

We love you, Alexis and we are so glad to have you as a part of our family!

Halloween

Ok, I know I'm almost a month late in posting this, but I'm posting it anyway.

So, as many of you know, we had kind of a rough lead-in to Halloween. Shortly after my last post on the blog, we all got the swine flu. YUCK! It knocked us back for a good week. The coughs are only now just fading away. So, we didn't get to picking our pumpkins for carving until 2 days before Halloween, and didn't get them carved until the morning of. But we had fun doing it anyway! The night we went to pick our pumpkins was one of our first ventures out of the house after getting sick.

Fortunately, we were all feeling MUCH better by Halloween night and it was a beautiful night for Trick-or-Treating! It was only chilly, so we were fine putting jackets under the kids costumes. We were very excited to try out the treating in our own neighborhood for a change. Zack had a blast running up to the doors. He didn't want to keep his mask on for long though, as it got dark he really had a hard time seeing, so I was glad he took it off. By about half-way through he started telling us to stay on the sidewalk and he would go to the front door all by himself. Little Mister Independent! Lexi was glad to be out of the house. She had fun just watching the chaos and getting passed between Mom, Dad and Autie. Aren't they adorable in their costumes?!?!

Jungle Junction

Here at the Bates' home we love to watch Playhouse Disney. The kids like it for the bright colors and the music. I love it for the things that they sneakily teach my kids. Their newest show, Jungle Junction, just started last week. When watching the following video please note how long this show has been on.

So, as you can tell, Zack is a fan. We've watched it at least twice every day since it started. I love to watch him get excited about things. This is how he reacts to almost any theme song though. He loves to dance and sing along.

Safety Nets Needed!

Aaron has been trying to teach Lexi to climb the stairs for a few weeks. She was only comfortable climbing one step and then she was done. He tried to bribe her with things at the top of the stairs, but no go.

Last night I was on the phone and when I turned around this is what I found:

Angie, my sister-in-law, came down the stairs and saw this and we decided to get her to climb the rest of the stairs. This seemed to be the time that flipped her little switch. Every time we brought her down, she'd turn around and head back up.

She even decided once that she needed to take her blanket with her. She's great at getting up the stairs! Now, who volunteers to act as a safety net for her until she learns to go down? Anyone? Hello? Where'd everybody go...

She Moves!

Alright, I am a huge slacker. I have been meaning to post this video for everyone's viewing pleasure for about a month now. When Lexi first started crawling it was more like a crawl, crawl, belly-flop, aaarrrrmmmyyyy cccrrraaawwwwl! It was funny to watch as her head dipped down and bobbed with her body. She did this variation of a crawl for a week, and moved on to crawling really fast. She can bolt across the floor now.

While I'm bragging about her mobility, I want to show how good she is at climbing up now too. Now that we've fed her food from our plates she wants to eat every time she sees someone with food. The other day Aaron sat down on the couch with some food, and some buttered bread. He sat the bread down on the arm of the couch. Lexi saw food, and needed to have some. So, she got herself up there and got it. I loved the way she tore into the bread as soon as she got it. It's so fun to see her explore and figure out the world around her.