A Day at the Farm with Kids on the Move

This week we got to a free day at the farm at Thanksgiving Point curtesy of Kids on the Move. I hadn't taken the kids to anything at Thanksgiving Point yet, so I was interested to see what there was to do there. The farm was great and the kids had a blast.

Here's my little man meeting a goat.

The fence is blocking the horse a bit, but here is Cailey with a horse

They both got to ride horses for the first time too. There were several horses set up as a live carousel. Cailey did really well, but about a minute into the ride she cried for me to come hold her hand as she rode. Jason is still too little to ride alone so I held him on but about halfway through his ride he wanted to get off the horse.

Here's Cailey riding her horse

Here's Jason, he wouldn't smile for the camera, but doesn't he look so cute in his overalls?

The high point of the trip was getting to ride the wagon. I took the kids on a wagon ride around historic Charleston, SC a year ago but they both passed out a few minutes into the trip. 

Here they are just snoozing away, I think they were both worn out from a busy week and the sway of the wagon rocked them to sleep. This isn't the best picture but I was trying to get one with both of them in it while I had Jason in my arms, a rather tricky feat.

Here is the wagon at the farm at Thanksgiving Point. Cailey was so excited she was jumping up and down when it pulled up. She is at such a fun age, well other than the fact that she asks 40 'why' questions an hour. :)

Posing on the wagon

I am going to add the Facebook style pic too because both kids have great smiles.

Family Project: Making a Piñata

About two months ago we were outside playing at the neighborhood park, while we were there a group was hitting a piñata for a birthday party. Cailey was so excited since she had never seen a piñata before. Then when it broke open and she found out that there was candy inside she was in love...she asked me if she could have a piñata. So I told her that we could make our own piñata together.
We started collecting the ads we got each week in the mail, very quickly we had a huge stack of paper.

The conditions were perfect, we had the paper, we were taking a break from the pool for mr. Jason to avoid infection (check previous entry for details), and I needed some fun activities to entertain little girls on a play date. So I decided to go ahead and make the piñata even though it was not anyone's birthday in our family.

I had Cailey and a friend of hers rip up the paper we needed for the piñata. Does that count child labor?  hmm...

Here's a picture of the little workers, apparently Cailey was really excited about ripping paper

They decided to make princess crowns with the paper

Once the paper was all ripped up I made some paper mâché the recipe is
2 cups flour
2 cups water
1 tablespoon salt

Mix everything together.

Next we dipped the strips in the paper mâché and put them on an inflated balloon. I thought for sure
Cailey would be all over this, but she didn't want to touch the paper mâché and get messy. Ben helped
out with the paper mâché. Jason I am sure would have been happy to help out too. But since we didn't want him to "help out" (eat the paper and the paper mâché) we put him his high chair with some pudding. By the end of the evening our living room looked like we had hosted some frat party! We did 4 layers of paper. We waited a couple of hours in between each layer to allow it to dry.

Here is a picture of the fam' diligently working on our piñata.

Here's the little man covered in pudding

I hadn't picked a design for the piñata yet, which is mistake I should have chosen first and then made the balloon the shape I needed for the design, eh you live and you learn right? I googled piñatas and found a really cute beehive piñata which was perfect for our piñata shape. for those interested..."Traditional piñatas are made with a clay pot reinforced with glued paper (nowadays old newspapers). 7 cones made of cardboard are added representing the 7 capital sins of Christian faith. This gives the piñata its traditional "satyr" look." (Wikihow)

We painted the piñata once the paper was dry, here is my little worker diligently working. 

We cut a hole in the piñata and put the candy inside. Then we decorated, I just used crepe paper, I found the bottom to be to difficult to layer so I cut a circle of yellow felt and then worked my way up slowly. I also noticed the more paper I used the better it looked. I know the lines aren't even but it did end up looking pretty cute. We made bees by wrapping black pipe cleaners around yellow Pom poms.

Here is the final product.

We had the neighborhood kids come help us break it open, most everyone was surprised that we 
made a piñata just for fun. I guess it was kind of random, but it was super fun and totally worth the 
effort Cailey loved it.