Summer Playmates

These two are sometimes such great playmates and this summer they have hit a stride in their sibling friendship.

Kip is generally a really sweet big brother. He encourages Ivy and is a great leader without being bossy. He enjoys teaching Ivy new things and coddling her like a baby.

In return, Ivy can be really tender but lately is in a particularly three-year-old season wherein she deliberately destroys Kip's building creations, runs off and says she won't play with him, and screams and cries until she gets her way. It's hard but she learned it from someone and that someone is Kip. 

But, as siblings do, they bounce back from conflict quite quickly and instantly forget each others transgressions. 

 

 

They did a few sleep overs in Ivy's room this summer since Ivy has the trundle bed. They both sleep relatively well in the same room (once they both fall asleep).

 

 

They will both really miss each other when school starts back up next week and they spend most of their day apart.

 

Life is better with a sibling.

Summer Crafts

Both Kip and Ivy LOVE crafts. Ivy has always been a fan but it has taken Kip some time to really catch on with the fun. This was his year and after art class and activities in kindergarten, he enjoys making crafts. He is even independently crafting too!

Target's Mondo Lama brand makes some really fun, easy, and cheap craft kits so we picked up a few to do over the summer.

Remember these paint sun catchers?

I also got each kid one of their surprise summer craft boxes. They were $10 a box and came with 8 unique crafts. 

They were all too hard for Ivy to do on her own and about half are too hard for Kip, but every week in July we had a standing "craft time" with mom while dad got ready for the day and we all worked on the crafts together. It was a lot of fun.

The kids did several crafts with Aunt Jagee when she was here and make random scrap paper creations regularly. 

I can't wait to see what starts coming home from First Grade!

Weekending it

This weekend we cashed-in on a long planned trip to see monster trucks in real life!

Kip has loved monster trucks since he was about 3 and we considered taking him to see a Monster Jam show back on his 4th birthday but opted out due to the pandemic. When Dan and I saw advertisements in the spring for the Hot Wheels Monster Truck Glow Party in Philly, we decided to surprise Kip with tickets.

Kip does not like surprises. So when he was bummed out at the end of July for some silly reason, I told him about the tickets to try and cheer him up about something to look forward to. He was immediately disappointed because it wasn't Monster Jam. Apparently, Hot Wheels monster trucks are inferior to Monster Jam trucks.

Kids. We're working on being able to express both disappointment AND gratitude. It's still a work in progress.

Anyways, we dragged him to the show and suffered through thick traffic as we approached Philly. Ivy whined literally the whole day and Kip was a grouch as well. Despite the moods, we all loved it. Kip too, even though he won't admit it.

We all temporary tattooed our faces to try and get in the spirit.

Don't they looked thrilled?

We had great seats and the kids liked the popcorn and cotton candy. The hosts of the show were two young 20 somethings with an insane amount of energy. The guy, F4, ran all around the whole time engaging with people in the audience while the girl, Sierra, interviewed the monster truck drivers like she was at some NASCAR race.

Everything glowed. The atmosphere was cool. Us adults were impressed and had a good time.

But, here's the thing, monster truck shows are kinda slow. If a car stalls out or flips over, everything stops for 20 minutes while they right the car. This happened to Gunkster immediately after the show started. There was car crushing and wheelies and donuts. All cool. Just slow.

AND HOLY LOUD! We knew it would be loud and got the kids noise canceling headphones. But it was crazy loud. I personally found the loudness sort of invigorating but Mandy thought it was painful. It "zinged" her ears she said.

There was also a dinosaur thing that came out of this tank and "ate" a car. That was pretty cool.

At intermission they set-up a large inflatable ramp and had freestyle motocross bikes do flips and THAT WAS COOL! It was the only point in the whole show where Kip was shaken from his bad mood. 

In the end, 5 Alarm won the "competition" which irked Kip since he picked BigFoot. But, you know the whole thing was rigged.

We grabbed some delicious cheesesteaks on the way out of town and the kids slept the whole way home.

You know, I feel like we plan a lot of fun activities and take the kids to a lot of cool experiences. For the most part, they have a great time but not every trip is sunshine and roses. 

I was pretty discouraged by Kip's attitude about this fun day and exacerbated by Ivy's non-stop whining. Sometimes I want to just say, "you know what? we don't have to do anything and you can sit at home and play with your 'boring' toys!" But that changes nothing except more bad attitudes. And it's okay. I can be both disappointed by how the day went AND grateful we had the opportunity to go. I for one enjoyed the experience.