Later that night ...

As I was taking the pictures of Taipan's play-doh shapes, Taipan and Simi quickly decided that they wanted to do silly pictures, so they made lots of silly faces and poses and goofing around and asked me to take pictures of it all.

For your enjoyment (the last two pictures are a few hours after the rest, taken when Yuta walked in the door and the kids almost immediately wanted him to be their horse):

My day off

I've got some extra days off this summer thru a cool program my employer is offering. Beginning last week I'll have 1-2 days off each week, and mostly be working three-day work weeks thru the end of August.

Last week I had Wednesday off, and some friends of ours came to visit - they played with moonsand, play-doh, the x-box and dollhouse ..... and some battling in the basement kicked the visit off:







Later that evening Taipan & Taisim did some more play-doh - Taipan did shapes, while Taisim made a snowgirl and snow (she also did a lot of haircuts with the barbershop play-doh set, but no pictures of that):

Father's Day shirt

Last Saturday while Yuta was at work the kids and I made the annual handprint shirt for him. This year's turned out pretty good.

New weapons and smoke bombs

One of Taipan's favorite things is the pool noodle light sabers that we made about a year and a half ago. They've not only been light sabers, but also staffs and swords. They're getting quite floppy, and the duct tape on some of them is creasing and tearing, so I picked up a few more noodles not too long ago.

Last weekend we found green & purple duct tape and made a new purple and a new green light saber for Taipan, and also ones that are all silver to use as Wolverine's long claws. I think every day over the past week we've been outside battling.

Taipan with some of the new weapons (the purple w. the green handle is one we made for Simi), and the second picture here is Yuta after being stabbed, and Taipan on the ground with what I think is the weapon he took from Yuta after stabbing him.



During a break from battling we brought out some smoke bombs I got from the 4th of July display at the grocery store - they were a hit! I'm going to buy more before they're gone from the stores. The cool thing is that just that morning Taipan and I watched some jets w. red, white and blue smoke doing a fly-over for the queen's 80th birthday celebration in England, and then we had our own red, white and blue smoke in our driveway:

T-shirts

We spent an last Friday night and Saturday morning making t-shirts. These are the first two we did, on Saturday night. Iron-ons, inspired by Taipan wanting to do a project he saw on nickjr.com (we did that project too ... pics later, maybe).

Pretend birthdays

We bought cupcakes at the grocery store last week, and we had candles, and Taisim had the idea of pretending it was everyone's birthday! So we lit the candles, turned down the lights, sand happy birthday and ate cupcakes.

Superstructs

We got Superstructs a couple weeks ago - they're kind of like Tinkertoys, but better in my opinion. They include gears and some foam pieces, and great instructions (vs. having to figure it out from a picture on the box).

Taipan's ferris wheel:



Taipan playing with Simi's swing set:

Sunflower

Chi Chi brought the kids a sunflower a couple of weeks ago. Yuta and Taisim planted it on the side of our house, where it could get a lot of sun:

Long time coming update

I haven't put any pics up in a while, but it's not because we haven't been doing anything. Quite the opposite in fact - I feel like I can't find much time to post these days.

Chalk is a favorite around here in the spring/summer. Taisim loves to draw, and she started drawing flowers, suns and faces. Here's one of the first tries - these are all attempts at heads. She got very frustrated if they didn't come out as she wanted them to, and would try again. I don't know that we got a picture of the one or two that were the finished product.

Below that is a nice surprise I got when I finished work one afternoon - this is the first picture of a person she drew, and it was me! She asked me to add the glasses, but everything else was done by her, on a magnadoodle no less.

Taipan likes for us to draw, while he describes what it is he'd like to see. This is a battlefield from the game Worms, which we downloaded onto our xbox. We played it *a lot* for about a week, but it went by the wayside once Wolverine came into the house.

Our espresso maker was finally shipped back to use about two weeks ago. It came in a box, which was packed in a box, which was packed in a box with styrofoam peanuts. After I got over being anal about keeping the peanuts in the box, Taisim had a great time playing with them. Most of her play was pretending she was a polar bear, in an igloo, and the piece of styrofoam in her mouth here is a fish:

Taisim with "princess hair", playing with a couple of friends that came over, but were too quick-moving for me to get a decent picture of:

Playing with pattern blocks. The ones Taipan has were brought back by my in-laws from a trip to Taiwan. Simi's playing with ones we got about a year ago.

Finally, our new slip-n-slide. I got this on a day when the high was in the low 60s, and the following day it wasn't much warmer, but Taipan & Taisim have a higher tolerance for cold water in mild temperatures than I do. The water pressure here isn't so great, so it works best if someone is standing with their feet on the bumper at the end, so that the water sprays higher from the tube on the side.

I've got more pics in the camera, so maybe I'll get those here soon.