Lemonade and Lava

This is our final week of summer. Caleb starts first grade next Monday and Benjamin will return to preschool (2 days a week) the following week. I'm trying to cram as much fun into these last few days of summer as I can.

No summer is complete without some homemade lemonade.

Juicing lemons is hard work.

Mixing the sugar in warm water.  Benjamin looks pretty excited!

Drinking the fruits (literally) of our labor.

I think he liked it.

Benjamin has a new fascination with volcanoes.  I bought a couple of books about volcanoes for the boys to read.

After reading about volcanoes, we decided to make our own. *I scaled this "recipe" down a bit because we used a water bottle instead of a 2L soda bottle.

Mixing the dough.

It is the same dough we used to make our Olympic medals.

The boys pressed the dough around the water bottle.

Okay, so it doesn't exactly look like a volcano.

Anxious to see what happens...

Volcanic eruption!!

The boys thought this was really neat. For me it meant about 30 minutes of prep and clean up time for about 3 seconds of lava fun.  Oh well, the boys loved it and that is the reason I do all this messy stuff to begin with.

Our failed attempt at making slime

This is actually our 2nd failed attempt at making slime. I'm not sure what we are doing wrong but we must be doing something wrong because the end result is not very slimy. While we didn't end up with very good slime, the boys still had fun. Here is how we made (or didn't make) slime. You may not want to follow my directions considering the outcome.

First you squeeze an entire bottle of glue (4oz) into a bowl.

Mix with 1/2 cup of water.  You can add food coloring too.

Mix 1 teaspoon Borax with 1 cup of water in a separate bowl.

Pour Borax solution into glue solution, stir, and you should get slime.

We managed to get some slime but most of it was liquid.

Caleb got his hands right in there.

Technically all of the liquid should have turned into slime, leaving very little water in the bowl. For some reason we ended up with a small amount of slime with a lot of liquid left.

This is what it looks like when you knock over the Borax box onto the bowl of failed slime.  Sigh.

Water Park Fun!

We have a water park about 3 minutes from our house and we usually try to take the boys once or twice every summer. Today the water park had "Champions Day", when they open the park at 8:30 in the morning (2 hours before it opens to the public) for kids with special needs and their families. So we just had to take the boys. They didn't know we were going until they woke up this morning, they were so excited.

Benjamin is ready for some water park fun!

We headed to the wave pool first. We learned that the water is a tad bit chilly at 8:30 in the morning, but the boys didn't seem to mind at all.

I love this picture.  I wish I knew what they were saying to each other.

Benjamin trying to catch the waves.

Benjamin picking his wedgie.  :)

Because we had access to the park before the public, there were no lines for any of the rides.

Glenn decided to take Caleb on this one. Caleb didn't want to ride it, he was definitely nervous. Glenn hiked Caleb up a million stairs while carrying a double inner tube. That was not an easy task but daddy's are good about tackling stairs while carrying a 43 pound 7 year old.

Coming around the corner!

I could hear Caleb screaming the entire way down, it was an "I'm having so much fun!" scream, not a "Get me off this thing!" scream.

Nothing but smiles!

The first thing Caleb said after coming down the slide: "I want to do THAT again!"
So, daddy tackled the stairs carrying a 43 pound, 7 year old and a double inner tube...again.

Being silly with Daddy's sunglasses.

We only stayed about 3 hours but it was a fun-filled 3 hours.

More Olympic crafts!

We completed our "Gearing up for the Olympics" week by doing 2 more crafts.

First we made our own Olympic medals (I got the idea here). We made some salt dough, which is just 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of salt, and about 3/4 cup water.  This made more dough than we needed for our medals so I bet you could cut the recipe in half and still have plenty of dough.

Our salt dough. It has a texture very similar to play dough.

We used magnetic number to imprint our medals

There are a couple of ways to let your salt dough dry. You can let it air dry for a couple of days or you can speed up the process by baking it in a low temp oven (about 200) for a couple of hours. Since it is a million degrees in Texas right now, I just sat our medals outside for a day and that dried them right up.

Benjamin playing with some of the leftover dough.

Benjamin painting the #2 medal silver.

Caleb painting #3

Our finished medals.

Next we made our version of the Olympic torch.  I took a wrapping paper tube and cut it in half.  I creased one end of the tube to look like a triangle because that is how the London Olympic torch is shaped.  The 3 sides of the triangle represent the 3 times the Olympics have been held in London.

I sprayed the tubes with a quick drying primer to make it easier to paint.

The boys painting the torches.

We added some red tissue paper and a blinking tea light to the top of the torch. I punched some holes on the torch to mimic the circles in the London Olympics torch. The actual torch has 8000 circles...I chose not to punch 8000 holes in our torch. You can learn more about the Olympic torch by clicking here.

Benjamin likes to keep his torch on his chair at the table.

We are officially ready for the 2012 Olympics!

Gearing up for the Olympics

I love the Olympics. Love, LOVE, Love the Olympics! Since I love the Olympics so much, I am expecting my kids to love it too.  I have really been building it up and trying to get the boys excited about watching it because I am certain they will really enjoy it.  Since the Opening Ceremony is this Friday, all of our activities this week will have something to do with the Olympics.

Yesterday we made Olympic flags.  Super quick and easy.  You just need paint (blue, black, red, green, yellow) and toilet paper rolls or cups.  I had planned to use some toilet paper rolls I had been saving but Benjamin crushed them the other day when he was playing "Monster Truck Bowling". :)

Our finished flags.

I saw these amazing toys on another blog a couple of weeks ago and knew that I had to have them. I've never seen toys like this before. I found these Playmobil toys on Amazon and the boys LOVED them.  I bought the pommel horse, the rings, uneven bars, balance beam, and a swimmer.

I love this picture of Benjamin. He is really concentrating.

Caleb had this gymnast doing all kinds of crazy tricks.

Caleb and Benjamin played with these toys for hours this afternoon. Hours. I don't think I have ever seen Caleb so focused and imaginative. It was so fun to watch.

Of course we had to make some podiums for the winners.