Happy Birthday and Tom Sawyer...

Today is Kendall's Birthday!!!! He's 31...and so AWESOME!  he's a great dad, a fantastic husband, he works really hard for our family and is good at pretty much everything:)  We love him SO much and hope that he is having a GREAT birthday (even though he has to work;( but we made him a special breakfast, gave him presents and i'm taking him out tonight...then a family party on Sunday, which is actually Avery's birthday:)  we have to do joint family parties for them...two birthdays in 5 days just requires it!!!

so happy birthday to the BEST guy i know:) love you honey!!!


today we had a Tom Sawyer experience...have you read the classic by Mark Twain? There is a part in it where Tom has to whitewash the fence and he convinces other kids in the neighborhood to help him, without them really realizing it, he just proposes it as something fun or that he only wants to do because it's so fun and they end up begging to help....

i digress...

I had some fun patriotic decorations up (until this morning) (no comments on how long they were up:)) and this was one grouping of them...see the beans in the jars???

so i was taking everything down and i thought it would be good to separate out all the beans into colors and put them away separated so if i wanted to use them for something else, they'd already be color separated...so i proposed it to the kids as a project for them (and me:) to do together and a way they could "help mommy" and they thought it was awesome! they got right to work and were awesome at it!!!  we had three bowls to put the colors in and they did almost the entire large bowl of mixed beans (i helped some:))!!! 

i was very impressed with them, they were really good helpers (i already knew they were but this was kind of tedious and they didn't complain at all:))

good lessons learned from Tom Sawyer:)