December Tennessee Visit

After our fall activities wrapped up in December we headed to Tennessee to have the kids pictures taken, see the Nutcracker in Nashville and of course spend time with family and friends. Thanks to everyone who helped us have a great time!

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Anna came for a slumber party Friday night while Chaz celebrated his 8th birthday with friends. We had fun making some seasonal peppermint playdough. We used peppermint to make the red smell wonderful and glitter to make the white sparkly. Here are my three little cooks ready to make some cool playdough! TeamworkThe finished products :)Missy K admiring one of her creations Anna busy rolling out playdough to cut more cookiesReagan working on creating a peppermint candy caneOne of our finished productsMissy K hard at work with Grammy making peppermint playdough cookiesWhile the girls were busy making and playing with playdough Jackson discovered how much fun hotrollers are to stack. He was obsessed with this activity for the longest time!Jackson also enjoyed some calm reading timeor maybe not... lol :)So many fun things to do at Grammy and Grand-dad's house! :)We love our Missy Reagan but as most of you know who have spent time with us she is a bit intense. This includes both incredible sweetness as well as tantrums. We go through periods where we seem to have found a system that works and then we inevitably backslide. We've been having more difficulity the last couple of months so while we were at Grammy's house we decided to make some mind jars (an idea I found on Pinterest). They are a mix of colored water, glitter glue and glitter. The idea is that you shake the jar and watch the swirling glitter, which is a symbol of your swirling/frustrated thoughts, settle to the bottom of the jar while you calm down. It is supposed to be a calming activity and also serve as a cooling off period without being a "time out" as it takes about 5 minutes for all the glitter to settle. We've had mixed results with our mind jars. I like the idea but they aren't always handy and/or Reagan doesn't always want to use it. We'll keep searching and in the meantime if any of you have ideas on how to help little ones learn to control their tempers we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas!!!Missy K is pretty good at controlling her temper but she wanted to make a cool green mindjar since Reagan was making a purple one. :)I thought this picture of Jackson playing Grammy's piano was so sweet! :)As you can see from the applause he is giving himself, Jackson is quite modest regarding his performance skills. Thank you Grammy and Grand-dad for the super fun time! :)