A Week of Hanging Out

We had such a great week at HOME!!! I really wanted to take the week before school started and just spend time hanging out with the kids.  I decided not to spend time cleaning or taking down Christmas decorations but instead just spend time with the kids.  I think we left the house once the whole week.  I think Eric thought I was a little crazy.  With the girls in school I miss our days of having no schedule, no where we have to go and just hanging out in jammies with no agenda.  Here are some of the things we were up to ...

We slept in and took naps

We played a lot of games.  Alexa's favorite was her new Guess Who Game.  Emma's game of choice was War with her Hello Kitty playing cards.  I only beat her twice and we played a couple times a day for a week.  I was really trying too! Shane was loving his new Disney Go Fish and Snap card games.  

Shane spent a lot of time playing Legos and Geo-Trax!

The girls played house with their dolls.

Alexa weaved a purse and some pot holders.

We read a lot of books! Emma loves that she can read big books like Alexa now.  She loves reading to me but I often found her cozy in her bed curled up with some books!

I think one of my favorite things we did was going through pictures and my blog! Maybe because it felt I did get something productive done during the week.  I love scrapbooking but have gotten further and further behind.  I have been trying to figure out if I want to keep doing traditional scrapbooking or switch to digital.  So while I spent time trying to make a decision I got further and further behind.  One thing I did realize is that if I did switch to digital scrapbooking there is something about having an actual picture too look at that I love.  So I decided to print hundreds of pictures this week due to a sale that was going on at my favorite processing center. We put them in the Creative Memory Picfolio Albums.  The kids had so much fun looking at pictures and reminiscing over the pictures.  They each would pick up an album over and over again and look at the pictures.  I realized that I love taking pictures, love recording our memories and my pictures are worthless if they are just on my hard drive.  I also realized how much the kids loved looking back at the pictures.  So it has motivated me to get these albums finished. My next project is the kids individual digital books.  I am excited to finally have a game plan for my kids' books and our family book.  I'd love any feedback of things that work for some of you! 

The other thing we had fun doing was going back through my blog and reading posts and looking at pictures.  I started my blog to post information about the bows I sell.  I then decided I enjoyed blogging so I began posting about our family.  It was a great way to keep friends and family informed of our happenings in life.  Now it has turned into more of a place where I am document life for my family to look back on.  The blog has also helped me let go of my traditional family scrapbook that I would journal in.  My friend at 3 Little Loves put her blog into a hard cover book a couple months ago.  She totally motivated me to get my last two blog years in a book as well.  I am in the process! Hopefully I can get that done and have my books in hand  by the end of the month.  I will keep you posted.  It also motivated me to keep up with my blog in 2010 and document what is happening in our lives.