Fall pics, part 1 of many

The first day of school for the kids was Wednesday, September 5th! John and Lila attend the same school at our church in Elm Grove. John has preschool 3 days a week (Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), and Lila goes to the toddler Mother's Day Out program once a week (Wednesdays). They were so excited! I can't believe how willing they were to pose for these pictures I took that morning..... 

 

 

I discovered this really nice park/playground in Brookfield called Wirth Park that we took the kids to in mid-September. The playground equipment there must be at least as old as I am, but the kids loved it! There's one of those metal merry-go-round things there as well as the tallest metal slide you've ever seen and those metal sand diggers -- everything was METAL. Not a very forgiving material for children. I wonder when playground manufacturers decided to start using plastic and/or wood instead!

 

 

Our playroom at its cleanest state ever....it is finally organized enough to be photographed.

Some new additions to the room are the craft table and four chairs, which I got for $100 at a garage sale in Naperville this summer. They're from Land of Nod and only a couple of years old! (The lady's kids had outgrown them). It would have cost five times that amount to buy them from the store. And notice the kids' artwork above the table.....we've been taping their masterpieces on the wall since the first day of school. I let them decide where they want each piece taped, so that's why everything is so randomly spread out, hehe.

Also, I put my Grandpa Glenn's globe (from the 1940s) and my mom's alphabet cross-stitch on top of the tall bookcase in the corner. My mom loved that globe and always had it in the office at her house. I like to look at it and think about how different the world looks today. The kids just like to spin it around -- all that geography goes right over their heads, of course. The alphabet cross-stitch was a something my mom had made for her niece in the late 1970s as a baby gift. When John and I lived at her house during Ross' deployment, she spent hours cleaning the background of the cross-stitch with bleach since it had yellowed with age. We had planned to mat and frame it to hang it in the basement play area of her house.

 

These alphabet cards were a gift to Lila from our family friend, Wrenne Jakubiak. Lila loves to talk about them while she's getting her diaper changed on the changing pad (which we moved from an actual changing table that we used to have in the room to the storage bench in order to save space).

 

Finally, here is the new reading area of the playroom. We didn't really have a reading area before because of the changing table, but when we brought this chair and ottoman home from my mom's house (thinking we'd bring it upstairs to John's room), we literally couldn't get it through the hallway into the rest of the house -- it's huge!! So we had to keep it in the playroom, but I'm really glad we did. It is the perfect place to read to the kids. We can all sit comfortably in it because of how wide it is.

 



 

 

More pics to come tomorrow night.....I am feeling ambitious about blogging!