One more present from Aunt Nikki

Before I get on to thanking Aunt Nikki for her very popular birthday gift, here are two pictures that I forgot to post with Benjamin's b-day post. 

 Benjamin knew it was his birthday and came running into my room at 7am asking to go to the pool pool party! I asked him how old to which he replied FLREE!!!!!! Then flashed me this goofy smile. 

 Benjamin got to spend the morning doing what he loves best, moon dough! He watched so many Youtube videos on this stuff and we finally broke down and bought some for Christmas. It is terribly messy and the texture gives me the chills but he LOVES it. 

Now, onto Nikki's present. The package came earlier in the week and I had been hiding it for several days, that is until Benjamin spotted it, climbed up on the counter and unwrapped it before I could stop him!! He tore off half the wrapping paper already so I grabbed my camera and let him open it all the way. He had no clue what it was but once we set it up, he was hooked! Thanks Nikki for the great gift, he loves it! 

Benjamin Turns 3

Last Sunday my Benny boo turned 3!!! Last year on his birthday he wanted to have a pool pool party, and this year he requested the same thing! We had a pretty normal morning, and put the little boys down for an early nap. After they woke up, we ditched Samuel at Mim's and all piled in the minivan to head to the pool! I am not a fan of water, I always get cold and it is really really hard to get three kids AND yourself showered and ready. Lucky for me, Brandon, Jordan and Kellie were all willing to get in the water so I didn't have to! The lighting at the pool was way to bright to take that many pictures but rest assured, all had a wonderful time! Elias was tall enough to go down the slide and spent the entire hour climbing the stairs and sliding down! Annie and Benjamin enjoyed the water falls and slides as well as several trips in the lazy river. The kids did great at there were no tears when it was time to leave. 

 Brandon was trying to get Benjamin to smile for a nice picture. All 8 pictures I took, Benjamin looks great...this was the best of Brandon.

 We got home in time to order the pizza and get set up for the big party! While we were waiting for the guests to show up, Brandon for whatever reason, threw a piece of bologna at Annie, it hit her in the eye and that poor tired girl melted down like I have never seen her!!!!! It took a lot of snuggles and finally pay back for her to calm down. We all got to take turns throwing bologna at daddy. Never a dull moment in this house I tell you !

My parents, Mim, Kellie and Jordan were all on hand to help Benjamin celebrate. We are mean parents and made Benjamin wait until after dinner to open gifts. As soon as the last bite of pizza was eaten, he was begging to open gifts. We set up all of Benjamin's presents on the fire place, then the real fun started. 

Samuel kept trying to go and open Benjamin's presents and of course we told him "No no Sammy, those are for Benjamin" He was quite upset and would periodically go over the the gifts and touch one only to collapse on the floor in tears because he wasn't allowed to touch them. He wasn't getting the attention he wanted so he progressed to walking halfway towards the gifts, looking at the adults then collapsing into tears. It was so hard to not laugh!!!

 Can you spot the bologna

 Jordan playing heads up with Benjamin

 Benjamin pretty excited over his cupcakes from Auntie Melissa!

 Samuel's first meltdown

 Samuel not getting enough attention so he really amped up the drama

After all the gifts were opened, The grandmothers helped clean up, Uncle Jordan help set up all the new toys and Papa was sent to the basement to assemble the tool bench! Samuel was still out of sorts so we wrapped up a random piece to the cleaning kit and gave it to him. He was delighted and the gift, along with a fresh chocolate chip cookie from Grammy was enough to calm him. 

Benjamin was enjoying all his new toys and especially his bag of starbursts from Jordan! Brandon tried to accuse me of eating them all , until we walked into the kitchen to see Benjamin playing with his toy swiffer surrounded bycandy wrappers!!! Oh well, it was his birthday he can have a belly ache if he wants to. We ended the evening with the traditional song, candles and cupcakes that my sister made!

Happy Birthday to my sweet stubborn mischievous little boy!

No Screen Challange

Well, it is official, I have decided on the 2015 challenge! I guess I am just a sucker for a challenge! While the spending one, was a wonderful one, its not really feasible to do every year. Elias and Annie would be naked in the fall if I chose to start another one now, so that got me thinking. I was listening to a podcast the other night and what do you know, buried in the talk was my new challenge for this year. NO SCREEN! Ok, I shouldn't say none, I am obviously sitting on the computer typing this, most of our bills are paid online and how would I order a pizza if I said no completely to screen.

 I talked to Annie and Elias about it and they were game to try it which I was actually surprised about. A normal screen day for our family consisted of a 20 minuet show( we don't have cable so everything is Netflix, hulu etc) while I did breakfast in the morning. I would check my email and dink around on my phone aimlessly until it was time to start homeschooling, sometimes the TV was still on from before sometimes the kids were just playing. While the big kids were homeschooling, it was usually a given that the little boys would end up watching part of Toy Story 3 or some pentatonix videos on youtube. The older kids would get "fun" screen time during the little boy nap if they were done with their homeschool and we would usually watch a show or movie in the evening as a family. When you write it all down, it is A LOT of screen, way more then I wanted to be using and way way more then I wanted my kids to be using, especially Samuel. I am not proud, in fact I am rather ashamed, he can grab my phone( or ipad) swipe the screen, find the  youtube link and scroll to find pentatonix in our play list and play his favorite songs. In addition to my concerns about the effects of all this screen time on the kids, I can say for a fact that Brandon has a screen problem, honey if you are reading this, I hope you get help. He has nights off so he does watch a few shows which I don't' care about because really what else are you going to do when you aren't in school and your whole family is sleeping at 3am. Its the phone, oh the phone. He is constantly reading news articles, scrolling the facebooks and that darned darned trivia crack! His phone is never out of his pocket and I think he gets anxiety not having it on, seriously, he is addicted. I am not without guilt either. I would complain about being tired, go to bed and before I knew it an hour of news reading and solitaire had flown by. This challange was coming at the perfect time! Now to lay down the rules. I'm still not really sure on several things as this is just our trial week now to see what is going to work for us. So far we have:

*Adult phones must be left on the counter and only checked when you hear it ring or if you get a message and we aren't having family time, eating etc. 

*Using a weaning approach, no more then 30 minuets of TV a day per kid , this goes down to 30 minuets every other day next week and gets eliminated all together the week after. 

* Only TV we will watch will be special movie nights or planned family TV time and it isn't something that will happen on a regular basis. We haven't talked about sporting events but we only get major networks so I am guess its not going to be an issue but it will probably fall under the special family event. The kids love football and there are only a few nights left this year. 

* No adult playing trivia crack or checking the facebooks during the day or while kids are awake, it is totally unnecessary. No phones in the bathroom( Brandon), again not necessary 

*Ipad only for educational stuff and time is limited. This is the hardest for me to navigate. Yes we have YouTube, Netflix and Hulu on the Ipad but there are SO many educational games, apps and websites. In addition ,this is 2015 technology is important and everyone will need to know how to type and navigate the web, yes not at the age of 6 but eventually.This will be one we have to figure out as we go. We use ABCmouse and ReadingEggs as well as ABCya which are 100% educational and it seems silly to eliminate that so, more thinking on this one!

*As long as the house is cleaned and our chores are done, I don't care what Brandon does at night. The man works 40+hours a week at a high stress job, has 4 kids and is a PhD student, if he wants to watch TV, I don't care( and I don't want to know so shhh don't tell me).Me on the other hand, I'm not allowed to( well not for awhile at least). I turn on just one episode of house and boom its 12:30 and the dishes I promised to do before bed aren't done. 

I am sure we will change the rules as we go but the overall thing I am going for is that we use our phones to communicate and they don't need to permanently need to be attached to our hands. I want more days without screen time to go by then days with screen time. Wish me luck, I am SO going to need it on this one!!!!!

Day one ( January 7th) update: Today we woke up, headed to the living room, read books and snuggled until we all woke up enough to eat breakfast. We were dressed, dished cleaned and starting homeschool by 8am. This is truly impressive since Elias didn't wake up until 7:40( which is also amazing because he is always the first one up!). The little boys played play doh, played downstairs and when poop was just about to hit the fan, the big kids got a school break( they had been at it for about 2 hours already). The four kids played happily downstairs while I cleaned the upstairs and did some lunch prep. I snuck the two older ones upstairs to do another hour of school while the little boys played downstairs. Samuel did ask for "Toy" at one point but I just said "All done screen" and played with him for a minuet and he was over it. In case you are wondering, this was the most quality, one on one work and most peaceful morning I think we have had and that includes when Brandon is around to help out. Maybe it was the new Christmas toys or maybe Samuel was in an amazing mood I don't know but it was great! While the little boys napped, Annie and Elias each did about 25 minuets of iPad/computer screen time on their respective ABC and reading eggs websites. It has been an "elective" type time during our homeschool and I saw no reason to end that. 

We had activities during the evening and before bed we all watched the last 30 minuets of a movie we started yesterday so all in all it was GREAT. The one thing I will say is oh boy does your house really really get trashed quick!!!! Here is to hoping tomorrow isn't a total gong show!

2014 In Review

I was so far behind on December posts that here I am almost two weeks into 2015 and finally getting around to our year review. I think this has grown to be one of my favorite posts to do every year, it summarizes all the awesome family fun we had through out the year,so without further ado, here it is

January Benjamin turned two and continued to be our crazy crazy little man

February was once again our calmest month. The brutal cold leaves us with new ways to keep entertained during this usually long month. A lot of time snuggling and reading in the Eberhardt household

March was the 2nd annual daddy-princess dance. Annie absolutely loves this event and the day after it is over immediately begins talking about next years dance. Elias also turned 6 this month, we had a low key birthday party but Aunt Melissa did make some awesome LEGO cupcakes

 April we enjoyed getting outside once again, temperatures were warming up and we were all itching to get outside. We also celebrated Easter

May brought the end to many things, the kids activities like ballet and Elias wrapped up his Kindergarten year and Annie graduated from preschool. We spent hours outside a day and Brandon and I celebrated our 8th anniversary as well.

 June was hands down our busiest month!! We had TWO family reunions. Brandon's Grandmother and Aunt( and Uncle) came to visit, we took a trip to Bemidji and we had an Eberhardt family reunion as well! We went to lots of farmers markets and the county fair. I also went crazy sewing matching skirts and dresses for Annie and I. We enjoyed the true summer heat by indulging in Popsicles almost nightly in the yard.

 July was spent in the water! So many trips to splash parks and water fights in our yard.Samuel turned the bit ONE as well!

 August we celebrated my dad's birthday wrapped up another fun filled softball season and of course, fun in the water!

September was another very busy month. Kellie got married, I started homeschooling, the kids started all of their 1,000 fall activities like Tennis, soccer, ballet, gymnastics and basketball..just to name a few. We also had a two week long ordeal with a stubborn case of nursemaids elbow with Benjamin. Poor guy! We took a field trip to Devils Lake and did our annual pumpkin patch visit! The biggest change this year was we bought and sold a house! We sold our cozy little townhome of 6 years in two days. We were happy to be moving, but so many great memories there! Also, my little bean turned 5!!!!!

 October Annie my mom and I packed up and headed to the cities to meet my sister for a girls weekend! Nikki bought Annie an American Girl doll and Jessica Jade has been a wonderful addition to our family ever since. We took a field trip to the police station with our homeschool group, out to turtle river state park and started up a LEGO club at the local library! We wrapped up soccer and enjoyed our recess time and weekends playing in the leaves!

 November was pure chaos between illnesses oh, and that little thing called moving! We were very thankful come thanksgiving to be settled in our new home. 

 December was a wonderful month with family and friends. Brandon was working an insane amount and wrapping up his PhD classes for the semester but he had 12 days off over Christmas and we made the most of it!