Family Game Night

Our plans for Saturday consisted of getting the basement prepped for severe weather season, emptying out the toy storage room(s), and getting ready for our 2018 basement revamp. Our goal is to put an egress window is, build new shelving for toy storage, and create a Big Kid Only area for the school age kids this summer. Surprisingly, the minis happily let us work while they did their own organizing. We told them that if they let us work (and helped us when we asked), we'd take them out to dinner.

Mid-afternoon the minis came to us and said, "let's get take out and do a family game night at home!" OKAY! 

I told them to get the games together that they wanted and we agreed upon Tasty Tacos for dinner. They had one request for us: "grab some cookies from HyVee." So we did. We found at why when we were told to make our way to the daycare room for Sheaffer Family Game Night.

They really got creative with the games we played! It wasn't our typical checkers, chess, or the ever faithful Candyland. Instead they had us start the night with darts (played on the magnetic dart board that was propped against the wall), a cookie walk, and Old Maid. We didn't get further than Old Maid because there was soooo much laughter and jokes that just those three games took a fair amount of time. 

Alexa had issues. We had to stop using her after this round.

Anxiously waiting to hear what number will be called out.

I was so impressed with their planning of game night and their creativity. They thought of everything!


The moment we found out our five year old is a card shark....apparently the boys have taught her how to play A LOT of card games. She won at Old Maid every time. I cracked up at her organizing her cards on the floor "so absolutely no one can see them!"







Before we knew it, it was bedtime. The other games will be saved for another game night. I'm especially looking forward to their version of Musical Chairs. Can't wait to see how that one goes!

Mud Kitchen

Ever since we moved into our house last year I had the hopes of creating a mud kitchen area somewhere in the backyard for the kids. I had drawn up plans of what I envisioned, but other house and yard projects came first and other backyard projects changed my original plans. I shelved the mud kitchen idea until this year; and honestly, I was going to shelve it for this year too, but when I inspected our Little Tikes turtle sandbox, I discovered cracks in the lid (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's from the kids standing on the lid. Like I said, just a guess though).

We got rid of the sandbox and in it's place (well, actually across the yard by the deck) went a version of my mud kitchen. My initial thought was to have Hubs build something like these, but we have plenty of other projects to keep him busy. I'm not fond of the outdoor mud kitchens like this (for real, $400-$600 dollars???!!? Nope, nope and nope). Instead, as usual, I went simple with things we already had.



Our old Little Tikes kitchen has been well loved and was getting replaced in the next few months. It fit perfectly in our outdoor mud area for the kitchen portion.

The Little Tikes garden wheelbarrow has also seen it's fair share of play, but it's found a new and useful life in the mud area to hold buckets, pots, pans, scoops, and cups.



The old yellow kids table gives the kids extra playing surface to create their mud pies or hold their bowls of dirt.

The only thing I bought new for the mud area was a standing sand table to be used as a mud table (to hold most of the playing mud).

The mud kitchen area was officially open this week for daycare and it got rave reviews! We did have to change things up a bit and move the table against the house because the kids had a hard time remembering the rule to keep the mud kitchen stuff inside of the bricks. Moving the table seemed to solve that problem.

Hopefully this will be an area to be enjoyed all summer long!