Wilcox Writings: Exciting Times

We're pretty boring. That's what this blog makes me feel like. But here you go anyways.

I finally broke down and made/bought some toddler activities for Ashton around our house. We still had a lot of infant/baby toys out that she never played with. I am not big on flashy, noise-making toys. Plus they are so dang expensive. Here's what I came up with:

We made a quick water table. We splurged at the dollar store and bought some cool toys for it. Ashton loves it. It shocked me how much she loves it. We decided to keep her play kitchen outside too and got plastic food for it. So now she can fill up her sink and make food. We've spent many hours outside playing so far and anticipate many more. Our next investment will be a sand box but we haven't decided how to build one or to just buy the plastic turtle one.

We have Ashton's pool that we got her last year. The problem with that was we would fill it up and play in it for a day or two. Then the water would become nasty so we had to dump it and start over. It was a huge waste of water and time. So we decided to make it a ball pit. Ashton loves it too. She likes to lay down and say, "night" and pretend to sleep. That's awesome for me!

Now, I feel we have enough toddler toys to get us through the next few years. Ashton would probably disagree with that and feels she needs even more toys. We did, however, watch some city employees take down a tree for an hour at the park. Ashton set a new record of paying attention to one activity! I was shocked that she wanted to watch the men cut down the tree for so long. So instead of toys, maybe I should ask the city to take down more trees.

Two weeks ago, we had a terrible storm. The winds topped out at 70 mph and a tornado was reported about a mile east of our house. We had hail about the size of ping pong balls blow at our house. Joe likes to claim that he survived a hurricane and a tornado. A category one hurricane does have winds between 74 and 96 mph so he was close.

Ashton did pretty well with the thunder and lightning as we let her watch a show on our laptop. She loved using flashlights when the power went out. We lost power for only six hours. Compare that to our church building that last power for two days. Some of our friends had it much worse than us and had no power for the entire weekend.

The damage of the storm consisted of losing part of our fence and destroying our garden. Everything is destroyed except the blackberry bushes. The hail tore through all the leaves and nothing was salvageable. We were pretty bummed but at least we don't depend on our garden for food. We are grateful to have no large trees in our yard as many homes had trees fall down. The storm got us thinking about hurricane season again so we made sure our 72 hour kits are ready to go when evacuations are ordered. We've gotten lucky for three summers so far so we're hoping our luck continues this summer.

Here are some random pictures