Reading Nights and Valentine Cookies

My school is still involved in the Jazz Read-a-thon. To encourage our students to read tons, we had a girls and boys night with special visitors. It was a time where the kids came for a 30 minute read aloud by our guest and then they broke up in groups to read for about 30 minutes in each room. We had rooms for read aloud, chorale reading, silent reading, and paired reading. For the girls night, we had some of Lehi City's royalty and some of BYU's soccer players. On the boys night, we had a few BYU baseball players, and football players. We were so lucky to have Jake Heaps, the BYU quarterback, come to the school. If was really cool.

Well, since I am on the JAZZ committee, I felt I should help out. So, I packed up the kids, their diaper bag, and book bag, and we headed to the read-a-thon. I was in the silent reading room with another teacher and a parent volunteer. My kids joined in on the fun and read for the first bit. Then they just roamed around. It was fun to be a part of these fun nights.

Emma watched what the others were doing and totally copied them. It was precious.

This weekend, when Kyle was in time-out Emma and Ellie climbed up in his lap. It was super cute. So, we snapped a few shots of these three kiddos.

As you can tell, we couldn't find one picture in which all three looked awesome. So, I just kept snapping. These are the best ones.

I decided it would be fun to decorate Valentine cookies on Sunday. Kyle loves it when I make sugar cookies. On Sunday, I came home from church and made the cookies. I really wanted zero help with this. However, Emma kept pointing at the table and saying, "Right here Mommy." She remembers the time in December that I allowed her to help me cut the cookies. I decided to make these cookies on the counter away from dirty fingers. However, after a good washing, I allowed Emma to come over and help me cut out a few hearts.

When it was time to decorate, Kyle and Emma dove right into the candy! This part was fun to watch.

I secretly think Kyle just loves candy and figures if he talks me into making sugar cookies he gets the best of both worlds. He gets candy and cookies. He's a bit of a sugar addict.

Overall, these two worked really well together.

They also were both extremely silly.

Here are our creations. We gave some away and then devoured the rest.

At one point, when I hid the candy, Emma would eat the candy off of the cookie already decorated. Kyle was pretty quick to catch Emma in the action.

Ellie was a little too young to decorate, but I made sure she had a sugar cookie to sample. She really enjoyed eating a cookie. Normally we don't share too many sugary things with Ellie. However she is growing up and in a few days she will be diving into her very own 1 year old birthday cake.