Oh Jackson...again

Last week we started to prep the garden for the spring.  Right now it's just a large fenced in area of dirt/mud.  The kids LOVE playing in there.   I'm glad they love it and love being outside, but it sure has made for some extra laundry and muddy shoes.  We spent a solid hour and a half just digging with shovels, filling up the dump trucks, and loading the wheelbarrow with our dumptruck loads of dirt.  I wish I had my camera with me while they were deep in dirt play - it's precious, in a dirt filled kind of way.

Trying to ride in the car together.

 

 Well, if you get that dirty, you also need to get clean.  Usually coming inside leads to double temper tantrums because neither kid wants to stop playing outside.  Today I knew I couldn't handle one more meltdown or I might have one myself.  So while they finished up playing, I snuck inside to make bathtub finger paints (thank you pintrest - bathtub fingerpaints).  It worked - everybody came inside with only minimal protesting.  Double bonus - now we can skip bathtime after dinner and spend more time reading books.  They played in the tub happily for a solid 30 minutes and came out squeaky clean! 

Of course, that much fun in the tub meant we just traded the temper tantrums about coming inside for tears over having to get out of the tub.  My kids are precious, but they don't handle transitions well at all (sorry kids, that's part of life).

Note - I don't think it's mentioned on the pintrest link, but this definitely left some color behind in our tub.  Good thing was it made me finally get around to cleaning our tub during naptime (it's probably been a solid two months since I did that last).  Bad thing was I didn't really want to clean the tub - I wanted to sit on the couch and eat junk food.