Labels for the Boys' School Clothes

So, something I have been working on the last couple of weeks is getting all the school clothes we will need for the boys for this fall and winter. I have gotten most of the clothes we need, except a few more pairs of jeans and some pajamas I am still looking for for Kolby (and we just found out that we’ll need an extra set of clothes for Kolby and Eli because they like to keep an extra set at the preschool in case they get messy painting or something). But I was trying to think of a good idea to mark the boys’ school clothes so that they could easily tell who’s clothes are who’s. (This saves me time, because then the boys can pick out their own clothes when they get dressed without having to ask me to find a size on a tag – since so many of their clothes are similar or the same sizes, and it will also be easier when we are doing laundry if someone doesn’t know who’s shirt they are folding, they can just look inside). Last year I used different colored sharpie markers and put a different colored dot on the tags for each of the different boys’ clothes, but the problem with that was that sometimes the dots were hard for the boys to find, and sometimes the dots changed colors when the tag wasn’t white. Anyways, I came up with the idea of iron-on tags, and I went to the internet, but couldn’t find what I wanted – all I could find was big, colorful full-name tags that didn’t seem especially inexpensive. So I decided to make my own. I got paper that you could print on your computer to make iron-on transfers, and I printed out a small letter with each boys’ first initial. In one afternoon I finished ironing on all of Kolby’s, Eli’s, and Camden’s, and I have since put off ironing on Isaac’s (but that shouldn’t take too long once I decide to get it done). I think they turned out pretty well, although I don’t know how well you can see them in the pictures. It was nice, because I could iron the labels onto a tag or right onto the inside of the shirt if there wasn't a tag. I didn’t want the labels to be too big, just a little letter that the boys could find easily. So, that’s one project that I’m almost done with for this season.

The labels that I printed out
(I realized later that I printed way more 'K's than I needed for Kolby).

A couple of Kolby's shirts with the labels on them.

Kolby's fall and winter clothes with all the labels on them.

Eli's clothes with all the labels.

And Camden's clothes with all the labels.

Snow Day

In the spirit of catching up on posting photos to the blog, here are some from a fun snowstorm that we had on February 6th. It was the biggest storm that we were around for this winter (I don’t know if Milwaukee got any bigger storms while we were gone in December and January). It was actually a “fun” storm because everything got cancelled – Michael’s school, the kid’s preschool, swim lessons, and church – and our whole family just got to stay home and spend time together (and none of us had to go dig out the car to get anywhere on the icy roads). That night, after the big snowfall, the Kearls came over and we took the kids out to play in the snow (except Isaac and Katie, they were happy to stay inside where it was nice and warm). The boys (including Michael and Tyce) had a lot of fun playing in the snow out in front of our apartment building. And then we all came in afterwards and enjoyed some hot chocolate – this is a tradition with our boys every time we go out to play in the snow – they would probably feel like some great injustice had been done to them if we went out in the snow and then they weren’t promptly offered a sippy cup of “warm chocolate” [they don’t like to eat/drink anything that is too hot, so I have to tell them that it is just warm chocolate to get them to drink it]. I got some fun video of Michel throwing the boys into the deep powder, but later realized that I hadn’t changed any of the lighting settings on the camera and it was dark out, so you can’t really see anything on the videos. Oh well, the pictures turned out cute too. (Oh, and in case you couldn't tell what the one close-up snow photo is, it's the handle to our back door totally covered in snow). Enjoy!

When I Grow Up, I Want To Be . . .

We got this questionnaire from Kolby's primary class at church, and I asked Kolby the questions while I wrote down his answers. I thought they were pretty cute, especially the one about what he wants to be when he grows up:

(just click on this page to zoom in)