Earth Day Celebration

I love any excuse to have a "party," (Saturday is "Pig in a Blanket" day if you are interested, and yes we will be celebrating :) For earth day this year a had a whole bunch of things planned. I am a pretty conscientious person, not perfect, but I try. I go crazy if the boys let the water run, try to recycle when I can and reuse things if at all possible. Earth day I thought was a great chance to teach them a few things. I saw these cute earth pops here and decided to make them.

Didn't those turn out cute? I was worried...

The "earth pops" were a hit. The rest of the night the kids kept saying "can we have those again?"

After the treats I gave the kids a recycling maze, and an earth to color. While they were coloring we talked about what it means to "save the planet," and what we could do to keep things clean and nice.

I thought these pictures would be pretty simple to color, but they drew rockets, bridges, lakes and a whole lot of other things on their earths.

After the "fun" activities, I gave each of the boys their own garbage bag (that was key to this activity) and we went around the neighborhood and to the park to clean up trash.

I wasn't sure what the boys were going to do...I mean, cleaning up the neighborhood isn't the most fun a kid can have in an afternoon. I think it helped that we made it a competition. They were so excited to pick up trash!

We had still had lots of fun even though we were cleaning. The boys really liked it. I think they like each having their own garbage bags. I think my kids like to feel like big helpers too.

The perfect day...a bit cold, but the light was perfect for pictures.

The kids tried to convince me that there was trash all over the toys at the park...I wasn't buying it.

McKay is such a good sport to get dragged around to all of the things that our families does.

Hunter had to run for all he was worth each time he saw some garbage, because his brothers usually got to it first.

Our garbage hunt was just perfect for the boys. They all helped the whole time and got quite a bit of garbage. After it was all over they were so excited to go and play at the newly cleaned park.

We also read "The Lorax," by Dr. Seuss. I love this book. It is so cute with such fun pictures, but really teaches a great message in a creative way. We actually read this book a few times today. My boys do not get sick of books easily.

How cute is Josh reading to his boys? I hope that our efforts to teach our boys about the environment, recycling, reusing, etc. will not make them fanatics, but will teach them that we need to take care of things, we need to be wise and most of all be grateful for what we have.