More classroom fun...

Emma and Ben's school is having a spring fundraiser. Parents can buy tickets to go to a night at Regas (one of our fancy-pantsiest restaurants around K-town) where they'll be able to eat "heavy appetizers" and bid on some unique artwork. Each one of the classes in the school was given a big old 3x3 foot canvas. Then it was up to the wonderfully creative talents of some of the best looking room moms to come up with a way for the class to collectively paint on them. On Regas-night they'll be auctioned off so we can "continue upgrading our technology and training our teachers" (so I'm told). Ben's class (which I was not in charge of) each painted suns, I haven't seen it yet, but it sounded cute. I got to do Emma's class and though more time-consuming than i thought it would be it was a lot of fun to work on with the kids. I gave the kids three choices to vote on for what our theme should be and the winner was "Murray Street". Mr. Murray is the teacher, so on his street all the kids painted what building they thought should go there. A lot of them did houses, two did construction sites. We had a Blockbuster, a school, a firehouse, a football stadium, a candy shop, a soda shop, a hair salon, a college, and five pet shops (which really annoyed Emma, the painter of the first one). Anyway, hopefully it will sell for big bucks so our technology can get its grade up.

For more fun with big canvases read what Cally did with some at her house.

If you like "The Office", you'll love Shrute-Space

New episodes begin on April 10th! Hooray! In order to satiate my need for fine comedy I was checking out the Office's website and I found Shrute-Space, Dwight's web log. So, so funny. This post cracked me up, especially the line "--as a joke".

The motivational posters were pretty good too.

The last of all the Easter photos you can stand

Saturday morning was the church egg hunt which went great. Here's a token shot of Lydia in action.

Then we headed up to the Compound for our Cruze Easter lunch and hunt. We lucked out with a gorgeous warm and sunny day (as opposed today...in which we've gotten some flurries) so we had lunch outside on the picnic tables. We split the cousins into two age groups and hid the younger kids' eggs in the front yard and Rachel and Terry hid the older kids' eggs in the woods. They made it challenging and it was kind of fun to watch the kids have to really hunt to find them.

Cally's sister Corrie was there with her family too, so it was a multi-cousined event.

Big kids on the fence:

Josh after feasting on fresh blackberries (picked and eaten with his dirty, dirty hands):

Then came Easter Sunday. I wanted to get a good shot of the kids looking their spiffiest before church, but we just didn't have time and the background was very messy anyway. So here's the only shot I got of Lydia (Queen of not holding still or looking or smiling when you want her to...it was really a lost cause from the begining...although I think her hands under her chin are pretty darn cute).

And the big three, who were more cooperative, but less in focus than I would have liked.

Gone Fishin'

These lucky kids have had a fun spring break. Part of Ben's fun involved a full day of fishing with his friend from church, Cory. Ben did indeed catch his very own fish which is in our freezer right now creeping me out. (I don't like fish. At all.) Ben let us know he doesn't want to eat his fish, he just wants to see Scott pop its eyeballs out and to see the skeleton. While I find that request rather odd, it is the better alternative to preparing the fish for consumption. More than likely though, the fish will just sit in the freezer until we move next week and it will somehow not make it to the new house.

Happy Easter Egg Hunt (yesterday as well)

Not only was it St. Patrick's Day yesterday, but it was also the annual Grammy and Grandpa egg hunt. Josh's birthday is next week, so we decided to tie in his birthday celebration to the egg hunt as well. Big day.

The bad news is that Josh missed the whole thing. Sometime that afternoon he started feeling kind of droopy and running a fever, so Scott stayed home with him. This is how he looked when I left with the other three kids.

He was sad to miss out, but really too lousy feeling to care all that much. Luckily there's still the church egg hunt and Cruze egg hunt this Saturday he'll get to do. Here's what all the healthy TN cousins looked like right before the hunt began.

Here's what the Cruze kids looked like mid-hunt.

After all of the eggs had been found (besides the few that will be discovered in late spring by the lawn mower), the cousins all gathered on the driveway to size up their bounty. I love this part. It's just like checking out all your candy after trick-or-treating. G&G fill their eggs with candy and money. Mostly change, but each kid also got to find an egg with an X on it that contained a dollar bill. Ben hunted $8.85, Emma $11.85, and Josh $10.15 (Lydia, Grandpa and I worked on Josh's basket and he got to sort through the eggs this morning).Lydia did not concern herself with such trivial matters as money. She was too busy saying "wheee" as she slid down the slides and trying to figure out how to get on the swings.

Grammy had made a cake for Josh, which she thoughtfully sent home for him and Grandpa replaced it with one from Ingles so the cake-expecting cousins wouldn't be disappointed.By the time I got home with the healthy three kids and put them to bed, Josh had woken up (he'd been dozing most of the evening) and said "If I eat that whole cake I'm sure I'll feel better!" with his first smile of the last half of the day. How could we resist?He got one piece and opened his gifts sent home from the Langfords and Sextons before going back to bed. We maybe shouldn't have let him have cake on a dinner-less stomach because he threw it all up just after midnight. Tis better to have loved and lost, right? Happy egg hunting everybody!

Happy St. Patrick's Day (yesterday)

My friend, MBC, posted a poll yesterday about dyeing food green on St. Patrick's Day. It just so happens that I decided at the last minute to dye our pancakes green yesterday morning. Emma was helping me add all of the ingredients and she was most excited to get to squeeze some bright green food coloring in the batter. It seemed like a fun idea at first, but turned out pretty lame. They were whole wheat cinnamon pancakes, and thus pretty dark colored. Adding some green to the batter just made them look really, really gross. This isn't a very good photo (they did look a bit greener), but it does illustrate how misguided an effort his was. Oh well, they still tasted good.

great parenthood quote...

I just re-came-across this quote from Jeffrey R. Holland that I love...such a great reminder of the importance of our work as parents...

"Our children take their flight into the future with our thrust and with our aim. And even as we anxiously watch that arrow in flight and know all the evils that can deflect its course after it has left our hand, nevertheless we take courage in remembering that the most important mortal factor in determining that arrow’s destination will be the stability, strength, and unwavering certainty of the holder of the bow.”

Monkey Girl, Take 3

Okay. So we all know that Lydia likes to climb. She is 18 months old now and it is getting out of hand. "Up 'ere?" she implores over and over while pointing to and climbing up to places she has no business being. The table, the countertop, the back of the couch, the piano, the washing machine, the top of the bunk bed....

(Hear those sibs encouraging her...as if she needs it? And by the way, yeah, the video stops in mid-trip. But don't worry, she tripped securely onto the middle of the mattress.)

Does any one have any spare ankle-weights?

Sew, Mama, Sew! dream come true...

I won another blog giveaway. This time I got a yard of the fabric of my choice from SMS's new arrivals. It was a very, very hard decision, but I went with this one, Oops Daisy Green Apple. I was totally surprised to be randomly selected. I need to enter more contests immediately. I'm on a roll.

Photo Pencils

Check out this tutorial to find out how to make these awesome pencils. (Via Design Mom, where else? she found it from sk*rt.) I am definitely going to try these. So cute for a stocking stuffer, party favor, random holiday gift, teacher gift, piano teacher gift, etc.

Music Graphs

My brother, Joel, emailed me these hilarious song charts posted on flickr. Can you name the artists/songs?

Toothless and Sweet Tooth

So, Emma is on a roll now with losing teeth. She has lost all of her front four and I just love her gummy grin, she does too. Nothing tickles her more than someone noticing her missing teeth. Her "s" and "th" sounds are just a little off and she gets as much of a kick out of it as we do. Ben is starting to think he ought to be losing teeth as well. Sorry Bud, not much chance of that in this family.

Lydia pushes limits...along with chairs. She has her favorite spots in the kitchen that are in constant danger of being seiged by her chair-aided-climby ways. The treat jar is a frequent haunt. Typically we move it to an inaccessable corner, but often move it back to the regular spot hoping she'll have forgotten about it. No. such. luck. She also has mastered unwrapping suckers.

Tote Bag

I made my mom a tote bag for her birthday (a month late!), but I was really happy with how it turned out (it's my first real bag)...so it was worth the wait, right? I printed out the words going in a circle and traced them onto the canvas with that blue transfer paper stuff so I could embroider somewhat neatly. Cally held my hand through figuring out how to line it and make it fit together well (and technically topstitched the thing for me, but hey who's counting--thank you, Cally).