March 2013

Besides hunting for alligators, here are some of the other things we did in March:

Worked in the yard.  Henry got some bluebonnet seeds from his class at church, and was so excited to plant them in our front yard.  I love his “I’m a serious gardener” face.


Built Lego houses.  Lizza spent days on this house.  It has lots of secret rooms and fun tiny details. 


Tristan then worked some magic on Lego Digital Design on the computer, and created instructions for the house that Lizza had just built, so now after someone breaks it she can build it again just the same. 


We also played games.  Some of us in princess dresses. 


And speaking of princess dresses, Cynthia went through a big dress-up stage.  Rachel was usually involved.


On St. Patrick’s Day we had our annual treasure hunt for a pot of gold (butterscotch candies).  Only this year was the best because I didn’t have to do one thing – Tristan and Oliver wrote all the clues and the younger four did the search.  And Tristan and Ollie were just as excited about making up clever clues and watching the little kids figure them out as the little ones were about finding them.  I love having helpers.


Here’s Cynthia helping me make a spinach smoothie.  She hears the blender going and comes running. 


Playing in the backyard.  Our grass is pretty awful and we have nothing fun to do out there, but once in awhile they’ll remember that it’s fun to go out and goof around on strider bikes and hunt for roly-polies and practice gymnastics.                                                                           


Cindy and Henry reading Angelina books together. 


Cindy working on a little set-up.  She definitely takes after Lizza with her set-ups. 


Easter!  The kids all got to dye some eggs, and this year we even got a tiny bit fancy and put oil in the dye mixture, and it made the eggs all swirly.  Cindy wanted to be looking at her eggs in her picture.                           


Ready for our little Easter treat hunt.  We didn’t have enough Easter baskets for everyone, so instead of having some of them use their Easter baskets and the rest use Halloween buckets (I’ve done that), the kids all decorated Easter bags.  Then they set off to find their color-coordinated treats – I can never find plastic easter eggs anymore, so instead I print off a ton of little pictures of easter eggs, in 6 different colors.  Then each person is assigned a color, and they get to collect all the treats with that color of egg taped on to it.  That way there is no bickering about how many treats everyone is getting, and also we (Daniel) can hide Tristan and Oliver’s colors in super hard places and I can put Cindy’s color on the floor in the middle of the room.



Henry and Cindy stopped mid-hunt to admire all the treats they had found so far:

And then to top off an already fun Easter day, Cynthia got to try on some new summer jammies from the hand-me-down box in the garage.  She was doing all sorts of Hulk smashes and awesome poses in them before settling in for her favorite part of the day – when she gets to choose out a book and climb up on my bed and read with me.                                                                                 


That’s it for March.