Planting Time

One of our new favorite games to play on the mobile devices is Draw Something.  Jessie, Mark, and I, and eventually even Ken who really doesn’t do much drawing have accounts.  Basically you play Pictionary back and forth with your opponents earning coins to buy new colors to use in your drawings.  It’s pretty addicting, but quick and fun.  Here Jessie’s drawing to her friend while we had an after school snack of ice cream cones.Spring is really here and playing out on the plastic toys is still just as fun as ever.  Yeah for nice weather!In fifth grade the kids put on a “wax museum” for the rest of the school.  Each kids picks a state to research, make a brochure and time line for, design a t-shirt, and make a diorama.  They also pick a person to be in the wax museum.  Mark’s state was Colorado.  He decided to be M. Scott Carpenter: He was the second American to orbit the Earth in the Aurora 7.  Then they dress up as the person and have a little paper with a button drawn on it that says “push.”  When people come through they push the button and the kids tell about who they are.  Pretty fun.  Brother Miller let us borrow his old mostly white bike helmet and we got a painter suit to try and make a space suit.  (The back of the helmet had a sticker that said “pardon my exhaust.”  Mark thought that was totally hilarious!)  I agree with Mark that it probably would have looked a little more spacy if he had worn a white shirt underneath.A neighbor and I worked on these ant treats for our Activity Day Mother/Daughter night.  We also decorated flower pots and planted flowers in them and made some really fun flower rings out of pipe cleaners that night with the girls and their moms.While Abbie and I were at the activity Rachel dropped by with a coconut cream pie!  YUMMY!We all got to give talks on Mother’s Day at church.  Abbie and Spencer got a little help from Dad and Jessie and Mark did most of their talks on their own.  Everyone did a super job.We also got to go plant 6 tomatoes and 6 peppers at our new house (which I still haven’t written about – I’ll get to it….sometime).  The kids were a fabulous help!Except the neighbors’ cat kept distracting Jessie….The people we are buying the house from let the kids play with this little gardening cart and they had a blast riding it down the hill at the side of our new house.Neil LOVES going for rides in the red wagon.  Here we took a quick walk around the block before bedtime.Neil discovered this monkey one morning and played with it all day.  So fun.Mark and Jessie found a fun new website: Pottermore.  Rachel even got on it with them.  It’s a Harry Potter related thing.  At first both of them were sorted into Hufflepuff, but they decided they were both too cool for that house and redid the sorting part.  The second time Mark made it into Ravenclaw and Jessie into Griffendor, just where they both wanted to be.

Beginning of May

Neil and I spent an evening after dinner outside with the bottle of bubbles.  It was so fun just the two of us while Ken took care of Isaac.

The three boys.

Not sure who took this picture.  But it’s so cute.

Abbie loves orange julius and so do I.  We’ve also been adding strawberries to them and man is it good, but it sure fills the blender to the top.  Since there are so many of us now we always end up making a second batch.  Lucky us!  And if there are any left overs we make them into popsicles.  Yummy!

Doesn’t it stink when you reading and someone disturbs you just to take a picture!

I’m trying to remember to be in more pictures for my kids.

Mark and I went to Sportsman’s Warehouse and used some of his birthday money to buy some more arrows and a shooting glove so his fingers don’t hurt so much when he practices shooting in the backyard.  He was so excited to show me his target.  I think only two of his arrows missed on this round!  So exciting!

Neil and Isaac and I went to cheer on Mark at the Hershey’s Track meet this year.  He did the standing long jump, the 200 meter, 400 meter and a 4x1 relay.  We got there and found him just as it was his turn to jump.  Then he asked if he could come and sit with us.  That sure makes a mom feel good!!  Here he is running the 200.  He won his heat and I could have had the perfect finish line photo with the hands in the air and the tape breaking across his tummy, but I was cheering instead :-)!

He was starving after his race so I gave him the 1/2 peanut butter and jam sandwich I had brought for part of Neil’s lunch.  Then he had to run the 400 right after.  He was so tired from his first race and didn’t have more than 10 minutes to rest.  I didn’t get to see this race because they combined heats without telling us, so Neil and I were waiting to watch his heat, and he had already run :-(.

Neil was getting hungry and didn’t want to eat the cheese that I had brought for him, so Mark shared half of his bagel sandwich.  I thought that was just funny, so even though Mark was starving he still only got the same amount of food.  But here are some funny pictures of Neil eating 1/2 of Mark’s sandwich.

Mark’s last race was the relay (even though he won his heat in the 200, his time wasn’t in the top seven, so he didn’t get to run again for the finals of that race).  He did a great job on his hand offs!  One other thing was that Mark took Neil over for the lollipop race, but the gun scared Neil so much when it went off to begin the race, that he wouldn’t run at all, so Mark picked him up and brought him back to sit with us.  Maybe next year…

That night we had Jessie’s band concert.  My kids favorite was the t-rex song they played with part of the band screaming at certain parts like the dinosaur was coming to eat them.