Name That Bird

Can anyone identify the bird in the video below? We saw it in the woods behind our house.

James is Walking!!!!!

The boy took several steps today. He is finally well on his way to walking. We tried to get footage, but when he saw the camera, he kept getting so excited to grab it that he would fall down and crawl toward us. I forgot how incredibly precious those first wobbly shaky steps are. Stay tuned... pictures to follow.

Easter Weekend

We just had a fabulous Easter weekend. The weather was great, trees were blossoming, flowers were blooming, children were giggling. Among the many discoveries made on their explorations this weekend, the girls found this playground right around the corner from our townhouse. Of course, right away their imaginations started running away with them. This is a picture of Eve playing "ice cream store". They take turns running the ice cream shop where you can purchase many exciting flavors like princess flavor with magic sprinkles.

Check out Eve's awesome static head.

Here are the girls down by the creek. They found an island which is now called treasure island because of the "treasure" (two pennies strategically placed by my dad) that was discovered there.

My dad and the adorable baby James looking so cute in his Easter outfit. I found him a white herringbone shirt just like Chris's to wear under his little argyle sweater vest and corduroy slacks. My sister brought him a green and blue tie that matches his vest. So stylin'!

Hugging with Habojee and Pemo

This weekend, my dad and sister are visiting us from Salt Lake City. For weeks, the girls have been planning the adventures that they were going to have together. High on the priority list was exploring our backyard forest. So my dad made them a little hiking kit with first aid gear, poncho, snack, bandana, whistle, compass, and a button that says "I like hiking with Habojee." When he gave Eve hers, he asked her to read what was on the button. She immediately replied, "I like hugging with Habojee!!!!" It was so cute.

This is the river that flows behind our house. I think it's called Little Rocky Run. This morning, my dad and Patty took Laine and Eve across it on their hike. They had oh so much fun.

Laine said to be about an hour ago, "We had the funnest adventure in the whole wide world!" They are delighted to have visitors. We're gonna spend the whole weekend seeing sights, exploring, and hanging out.

And now, announcing....

Mr. BEAUTIFUL!!!!! The girls think that it's so funny to use their powers to turn James beautiful. This usually involves putting a skirt on him, or a tutu, or some sort of hair piece. When he's in costume, he responds to either "The Amazing Baby" or "Mr. Beautiful." I guess that's what you have to deal with when you have two older sisters. Oh, and speaking of the amazing baby, James stood up and took two steps today all by himself before getting caught in his pant leg and falling. Yay!

The girls were up to their usual imaginary games today. Laine had a bad case of the grumps though. She's been irritable and fussy all day. She made Bun and Bun's little sister, Baby-Bun practice sitting quietly on the church bench because they weren't being reverent during church. Later when Laine was in a better mood, she and Eve pretended that Eve was Laine's friend that lived in a tree (the back of the couch). After a while, they decided that they looked so much alike that they should pretend to turn into sisters and have Eve move in with us. So she did.
Here's a really bad picture I took, but you can kind of see the deer running. I always see deer all around our house. These three jumped out in front of my car on the way to work this weekend.

Why did I even bother?

Today, the girls spent the entire day playing fun and exciting games about going to the beach. The carpet was the sand and they lay blankets and towels on it and spent hours building pretend sand castles, shrieking with delight as the waves came in and out, and hunted for seashells. As far as I could tell, they had exactly as much fun pretending to go to the beach as they did going to the real beach minus the cost and effort of hotel, gas, 4 hour drive each way, packing, unpacking, applying sunscreen to 3 wiggly people, getting sand in your bum, etc. So I'm not sure why I bother taking them anywhere. Surely there's some value to having real experiences versus pretend ones, right? They're so hilarious. Right now, they're supposed to be asleep, but instead they're playing a game they just invented called "cheeseball." The way you play cheeseball is, you take all of your covers and roll them into a ball at the head of your bed. This is the cheeseball. Then, you take turns diving headfirst into it. This provides at least 45 consecutive minutes of fun and laughter until someone falls off the bed and gets hurt. In tonight's case, that person was Eve. But she seems to be feeling well enough now to play "seashell treasure jewel powers" with Laine.

Mt. Vernon Excursion

As part of our spring break week of fun, I took the kids to Mt. Vernon today to see George Washington's plantation. I was a little hesitant to take the kids there because I thought they might be too young to find a historic site very interesting, but we had a great time. We went on a guided tour of the mansion, and Laine was asking and answering questions with the tour guide and was genuinely interested in knowing what life was like back when Washington lived on Mt. Vernon.

This is the view of the Potomac River from the estate. I bet Washington wished his view included a pair of adorable giggly preschoolers.

The kids liked exploring the barn. They still grow lots of food and keep animals on the plantation. This was the highlight of the visit for Laine and Eve.

James was with us too, but he's always in the sling with me, so it's hard to get good pictures of him, so here he is on the car ride home being a good boy as usual.

Outer Banks Trip

This week, I'm on spring break and I've been wanting to get away for a little while, so the kids and I took a short trip to the outer banks in North Carolina. We stayed in Kitty Hawk (where the Wright Brothers first flew) right on the beach and enjoyed fabulous weather, sight-seeing, sand-castle building, and wave splashing.

On the way down to South Carolina, we stopped in historic Williamsburg for a little while to look around. It is an adorable town. We stopped at Jamestown on the way back, but the place was swarming with like 1,200 4th graders and so we couldn't really do anything. We'll have to go back on a weekend when there aren't a million kids running everywhere.
As soon as we checked into the hotel, the girls changed into their bathing suits. This is what our hotel room looked like about 5 seconds after chekc-in. Do you see why our house is always cluttered? You can't keep up! It takes at least 3 minutes to undo what they do in 3 seconds.


And then... the beach!!! This was the first time the kids have seen the ocean, and it was love at first sight. They were delighted.


Eve wipes out while splashing in the waves. She didn't like the taste of salt water very much. We had the whole beach to ourselves. The temperature was in the 70's. Gorgeous!

Laine spent a long time running in and out of the waves. She built sand castles, and looked for seashells. When we got home, she called Chris, and said "I brought home something that starts with the letter "C". Can you guess what it is? I'll give you a hint. In this case, the C makes a "see" sound." When he gave up, she told him it was C-shells.

Here's my sweet little beach babe.

Eve loved the beach so much, that she thought the only thing that could possibly make it better...

Would be to turn it into a nude beach. Uhhh good thing we had the beach to ourselves.