Spring-ish

We have been warming up here and it has been so very nice. Our life changes so much when we can be outside! Daily walks to the library or park, riding bikes or roller blading. How did we survive the winter? April had a few weeks of rain with a day here or there that would be nice. It's been pretty nice this week so I'm hoping Spring is here to stay. The month of May has some serious making up to do if I'm going to be a happy Wisconsin-ite!!

Nora and Miles on a family walk.

We got some sand for our sandbox. Yay! Wesley spends a few hours each day playing in the sand. I think we need a bigger sandbox. Scooter loves it too, but he throws the sand out of it too quickly.

My sweet baby boy isn't really a baby anymore.  But I ask him every day if he's my baby boy and he still says yes. Yay! I love this feisty kid. He's the cutest rascal around.

This face cracks me up.

We quickly learned we can't have the sandbox on the grass if we want to keep the grass :)

This is hard to read but Nora and Sophie each bought a beta fish with their own money. Nora's died within the week and she buried him in our yard and wrote on this rock for his gravestone. Sophie quickly gave her fish to Nora and said she didn't know why she bought one in the first place. Sweet girls. Nora's fish is named Zippy2.

Just a few postworthy things.

 

Wesley still sleeps on a mattress in our office because he and Miles go to bed at different times and often keep each other up at night if they are in their room together. I'm hoping to get him upstairs with Miles soon, but usually it's easier to let him sleep in the office. Scooter apparently wants Wesley's bed for himself!

 

Sophie had an Activity Days talent show and played a song on her violin. She was pretty nervous and just did one song instead of the two she had planned, but she did a great job.

 

I found a huge bag of Mr. Potato heads at the thrift store for 5.00 so I was pretty excited about that. The kids have had a lot of fun with them.

 Sometimes I feel like we already have 5 kids because Nora has to include Teddy in everything we do. We went to a dress-up Calvin & Hobbes birthday party and of course Teddy had to have a costume! I sewed up the orange dress and Nora added the stripes and belly and necklace and ears.

 Scooter loves sitting right on Brian's lap and he gets just as excited as the kids do when he comes home from work. If he hears Wesley say "daddy" he jumps up on the chair by the window to see if Brian is home. Silly dog. And he kind of looks huge in this picture, but he hasn't grown much since he turned one in December. He tapered off at 22 pounds, which is nice. We sure love him.

Our weather is slowly getting better. Today it's back down in the 30's but we get a few 50 degree days here and there that are getting us through. I hope by next week we can finally put our coats away! We went on a walk on Sunday and Brian and I both wore our coats but Wesley didn't wear his and thought it was fine!

 The kids did a Nature Scavenger hunt one Sunday afternoon and had a great time, they all love nature and science and animals and are always wanting to do anything related to those three things. It kept them all playing together so nicely for over an hour - so we'll probably be doing it often!

Spring Break

Our Spring break this year was far from "springy" but we managed to have fun. The Friday of Spring Break was a bit warmer - I think the first day of 40 degree weather since fall - so we celebrated by walking to the library! The sun was shining and the kids were running down the sidewalks through the snow and slush and I'm pretty sure everyone who saw us was wondering why the kids and I were all laughing and grinning like we'd just won a trip to Disneyworld. Actually, they probably weren't wondering since they experienced the same winter we had! It was awesome to be out and walking again. The rest of Spring break I was watching 3-4 other kids every day so it was pretty 

much a mad house here Monday - Friday!

 

 Sophie helping with dinner.

 Nora making a duct tape bracelet. Nora loves her duct tape!

 Miles has really loved paper airplanes lately. The first time I made him one he looked at and was like, "Umm... what is that?" So we checked out a library book and I've improved a bit. Though daddy and Sophie are both better.

 The girls back up in their tree with their friend Beatrix that was at our house all week.

 Just a bunch of kids at the table :)

 We made Fairy houses for a project and used some wooden birdhouses from the craft store and glued on moss, rocks, flowers, butterflies, etc. The girls spent about 5 hours doing this.

 Nora and her fairy house. She also included a cute note to the fairies who will come and live in her house. We do believe in fairies.

 This is Wesley and one of the two boys I watch in the afternoon, Lance. These two are almost exactly the same size and love to wrestle and hug and chase each other all afternoon.

 I had to include these two pictures of my kitchen and dining/family rooms. Every night during the break my house looked like this, or worse, so each night I had to clean it all up so it could happen again the next day! And the kids even helped when I asked, so it would have been much worse!

 Nora climbed up in our tree in the backyard with a couple of blankets and stayed up there for almost two hours! She was trying to take a nap and I'm not sure she succeeded but she loved it anyway.

 Sophie played a really great trick on me and mixed peanut butter with fudge sauce and spread it on the toilet. She called me in and made me think one of the boys had done it. Since there were 8 kids in the house at the time, with four boys ages 5, 4, 2 and 2, this wasn't too hard to believe. Scooter was licking it when I walked in the bathroom so Sophie was quite pleased with my reaction that went something like "SCOOTER! SOPHIE! Don't let him lick that! Gross! Who did that? Get him out of here!!"  Funny girl. We were both laughing pretty hard the rest of the day when we thought about it.

 

 

 

At the end of Spring Break we had an Easter brunch and egg hunt in our backyard and that night our friends from Michigan, the Allee family, came to our home. They just moved here and were in town for the weekend because they were signing on their new house on Monday. Their three girls stayed with us so they wouldn't have to get two hotel rooms and they came over for Easter dinner. I watched their 4 older kids while they signed on their house on Monday and my kids were pretty excited because I let them stay home from school an extra day to play. It will be fun to have the Allee family in the same city as us. We had a very busy week but it was a lot of fun!