Happy Easter!

Still more eggs

For someone who had never done an egg hunt before, Emily sure made up for it this year!  I had long planned to hide eggs for her to find on Easter morning.  I should have skipped the candy altogether and stuck with pennies.  She had fun, but it's going to be a constant battle over the candy.  It is currently all sitting in a bowl on top of the fridge. :op

More eggs

We made a trip to Waukee on Saturday to spend the day with Austin's family.  Emily & Asher got to dye eggs with Grandma Lorenzen.  They also had an egg hunt outside.  It was a bit windy, but that didn't stop them from going to the park, too.

Messy closet

Emily is still into dressing herself and doing it 5x/day.  She goes through so many outfit changes it's hard to keep track when laundry day comes, and her pile is usually the biggest.  Just to show what we're dealing with, here's a picture of her closet floor.  This is pretty much the standard.  It doesn't matter if you have every last piece of clothing picked up, put away or hung up on a hanger.  Within 24 hours it will look like this again.  Therefore, I usually only pick things up a couple times a week.  I hope this is only a phase.  Can you imagine what her room will look like when she's a teenager?!?

Bubbles

With the perfect weather this week the kids & I have really enjoyed some time out on our back deck.  I bought a battery-powered bubble blower and both kids love trying to catch the bubbles.  It sure beats blowing them all yourself, but I now understand why they sell bubble solution by the gallon!

Egg Hunt

We enjoyed a wonderful lunch and egg hunt today with a bunch of good friends hosted by the Ulven's.  The weather was absolutely perfect.  Emily's favorite was the jelly beans.  Apparently she needed binoculars to find all her eggs. :o)

The climber

Now that Lincoln has been cut off from the stairs he has found other things to climb.  The file box was serving as a nice blockade to the main power switch on the computer tower.  Now it creates a nice step up to the phone cord and mouse.  Lincoln sees Emily standing on the rocking chair trying to reach the VCR/DVD player and her videos.  Both the box and the chair have been removed.  What's next?!?

Tear down

The Washington Irving Elementary School building in Waverly is located 2 blocks from our house.  It was the home of all the 5th & 6th graders in the district.  The building was severely damaged during the flood of 2008 and has to be torn down.  Work began this week, and with the beautiful weather we have checked out how things are progressing almost every day.  It is quite amazing to watch and the kids are fascinated.  Emily refers to it as "the church falling down" because of the tall bell tower.  After I told her they had to tear it down because it was broken, Emily said, "Sue can fix it with tape."  Sue is the lady who leads story time at the library.  She apparently is one amazing lady! ;o)

It is also a bit emotional.  Although I'd never been inside the building, it still saddens me to see it being taken down.  It would have been nice to have the kids' school only 2 blocks away at a point when they could have easily walked or ridden a bike.  However, ground has already been broken on a brand new middle school building on the other side of the high school, which isn't terribly far away.  It will be nice to have a beautiful, new facility instead.

Cut off

I finally got a baby gate up today.  I can't find the old, cheap tension ones we had for Emily, although I didn't look really hard.  They wouldn't have worked anyway because of the uneven surfaces on the banister post and the woodwork.  So, I had to actually go out and buy a decent adjustable one.  I guess I can justify spending the money since, ironically enough, while I was hauling it in Lincoln climbed up and for the first time fell back down the stairs.  All I heard was the thud and delayed wail.  He is now sporting a large, purple goose-egg on his forehead.  He's fast because I've turned away for just a minute and caught him halfway up the long run of stairs multiple times.  The downside, of course, is that Emily is also blocked off from upstairs.  That's not always bad considering some of the messes/trouble she has caused in the bathroom in recent days.  However, she often goes up to her room and plays quietly on her own.  I don't really want to discourage that.  Plus, whenever the gate is up she wants to be on whatever side she is currently not.  I hope that will quickly wear off with the newness.  In the meantime, we will work on teaching Lincoln how to properly climb back down the stairs.

Funny photos

Here are some recent funny photos of Emily and the explanations that go with them...

The kids have a collapsible tunnel they can crawl through.  Emily "wears" it and declares she's "playing a tuba just like Larry [the Cucumber]."

Emily loves being downstairs when Austin works out during the day on the weekends.  This was her "workout" outfit last Saturday.  It consisted of black dress tights, a 2-pack of tank tops from Wal-mart that are still attached together, her white dress shoes and the matching, ever-present headband.  Quite the get-up!

Emily has recently started creating "new beds" in odd places.  First it was the square landing of the stairs.  Then it was one of the shelves in the toy closet.  After telling her she couldn't lay on the shelf, she moved to the bottom of the closet in our bedroom.  She got mad about something the other night and after noticing it was suddenly very quiet, I found her sound asleep in the closet with the doors shut and everything (she had a flashlight with her).  She ended up taking a 2 hour nap.  Too bad it was from 6:00-8:00pm!