The Latest, In List Form

Here is the latest:

1) We had a great Easter celebration, first with an Easter egg hunt at my sister's house, then with church in the morning and an Easter dinner here with Rich's family.

Hunting for eggs at the Fox's

Olivia hitting the jackpot

Cousins on the Kelly side

2) We helped cousin Olivia celebrate being two!*  (Or as she states her age: a big sister!)  We can't wait until October now!

3) We expanded the garden!  We have had intentions of doing this, but kept putting it off.  Probably because it was an annoying, more-difficult-than-it-should-have-been type of task.  Turns out, once you put rock down, pretty much just plan on leaving it there forever.  But now we can't wait to get it planted!

Before.

After

4)  Now onto baseball season and a continued hunt for a camper that we're happy with!

* If I may expand upon a story I alluded to in the previous post....

It was a busy day of getting things ready to host Easter and all the kids were pitching in to help.  I had asked Will to get out our gift to Olivia (a play cash register) and put the batteries I had bought into it.  This attracted the attention of the other 2 kids and they made it a joint effort. I was clear about being cautious of the new toy and leaving the play money and other accessories in their bags.  Not too soon after I heard, "uh-oh....Mom?".  I enter the room to see that they had placed Barbie coins from our play cash register into the coin slot on the new one.  And surprise!  They didn't fit and were wedged within the product.  That's right: there were three minds ranging in age from almost 7 to 12 and not one thought to mention that maybe shoving a foreign object into a new toy that wasn't theirs was a good idea.  Cue my total freak out session and summoning to Rich for help. 

A shout-out to Rich for being ultra handy in these situations, as there have been many Christmas mornings with non-functioning new toys that, after a trip down to the workbench, are in perfect working order.  Turns out this required total dismantling and a soldering gun to extract the pink coin, fix wires and proceed with the present-readying.  

Lesson learned: kids will always surprise you.  I mean, one minute they are giving you a well-prepared dissertation via Powerpoint regarding why they should have social media or watch a PG13 movie and the next minute they are shoving things where they shouldn't be.  Parenting is hard.