Easter is for Throwing Eggs.......

Well, we got all of our eggs dyed and filled right on time....and it was a lot of eggs....and by we, I mean mostly me.........

.....and when Easter morning arrived the boys had to hunt for their baskets which was quite the challenge since they are both afflicted with can't-finders-itis.....I think it's hereditary....from their father's side :)

They both got new flashlights and the obligatory Easter candy, and then Henry got some new garden tools and flower seed packets and David got his first real hammer....we've gone over the hammer rules but, it's David, so we'll see.....

Then it was off to the two hour mass, but not before I attempted a family photo shoot..............it went just about as well as you would expect........

....the blur in the corner is the surprise Henry blanket attack.

After mass was over--did I mention it was two hours?--we came home to set up for our fourth annual We're All a Bunch of Nomadic Drifters Who Have No Family Nearby to Celebrate With Easter Egg Hunt and Potluck....I know, the title could use a little work.........

We had seventeen adults and fourteen children so it was a little crazy in our tinyhouse.  But good crazy :)

Good crazy....and not a bit overwhelming :)

I think everyone had fun.....

.....and no babies were actually harmed.....well John Michael did intercept an egg meant for our neighbor with his head......so I guess I'll have to amend that to no babies were seriously harmed.......

Our raccoons are going to have quite the Easter celebration as well, once they realize our yard is littered with fruity pebbles--who am I kidding, I totally bought generic dyno pebbles...hopefully the raccoons won't be too put out :)   

Happy Easter everyone!

He Peed on My Shoes

.....or, Why Having a Two Year Old is Like Having a Puppy.......

Is there an appropriate picture to go with this story?  Not really.

I told you how Henry has taken up doing his business anywhere around the house except the one place his business belongs.  Well, little man has taken it to the next level.  Now, if you take him out of his pull ups (or even diaper--yeah, we still had some left over) he will pretty much immediately go and spite pee on something.

This weekend Chris rounded the corner and saw the guilty face and wet undies:

Hubby:  "Did you pee pee?"
Henry:  "mmmm hhmmm"
Hubby:  "Where is it?"
Henry:  "Over there." (insert vague arm gesture)
Hubby:  "Show me."
Henry:  more definitive arm gesture
Hubby:  "On my shoes!  REALLY?"  (insert exasperated shoe cleaning)
Henry:  "Take that dad, you wanted another baby well now you have two.  Maybe you'll think twice next time and ask permission before bringing any new children into the house--MY house.  Go ahead, I dare you to have another baby."  (okay, I'm just guessing at his inner monologue here)

We've taken a potty training hiatus.  Touché Henry, you win this round.

Easter Eggs are for Painting....

So we've been hosting Easter egg hunts on Easter Sunday for the past three years--mostly because I like to hold off on the egg hunts until Easter has actually arrived which pretty much means we have to have one at our house since everyone else already did theirs. 

Last year we did confetti eggs for the grown ups inspired by this oh happy day party.  I filled our eggs with fruity pebbles instead of confetti which was great because one, my yard wasn't covered in confetti and two, the boys were beyond excited since the only cereal they regularly have access to is boring old Cheerios--parenting side note:  if you set the bar low it doesn't take much to thrill your children :)  We also had one glitter-filled egg and whoever had that egg cracked over their head was declared the winner of the hunt and prizes were handed out accordingly.

One of our friends informed us that confetti eggs were actually called cascarones and that when he was growing up his entire extended family saved all of their eggs for the whole year just for this purpose and instead of confetti some of their cascarones were filled with more dubious substances such as flour or syrup or any other messy thing they could think of.  I loved the idea of this family tradition so much I decided to adopt it as our own.....you've gotta do what you've gotta do when you don't have any family traditions of your own to fall back on.  Plus cracking eggs on each other's heads is the perfect tradition for a house full of boys and the fun is in the activity, not in collecting a bunch of junky nonsense from plastic eggs or wasting hard boiled ones.  I think we'll hold off on booby trapping our eggs until the boys are old enough to do their own laundry though.  

After our egg hunt was over last year I realized that I didn't make nearly enough eggs, so this year I saved as many eggs as I could during Lent--whenever I needed one, instead of cracking them open I just used my kitchen scissors to poke a whole in one end and cut out a little circle, then I shook out the egg, rinsed them off and kept them in their containers to await their beautification.    

This week I realized though that since I've been buying organic eggs, my whole supply was brown.  I don't think it will matter for doing the traditional egg dyeing but I wanted to try some different techniques with the boys so I grabbed some white eggs this week.......

....and dumped them all into this measuring bowl to hopefully turn into scrambled eggs for breakfast all week.  I hate the idea of wasting food....even if it is full of yucky growth hormones :)

After trolling around Pinterest for egg dyeing inspiration I found this idea for watercolor eggs--I guess I should have re-read the instructions since they were just painting with the egg dye and I apparently only remembered the title and gave David his actual watercolors.  Oh well, these are super cute and involved much less clean up than mixing up a bunch of dye would have.......

David loved it.  Henry slept through it.  John Michael fussed in the Moby wrap--I don't recommend doing this with a baby tied to you if you can help it.  If you can't help it, don't worry, no one was ever permanently damaged by a few water color drops to the face.....

We're going to start on the rest of our eggs tomorrow with the food coloring method we did last year.  After this painting success I think I'll give the boys paint brushes and let them go to town if (okay, more like when) they get bored waiting for the eggs to soak up the dye.  You know ten minutes is a lifetime when you're two and four.  I'm hoping to have all the eggs colored and dry by Holy Saturday so we can spend the day filling them in preparation for Easter.  I'll let you know how it goes :)

Sorry for writing the longest post ever when all I really wanted to say was this: paint your eggs with watercolors...it's super fun....and not too messy.......the end.

Welcome to My Nightmare.....

You may want to avert your eyes from the scene of this lego-tastrophy......

This is my darling husband's childhood collection which he has been longing to introduce the boys to pretty much since they *mostly* stopped eating their toys.  This is not to be confused with his other unopened box of young adult legos which includes, but is not limited to, one giant submarine and one giant lights and sounds ship.

I've held him off opening this pandora's-box-o-legos for quite some time, precisely because I did not want the above to happen inside of my house (this disaster is in the garage).

Am I the only one with an aversion to legos?  Piles of wooden blocks strewn about the floor don't bother me.....well, they bother me a little but they don't lego bother me......

Plus look at all of the fun things you can make .....

You can even bring in the catapult into the mix for added block fun.....

....and *bonus* babies won't choke on giant blocks of wood and you're a lot less likely to inadvertently step on a big rainbow block than a microscopic piece of plastic.

But of course David loves the legos--especially since they were his daddy's.  Chris maintains that legos are not toys, but building supplies, the first step towards geometry and and physics and carpentry skills....really they are a homeschooling requirement.


I am not convinced.

I am outvoted.

I am in need of a lego storage plan.


Maybe this, or this?  I refuse to buy a bunch of plastic bins to store a bunch of plastic nonsense.  That's right, I said it....ridiculous amounts of legos = nonsense.  Has anyone done babies and legos before?  Once John Michael's mobile I'm thinking I may need to baby gate off the boys' room to contain the choke-able toys and still leave the door open so I can hear them.......

This Week with My Little Darlings....

aka:

Why We Have to Homeschool Our Children Because the Other Kids at School Probably Won't Appreciate Their Uniqueness....

or

Why Having a Newborn Hasn't Impacted My Sleep.....

or alternately,

Why I Need an I-phone.....(PS the answer to the last one is that these cell phone pics are sad, my apologies).

(is it everyone? does everyone say that?)

David has been really into fashion these days and insists on choosing his own outfits, which usually include a bow tie and rarely match.  I've been trying to imagine him walking into kindergarten in some of these get ups.  I can't imagine the other kids would appreciate his unique sense of style...or maybe I'm just not giving five year olds enough credit?  

In other parenting news, this is how I found Henry at about 10:30 in the morning the other day.....

....he was out cold.....

I feel like having John Michael hasn't really impacted my sleep so far, or at least my overall tiredness level.  I think it's a combination of finally jumping on the co-sleeping bandwagon and the fact that my children all wake up absurdly early (although now that David isn't napping anymore he has been getting up in the to 6:30-7 range which I'm told is much closer to the time regular children think morning begins).  Henry had been sleeping in to a more respectable hour too--you know, past 5:30, before the baby arrived on the scene.  Now he seems to be suffering from middle-child-itis and knows if he gets up first he gets me mostly to himself.  He's also decided that he's not a big boy and does not want big boy undies anymore and if you make him wear them he will go hide under the bed and do his business there....out of spite....but I'm not bitter......

So maybe my body is just used to being tired?  Can you become immune to tiredness?   Maybe I've just seriously lowered my sleep expectations over the years?  

Oh well, I am loving the co-sleeping!  I think I've gained at least two hours of sleep a night by not trying to pick up the baby out of the bassinet, feed him, settle him back down to sleep alone, and then lay (lie?) in bed waiting anxiously to see if he is really going to fall asleep or if he will start crying again.  Am I the only one who suffers from baby waking anxiety when you can't sleep because you just know the baby is going to wake back up so why let yourself fall asleep anyway?

Feel free to laugh at me if things go horribly wrong when I finally do want to move him out of our bed, or you can just remind me that I said it was totally worth the risk to not be newborn tired right now :)