Pirate for a day

The kids have been reading Treasure Island at school. To go along with the story they've had activities that they could earn 'pirate bootie' for completing. There was a prize for the team with the most coins by the end of the story.

One of the activities was dressing like a pirate one day at school.

Here they are:

Kirsten:

Abigail:

Wyatt, who obviously did not participate:

and Addison, who was home sick in bed:

The girls did have fun deciding on what to wear. Even Addison had an outfit all picked out.

Training Day

During our busy tax season, Dax took some time out to train the next generation.

Here he is teaching Wyatt how to input a tax return.

It's great for your kids to know a little more about what you do for a living.


The down side of that is that he gave Wyatt a VERY simple return to input so now Wyatt thinks Dax's job is easy and doesn't understand why it takes him so long to get the returns done.

Back to Easter

It has been so crazy busy around here that I just haven't had time to keep up.

Since I never got around to posting about Easter, I guess I'll start there.

The kids dyed eggs again this year. Although, this year they weren't boiled. Since there are 4 dozen eggs to be dyed, I baked them. And it worked out great.

Here are Abigail and Kirsten still working on their eggs.

Even the cat couldn't resist helping.

Here's the group ready to hunt for eggs.

After finding all the eggs in the house they headed outside to look for more.

The Easter Bunny got them pretty far away from the house this year! We still found some in the trees a day or two later.

There is also still one dyed egg that has remained unaccounted for. I'm not sure if one of the dogs found it first and ate it or if we need to just keep waiting for the smell to alert us to its location.


Dax decided to go with a preppy look for this year's Easter dinner.

Unfortunately we were unable to find him a yacht or a yacht club. Hope he has better luck next year. It sounds like fun.


Addison borrowed my camera for a bit to take some pictures.

I made a collage of the pictures she took.

I'm feeling pretty good right about now that she isn't interested in a photography career.

Beautiful Texas Bluebonnets

This year I spread about 10 packets of bluebonnet seeds in our front yard.

I did it in the fall like I was supposed to. We had a lot of rain during the winter so I had high hopes for a bumper crop.

Beautiful, isn't it?


Only, that's not my field of bluebonnets.


Those bluebonnets are growing on a soccer field where I'm sure they're totally unwanted.


I, on the other hand, WANT a field of bluebonnets so that's why I put out all those seeds.


Here's my field.....

Yep!


ONE!


More than a hundred seeds, and I got one plant.


Abigail found it and she took the picture. I don't even know where it is because she won't tell anyone.


She's trying to protect it.


But she did tell me that when it is finished blooming and goes to seed then maybe we'll have more next year.


She's quite the optimist!

Laundry surprises....

My kids have been responsible for doing their own laundry for a couple of years now.


I remind them all the time about the precautions they need to take when doing laundry.


Things like:

- check your pockets, I don't want any more red pens in my dryer.
- don't wash all the blue jeans at once, the washer ties them in knots.
- don't wash new red clothes with your whites.
- make sure that you're only washing dirty clothes! (I've actually found a shirt still on the hanger in the washer!)

You know, the usual stuff.

The one I repeat the most often, though, is 'Don't just scoop the clothes up off your floor and throw them in the washer.'

And just the other night when the washer was off balance and I went to adjust the clothes I found a reminder of why I say that most often.

It's one of Kirsten's boots.

She assures me that she doesn't know how it got in there because her hamper and her shoes weren't even in the same place.

And of course she didn't just scoop clothes up off the floor because I've told them not to.

I'm sure Not Me did it. That bad little Not Me is always doing something he's not supposed to at our house.

Tennis

Kirsten signed up for tennis this year.

She played in her first match (it was actually a couple of weeks ago) after only a week of practices. Fortunately it appears that the other team hadn't had much more practice than that either.

She played mixed doubles. I can't for the life of me remember her partner's name, but they call him Skippy.

The pictures aren't great because they were three courts away. Oh, and you can ignore the people standing around the courts. lol

 I had hoped to get an action shot, but the closest I came was this shot of her kicking the racquet while she was waiting.

They won their match 4-2 so she was pretty excited. They have a tournament coming up later this month. Can't wait to watch her play again.