Swings :-)

Jude loves the swing and Tamlin loves pushing his little!

Dirty Boys

With the warmer weather comes more playing outside. Lately, I have been trying to head out with the little ones after dinner and before bed. This only works if Brian and I cordinate dinnertime early and tackle the kitchen mess together. Tamlin would spend all the time outside if he could, playing with cars and balls, of course.

With the outdoor play comes dirt and dirty little boys at the end of the day. This is a lovely dirt, sand, snot, dinner mixture smeared across Tam's face. Doesn't seem to bother him a bit.
Good thing they both love bath time still and don't mind sharing a tub (or tub toys).


A little soap and scrubbing and I have clean boys again.
You can tell these photos are from last week...
Tamlin still has longer hair pre-buzz-cut and no goose-egg bump on his head.My clean pale blue-eyed boys.

Wordless Wednesday - first scrape of the season

Tam went over on his blue plasma car...
helmets may be a requirement in the near future.

Yep, a big goose-egg on the noggin' . . . but it didn't seem to phase him a bit.

Easter Egg Hunt at Church

Our Sunday School teachers hold an egg hunt for the little ones prior to Easter. We went last year with Tam and had a great time, so we packed everyone up for this year too.

This year, Tamlin has a better idea of what the eggs are and that there is candy / prizes to be found inside of them. Once we told him we were going to an egg hunt, he was eggstatic :-)

Saturday morning, we bundled the kids up to face the chilly weather and head on over to our church.

It seems that Jude has finally grown enough to fit into his cute little hat from last fall. Here he is with his egg bag...all ready to go.




The kids first listened to a story about the Passion. It was told with little figures to represent parts of the story instead of with a picture book. There were around 2 dozen kids here, ranging from 8months to 3rd grade. Tam's interest in the story-time went downhill after about 10minutes. What a face!


Once that was over, it was off to find the eggs. The organizers do a great job of setting up multiple rooms with hidden eggs so that the various ages can be separated. This means way less bullying / chaos that might ensue with older and younger kids all together. This all means way less drama, thankfully.

Tam and I headed up to his pre-school Sunday room to find eggs. Brian and Jude were off to the nursery.






















Tam burst into the room with sheer delight on his face.

"Here's one, Mom!"

"Here's another one, and another one, Momma!"

It was too cute to watch him and the four other kids hunting around the room. Each of the little ones made straight for the toys that they loved the most in the room. This meant that Tam made straight for the trucks, train, and slide. He found his last egg at the top of the tower in the play castle.

Once he was done, he helped one of the other younger boys find some more eggs. Such a sweetie.

Then we were off to see how Jude was doing down in the nursery.

Jude - "Bah, bah, bah, mamama, blurrrrrrtz"
Which translates into "Look, mama, I found an egg!"

Tam - "I help Jude find eggs."

Jude - "Yeah!"

Tam - " Here's one, and here's one; Look over here Jude. Here's one. And lets go on the slide!"

At this point, Tam wasn't even worried about what was in the eggs, because he was having so much fun looking for them.

Jude was having fun just cruising around the room and trying to eat the plastic eggs that he did find on his own.


Once done, we all headed back to the gathering room to check out the booty. The eggs all had little toys, stickers, stamps, or crackers in them.




All of them had a Christian theme, which was nice.






Tam - "Urgh...how do I open these eggs?"



Jude - "Here, Bro, I'll help you out"





Tam really liked the little bouncy balls. Oh, and he liked the stamps which he proceeded to stamp up his arms.

Jude's eggs were filled with bunnies to gnaw on and vanilla wafer cookies.

Jude did make it through the entire event, barely. He crashed in the car on the way home and slept the next 3 hours.

Tam stayed hopped up on cookies and snacks for another hour or so before his nap. He is still played with the balls, eggs, and stamp prizes!

A great, and safe, way to spend a holiday morning.

Coloring Easter Eggs

It was time to color Easter eggs. Since only Brian likes hard boiled eggs, I opted to use hollow eggs for dying. (I did them this way last year too.) The upside is that the eggs can be kept from year to year. The downside is that we had to use the egg yolks right away. This time the yolks went right into french toast (for lunch) and cupcakes (for dessert).

We used a simple kit that has you add the dye to the eggs drop by drop, rather than placing the entire egg into a bucket of dye. This creates a tie-dye effect on the eggs which is pretty cool.

We started the session with plastic bag/gloves on Tam's hands to minimize mess.

After one egg, we ditched the gloves and opted for mess and a more tactile experience.

Tam really liked using the purple color

Voila!
Tam declared this one finished.

Tam decided to mix the colors all together to try to make rainbows.
He was semi-successful, but he thought the results were pretty awesome.

All the while we were dying eggs, Jude watched and gnawed on plastic ones...
and babbled at us :-)

We finished up with 7 lovely mottled creations.
Only 2 of which were designed by me...can you tell which ones?

Oh...and we ended up with 10 colored fingers!What fun for everyone.
I placed the finished eggs in an Easter bowl with Tam's creations from last year :-)

Brian Singing

Members of our church choir (along with another church) performed Fraure's Requiem this past Sunday. Brian sang the two baritone solos and here is one of them. It was a great concert!