Easter

Easter Egg Hunt

For Zade's coop preschool, all the kids gathered at our house for an Easter Egg Hunt.  

Aria's school hosted a roller skating night at Penn States this week. She was excited to get to use her new roller skates and zip around.

Fairy Garden
Tara inspired the kids to make a little fairy garden in the backyard:

Easter
We set out Hershey's kisses and plastic eggs filled with gummibears for the kids, so when they woke up, they got to do a little Easter Egg hunt before church.  As you can imagine, they had a great time.  We also tried to emphasize to them that even though the idea of the Easter bunny is really fun, the real purpose of Easter is to celebrate the Resurrection.

New Camera
For Tara's birthday her parents got her a nice camera, which we're looking forward to using to get some nice pictures of the kids... and of course the cats. :)

Mira, the sweetest cat in the world

Zade the pirate up in his tree house.

Baby Ryzen
We've been meaning to get baby pictures of Ryzen, and now that we have a pretty good camera, we'll see if we can get some ourselves. Here are a few attempts from today.

Aria's Party

Aria just had another birthday, and had her friends Margo and Charlie Zollinger, and Aralee Larsen over for a little party.

 They had an Easter egg hunt in the front and backyard

Then pizza and ice cream cake

And then clover shaped pinata.

One of Aria's friends got her a Tinkerbell fairy that spins around and can actually fly in the house, which the girls had fun playing with.

Other than that, the kids just had a great time playing together for a few hours.  It was a pleasant little birthday party.

In other news, now that little Ryzen knows how to scoot around on his bum, he's turned into a micro tornado, like his sibling before him.  A right of passage, I suppose.

Lastly, we took Aria to the doctor this week to figure out what has been troubling her, and he confirmed, she's just a little plugged up.  Nothing a little Miralax can't fix. :)

Ups and Downs

This hasn't been a somewhat challenging week. Almost every day Aria refused to get up out of bed and go to school, and argued with us long enough to miss the bus, so I had to play hard ball and just put her in the car against her wishes and take her to school.  We're not sure why she's gotten so negative about going to school, because she seems to enjoy herself when she gets there.  The only thing we can think of is that every now and then she's starts feeling lousy.  For the last 2-3 months she's had an occasional day here or there where she tells us her tummy hurts near bedtime, but then that's the end of it.  But this week things have escalated. On Monday night she said the same thing and skipped dinner outright. The next day she seemed fine, and then several days later in the week when we went out to dinner to celebrate Tara's birthday, she said the same thing.  She didn't eat the food we ordered her at the restaurant and began complaining so much that we had to leave the restaurant early before we could even have cake. When we got home Tara asked me to take care of the kids, so she could go out shopping for herself, and shorting after she left, Aria threw up all over.  Then, the next morning she felt great again.  It's just been weird. We're thinking she's either allergic to something or she's constipated. Hopefully we'll figure it out soon.

As for the good things that occurred,I pulled out my guitar for probably the first time in a year and started playing for the kids. I've missed playing guitar.  I've just felt so busy with work that I got out of the habit of playing. I need to get back into the habit of playing again. Aria has always loved music, so after I was done playing she took one of my picks and began playing and singing along for quite a while. It was fun to see her enjoying herself.

 The kids also decked out a little table for a tasty meal for the Chad & Missy Murphy's kids when they came over for dinner last Sunday.  It was fun having them over.

Here's a little video of a book Zade has slowly been building over the last few months.  He'll work on little pictures and then adds them to it.  Here's a link to a short video we put up on YouTube where he explains it:

**** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSqPsk9yJuU&feature=youtu.be ****