Andrew's birthday celebration!

 
I loved Andrew's museum trip. We wanted to do something different for B'days this year. We are trying out no party and instead picking a museum to go to. Andrew invited 4 friends (one was his sister) and we visited the Mining and Mineral museum. It is really cool and I'd love to go there on a date sometime so that I can slowly go through the musuem instead of 5 six year old speed.

My neice

 
Emily attacked the dress up clothes with much vigor as well. She enjoyed the whole witch wardrobe. Here she is with her mom, my sister, Kaylynn. Kaylynn plays the piano on about the same level as me (which means she can plunk out a few tunes, but mostly we are at a place where we just know how much we don't know).

cake on a stick

 
I have never seen anyone use their fork like this before, but it just cracks me up. And what do you say to your kid for eatting this way? Use your silverware? Use your fingers? I just could not think of anything appropriate to say to 'chastise' her for eatting this way. So I laughed and took a picture.

4 hot Williams Women

 My sister and my mom visted us last month for my sister's birthday. One of my other sister's that lives here locally came over and we "Williams Women" had a great time. We stayed at home with the exception of running to Dunkin' Donuts.

Jeff's the man...uh, toliet man

 
Jeff replaced the wax ring on our toilet. We had suspected that might be a problem, and once we pulled the old toilet off, we knew that was the problem. Now we have a toilet that does not rock and a bathroom that smells pleasant most of the time (hey, I do have small kids!).

Way to go honey!

Harriet Potter or Maggie Weasley?

 
We have moved our dress up clothes to a chest in the family room. They get played with much more this way. This is one of Maggie's favorite ensembles. If she even knew about Harry Potter, I would think she was copying the idea, but I think she just likes the look and feel of this outfit.

Easter Egg Hunt Morning

 

We have egg hunts the day before Easter. Evidentally we forgot to tell William because he is still in bed. We lined up the kids and let them go in waves with Maggie getting a 2 minute head start and JJ getting a 1 minute head start and AnnaLisa and Andrew bringing up the rear. The older kids did a great job of helping the younger ones find eggs. Afterward we emptied all the jellybeans into one bowl and the kids could have a few jelly beans through out the next week. At the end of the week, we got rid of any remaining ones, but this way we only at a bag of jelly beans between our entire family. I was pretty happy about that, however the kids brought home a ton from school. Tell me why the schools can send home candy for every holiday, but aren't allowed to mention what the holidays are about? Crazy.

A child left to (her)self...

 ...bringeth her mother to shame (Proberbs 29:15).

First I need to explain the picture. This is a loaf of homemade bread that I only sliced one or two slices off the end. I did not slice up the whole loaf and put it in the bread box as is my normal routine. I turned it on the sliced end, because that would keep it from drying out.

This was one of my less than stellar days when I was more on survival mode than mother extrordinaire mode. I admit that MaggieMae was unsupervised for 15 minutes here. If I remember correctly I was sitting infront of the computer with a baby on my lap, falling asleep - that is me falling asleep, not the baby (sometimes I get on the computer to try and keep myself awake). Meanwhile MaggieMae scooted a stool over to the counter, and did this. I asked her why she did it(she took her fingers and somewhat methodically poked wholes through out the loaf, while not knocking it over) and I could not understand her response, but it seemed very logical to her.

football mom in training?

 
Maggie loves to carry around two babies. Evidentally having twin siblings affects a child. One day she stumbled on some cool sunglasses her brother has and started wearing them while playing with her babies (who coincidentally are named William and Rosi. Yes, William is the one wearing the pink dress. Oh, they both are. He is the girl one, oh, they both are. Um, oh, yeah, he is the bald one).

What out soccer and hockey moms, MaggieMae is on the field and she brought her own team.

yes, I make the two year old vacuum

 
The boys are known for dragging sand into the house via their shoes. The sand is usually from the playground. I use to think that it was a secret plan of my boys to create their own sandbox at home. Indeed, they would dump sand from their shoes into the empty sandbox. Finally we broke down and bought some sand and filled up the old sandbox(around here we have a few cats that will use any uncovered sandbox as a litter box, so now I have to be extra vigilant to make sure it stays covered). I had hoped that would actually cut down on sand in our home. Well, the boys continue to bring sand home in their shoes (eveidentally the two were unrelated). To handle this sand problem, I bought a hand-held vacuum for them to clean up after themselves. It has worked well. I am not sure why, buy Maggie decided to dump out her brothers boots onto the carpet. I told her to go clean it up, and I got this shot.

A new color...

During








After
 
MaggieMae was going into the bathroom to use it tonight and she turns to me and says, "Mom, our bathroom is orange." I laughed because while it is a tan/gold color (formally called 'Cressant') we painted it two days ago and now she notices?!

I asked one of my friends for some advice about what color to paint it and she suggested this color and then offered to paint it for us (evidentally I have crazy friends who love to fix, paint, organize, etc). I got all the supplies and took her up on the offer. The previous color was a mauroon, which I loved, but realized that we probably needed to go to a more neutral color as we hope to sell or rent out our home in the next year or so. Maggie and JJ wanted to help, so they got their turns. I was even able to do a bit of the painting, although most of the credit goes to my good friend Denise who did an amazing job!