Spring!!

The weather this weekend was wonderful! We were outside all day Saturday. We started with a trip to the nursery. The kids loved looking at all the plants, the ponds and other outdoor stuff. When we got home we planted a ton of flowers, a bush, and a tree. Here's Chloe posing with some of our work after she helped water on Sunday. (She wasn't anywhere near this clean on Saturday!) She was very curious and asked a lot of "What's that?" questions while we worked. So cute :-)

Thank goodness they're washable...

Let me start this by saying that Chloe LOVES to color... wait, let me change that to, I swear I was only out of the kitchen for a minute... nevermind, here's the story:

Thursday afternoon I took a load of laundry upstairs. Now I do laundry on an almost continual basis with 4 young children so this is nothing new. I was going to hang up the shirts and leave the rest of it on the floor of Eric's and my bedroom to fold later. Then I was coming back downstairs to put some chicken in the oven for dinner.

So I'm in Claire and Emilie's room hanging up shirts when Emilie runs in breathless, "Mom, you're not going to believe what Chloe just did." (Chloe and the other girls were happily watching the Smurfs on Boomerang just moments earlier. Our satellite dish had been broken for the past week. The repairman had fixed it just that afternoon so they were thrilled!) Anyway, Chloe came up the stairs like this:





She also colored the bottom of her feet and the floor in the kitchen. Thank goodness she used the washable markers that one of her sisters so helpfully left on the table for her coloring needs. She just couldn't resist. (For anyone reading with small children, baby wipes wash off washable markers pretty easily.) Chloe was so pleased with herself that I had to take a picture before we cleaned up. Then I put the markers up high in a drawer...

Happy Easter!

We had a great Easter! Yesterday we went to Elise's preschool's egg hunt which was a lot of fun. Then we headed over to Eric's parents' house for our niece, Liah's 5th birthday party. The girls loved playing with their cousins, and it was nice to be outside in the great weather.

This morning, the girls loved their Easter baskets and were incredibly excited! We then headed to church. Getting dressed up was so much fun, and they got tons of compliments on their dresses. Even more impressive was that despite church being incredibly crowded (Eric and I each had a girl on our lap just so we could squeeze into a pew!), the girls were really well behaved during church. Usually they just go to Sunday School, so I wasn't expecting much since they all had to be with us during the service this morning. What a nice surprise :-) After that we headed to my parents for lunch, an egg hunt, and more baskets of goodies. They are still coming down from the sugar... Anyway, here are a few pictures:

Claire took this picture of Eric and I. A little out of focus, but not too bad.

The girls all dressed up and ready for church with their new purses from the Easter bunny.

The bunny brought everyone new shades

Claire showing off her new swimsuit. She loves orange.

Elise's sunglasses

Yeah for Play Doh!

Checking out their loot.

Getting ready for Easter

We spent Saturday doing some of our family's traditional get ready for Easter stuff. We started the morning with a visit to Purina Farm's Easter Village to pet the baby animals and check out the big ones. We came home and dyed Easter eggs and the kids worked on Peeps art projects with my mom. The kids had a blast and then moved back outside for a driveway party at my neighbor's house. Here's some pics from our day:

Elise's "Goldilocks and the 3 Peeps"

Emilie's "Ra-peep-zl"

Claire's "Statue of Peeps"

Emilie swears someone was pinching her... maybe the bunny?