Easter Fun

 Our first day of spring looked like this....

 Today the weather is BEAUTIFUL!!!  We might even reach 70 degrees! YES!! I love spring! I love summer!

The Easter Spider came along with the Easter Bunny.  The Easter Spider leaves a trail of yarn that the girls have to follow to find a clue that leads to their basket.

We went to an Easter Egg hunt at our local grocery store.

 We then dyed eggs with our neighbors.

Check out these cool eggs my friend dyed using onion skins, flowers, and ferns. I guess it is the Croatian way to dye eggs.

 We had our first watermelon of the season!

 We then had an egg hunt at a campground not too far from our house.

 Look at the blooms on my Magnolia tree!!!

And of course...a movie of all our adventures:

St. Patrick's Day

We usually have corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's Day, but since it's not really Irish and my kids don't like it anyway, we had traditional shepherd's pie.  It was yummy!

We ended our meal with pistachio pudding bundt cake and green key lime pie ice cream.  Yummy!

 Of course we had to have green lemonade too. Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!

Happy Pi Day!

 We had frozen chicken pot pie for dinner followed by pudding pie. Yummy!!  Happy Pi day!!

Spring!!!

I filled the planter with spring flowers.  Daffodils are definitely my favorite.  They look so happy.  I love the William Wordsworth poem about wandering lonely like a cloud over the field of daffodils. I'd love to be a cloud floating over a field of daffodils in the spring.

 I have to plant pansies because they are my mother's favorite flowers.  The reason they are my mother's favorite flower is because they were her mother's favorite flowers. There is a children's song in our church that talks about pansies growing beautifully even when the weather is still cold. Both my mother and grandmother love that song, so I plant pansies in their honor.

These are poppies just about ready to bloom. 

 I love the smell of hyacinths.  Most spring flowers don't have much of a fragrance, but hyacinths do. I have to plant a few of them.

 And of course...the first sign of spring....crocuses. I hope the squirrels don't eat the bulbs and my flowers come up next year and every year.

 Happy Spring Everybody who reads this!!

Cat Tree and Biggest Tonka Truck I Have Ever Seen

 We got this fantastic cat tree for free on Freecycle. We were hoping our cat would play in it and sleep in it.  Her current favorite spot is the top bunk in Erin Joy's bedroom.  Bella, the cat, loves sleeping on Erin Joy's head.  Unfortunately, Erin Joy is allergic to Bella.  We hoped Bella would choose this for her new favorite place.

Nope.  The only time she visits her new cat tree is when we pick her up and put her on it.  We even sprinkled it with catnip. Nope.  Still prefers sleeping in the top bunk on Erin Joy's head.

And now to change the subject completely, but I just happened to have downloaded these pictures tonight...

 We not only live within walking distance of our school and a waterfall....we live within walking distance of a big Tonka truck.

We decided to explore the road near our house that leads to a quarry and discovered this big truck.  Pretty fun! My nephews need to visit so they can see it!

 Rachel can almost squeeze between the two back tires.

 Other quarry pictures...

Beautiful trees and hill sides being blasted away for rock and dirt....

We have several quarries in the area.  Several logging companies too...

A lot of trees and rock gets hauled away from our mountains.

Not so sure how I feel about that...

I know we need wood, gravel, rocks, and dirt and I know the companies are careful to plant more trees, but there sure are a lot of empty spots on our mountains.  The blasting is noisy too.