The girls today...

I think my babies were extra funny this morning. Genny is wearing my T-shirt and sending a text message on her cinderella phone. Note the sunglasses on her head.

This baby bed is Audrey's favorite toy. Hands down. We find her sitting here all the time. She drags books, toys, blankies over to it and then sits there with them!

I think it's her "Thinking spot."

Today we made a tent. It was awesome.

And Audrey tried out the sunglasses as well!

Augering

Last week a gentleman came out from the city to put these in the yard before Robert dug holes for the girls' swingset. You know, we'd like to continue to enjoy electricity and water service while enjoying the swingset.A couple of days later, Genny announced "Daddy, I moved some of your flags!"

{I should mention that no one told her to leave the flags alone. And they were right on her level. And red. And flags. And she's 3. You would have moved them too....}

So, keeping very calm, he says, "Well, Gen, show me which ones and we'll put them back."

"I moved this one and this one and ... well, all of them." {awesome}

Despite that small obstacle, today Rob rented an auger. And prepared to dig giant holes in the ground. It was lovely outside this evening.

Augering. Still nice outside.

And then it rained. See, we put up the pop-up tent thingie. That's an auger on the right. That's a burnt-out shop light on the left.

Still smiling despite the great quantities of mud, lightning, and rain.

Still augering. This thing is noisy. I'm sure the neighbors will be calling any minute now. I'll tell them they should be grateful to have electricity after the game of musical flags.

Funny Bunnies

I think there's something on my head!

Did you put something on my head?

And why do you keep calling me "little bunny"?

Catching up... funny Audrey faces!

I wasn't able to upload pictures from my camera lately since my computer is acting up again.. But now that it is, I'll try to get caught up.

Suspicious, with cup.

fishface.

hair. wild.

Easter!

Moving the week before Easter creates an additional challenge to the sport of dressing everyone for Easter Sunday.

See, we managed to get it together in the end.

I had not yet uncovered my hairdryer and curling iron. And unfortunately they had been packed in the stages of “throw all this random crap into a box and don’t label it” It just adds to the challenge, you know?

Robert’s shoes were missing. There was quite a while where he was considering wearing flip flops. That or barefoot. Turns out his shoes hadn't gotten moved and we hadn't noticed that yet.

Genny’s dress went missing. Because I made sure to put it where it couldn't be lost in the move.

Gen refused to eat breakfast. Why? Probably because I had stuffed chocolate in eggs and hidden it in the house. Why eat when you can look for candy? What did I expect?

I had thought that hunting eggs would be the pinnacle of excitement for Genny. It was, but it was a slow process. About 10 eggs per hour was her speed. Unfortunately, I had stuffed and hidden about 50 eggs. You do the math.

I had bought really cute feather hair clips for the girls. They were shrink wrapped, and I didn’t open them until exactly when we needed to leave for church. And then I found this:

They were slightly larger than expected. She looked like a deranged fraggle. Why don't I open things before Easter?

The rest of the hair bows in our house (all 300 or so of them) have not been unpacked yet. So shortly after we should have left for church, I was tying some ribbon around Genny’s ponytails. Oh, the irony.

Audrey’s pantyhose didn’t even touch her legs. I know… you’re laughing at me for putting pantyhose on a baby. It even had little flower designs in it. But they made her look like a fancy albino elephant. So there you go.

In the carnage of the egg hunt, jellybeans were dropped and subsequently discovered by both Audrey and Daisy. Judging by the number of half-chewed jellybeans I found, neither of them found them delightful…

Yet after all of that, all of us made it to church mostly on time, completely dressed, and mostly appropriately….

And this year Genny "got" Easter a little bit more. We taught her to respond to "Jesus is risen" with "He is risen indeed!" and that made me awfully happy!

Cookie Monsters

So today, even though I probably should have been pushing forward on the move, I told Genny we could make cookies. We hadn't done that in a while, and it's one of Gen's favorite things to do. I didn't want to create a huge mess while we were showing our old house, and cookies do that. Lots of dishes -- too many to stuff into the microwave oven. And we hadn't taken time to do that since we'd moved. So it was a special treat!

Genny was thrilled.

She got to pick the color. A violent shade of purple! With sprinkles and M&M's!

She was quite deliberate about the decorations. And my cookie sheet looks awful... gee, someone should have thrown that out in the move!

Audrey's main function was as a cookie tester. She likes purple cookies as well, apparently.

Easter eggs

Last year, Genny and her Daddy dyed Easter eggs. And now here's the rest of the story…..

Audrey had been home about 3 weeks, which meant she was not sleeping ever, she was screaming constantly, she was attached to her monitor, which was going off a lot. Things were ugly. Add to that the fact that I had mostly lost my mind and was having trouble stringing together a sentence, much less preparing for a holiday. I counted myself fortunate that Genny had an Easter dress already and an Easter basket I had bought for her the year before. On some midnight trip to WalMart, I had picked up stuff for her Easter basket, and with a guilty sigh, I threw a package of egg dye into the basket.

I told myself that dyeing eggs was important… no, vital. After all, she was 2 and surely she expected to do that (she didn’t) and it was crucial to her childhood (it wasn’t) and it really was worth the effort (nope!). And since I was so busy dealing with Audrey, on the Saturday before Easter, I threw the box of dye at Robert with an ugly growl… telling him “Go dye eggs with your child.” He obliged, and he didn't even ask why it was all that important (after all, he had to explain to Genny what they were going to do… and why… she thought it was odd until the little cups of dye appeared….) We discovered that we didn’t even know how to hard-boil eggs and kept making egg-drop soup.

So that’s how it went last year. But I had pretty pictures, and I thought that I posted them but apparently I didn't, making me feel like our lives were somewhat normal. And Genny had fun with her Daddy, who was a very good sport about the whole thing.

I should note that Robert has a much nicer version of this story in his head....

So this year we dyed eggs in a more fabulous way. We waited until Audrey Kate took a nap. We boiled eggs without making soup.

We bought this kind! Fabulous!

Genny thought the dye was very, very exciting.

And the glitter was better. She was in charge of all glittering. (For the record, my house is now going to be glittery until she’s 27 probably… but totally worth it)

Here’s our best creations.

And Daddy was happily out in the garage, hanging new fluorescent lights. He came in every now and then to admire our eggs.