Hellooo spring!

The following are a collection of photos and videos from the past week. I'll try to give you the play by play...

The girls are slowing getting over their mutual fear of live animals! This has largely been due to Llantita (found under a tire = llanta), the friendly neighborhood cat who happens to belong to two lovely girls of which our little girls are quite fond. Ask our friends - this is definitely worthy of documentation.
Above - Llantita tracked down in our neighbor's flower bed.
And yes, this is also a subliminal political message.

The weather has been *awesome*. (Um, did it snow in Iowa yesterday? No, no smugness, just continual incredulous-ness that I'm truly a world apart here in Virginia.) Last week Olaiya asked if we could picnic, and before I could get all stodgy, she had a blanket on the ground and I found myself pouring my Mt. Dew outside, gratefully enjoying that I had indulged one of my daughter's many whims.



Easter! We didn't get too far on the egg coloring* front (mom and babes too impatient and lacking foresight to boil eggs and mom's brain too low on oxygen to blow out more than 2 yolks and whites), but Olaiya went the way of instant gratification with her pal Crayola Magic Marker in hand. *Side rant - did you all see the "standard" egg coloring kit this year? Packets of dye with plastic bags included? No more dipping and soaking eggs until they're the desired, delightfully saturated color? Instead, you squeeze a couple drops into the bag and kinda roll the egg around inside? Total crock. I think we'll have to give it the old school try with our left over dye and see what we get. Olaiya's been hounding me to do another egg "project", so I think we just might.

Have you ever been to an Easter Eggstravaganza? Okay, we hadn't either. But since we now attend NCC, have young children and were kicking it on our own for the holiday, that has changed. The scene: rope off two large grassy squares of park (one for the PreK set, one for K-5). Cover with 10,000 plastic candy-filled eggs. Shout "Go!" with a bull horn.

And the children descend like a plague of locusts.

Olaiya wasting no time. (Do you see the air under her heels?)




Naomi went a bit slower and was excited about each one.

I wasn't kidding - there were really 10,000 eggs.

"What took us two weeks took you two minutes."
-Pastor Joel smilingly on the bull horn post "hunt"

Naomi in her Easter best, clutching her candy from the piñata at church. What, didn't you always have a piñata for Easter?