HOORAY FOR SPRING!!

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY! We've decided this is our family holiday, seeing as we're Irish and all. :) We had green beans and green jell-o for dinner and everything! This is our leprechaun, Pearl, that we made at playgroup a couple of weeks ago. We've been growing her hair for St. Pattie's Day ever since and it came in fabulously.


Analise and Kate have been enthralled with all of the flowers blooming this spring (even though they are driving everyone's allergies insane!) They love picking all of the little weed flowers they find when we go on walks and the clover blossoms are their favorite. And yes, Kate has eaten some. (She also picked a noodle I'd stepped on off the bottom of my shoe and ate that this week also. But that's another story . . .)
This week we rediscovered hopscotch. Aly remembered it from when I taught it to her in North Carolina, but none of the kids in the neighborhood knew what it was. How sad! All we needed was a board drawn on our driveway with sidewalk chalk and a rock for each girl and we were set. The kids loved it! Here's Aly in action with her "lucky hat" that she made at a birthday party.

I love park days! It's the perfect weather right now - not too hot, not too cold. They've started up playgroup in our ward and I didn't realize how much I missed it - kids get to play and be active in the sunshine and I get to socialize with other moms. What could be better? Kate likes to sit on the big kids swings now and will just laugh and laugh and say, "I funny."

Here's the girls coloring - actually on paper. Kate went to church today looking like a Smurf because she got ahold of a blue marker, hid in the closet, and colored herself. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. The markers are now out of everyone's reach and the girls can only use them by coming to me first. But I'm glad Kate likes coloring. It's making sacrament meeting a little easier.

Oh, and a few more updates on Kate - she went to her first birthday party yesterday and was in heaven! There was a bounce house and she loved being knocked off her feet (she started singing "ashes, ashes, we all fall down!"). And finally, Kate is definitely in the temper tantrum stage. But it just cracks me up because after the initial meltdown she'll come to me and say, "eyes crying; eyes sad." I tell her I'm sorry that her eyes are sad and are they ready to be happy? She'll say "mmh-hmm" and we'll move on with our day.