T-Ball

Easter Part 2

The past several years we have spent Easter with our good friends the Needs and several other long-time friends. Now that we all have kids there is quite a crowd. Denise and her mom outdo themselves creating a fantastic egg hunt for the kids and grown-ups. And the food, of course, is abundant! This year we were blessed with a gorgeous day - in MARCH! After the snow last week, this is a welcome change!

We are so blessed by the fellowship of good friends. Thank you Denise & Dwayne!

Gotta look hard for those eggs!

Kyla excited over her finds

A cuddle with daddy on the hammock

Joanne, Piper and Cecily

Easter

Some of our activities to celebrate Easter:

My friend Wendi (who is a professional baker) invited some moms and their kids over to decorate Easter cookies.

Evelyn and Isaiah had a great time and got pretty creative.

This egg is one of my favorites that Evelyn made. She came up with making the stripes all on her own!

Isaiah took a few cues from his older sister to mix some of the colors.

Today was Palm Sunday and at church the kids "processed" through the sanctuary with palm branches while the kids choir sang "Hosanna". I didn't get pictures of that, but once we got home the kids put on their own little Palm Sunday performance.

I took more videos of their performance, but I was having such a hard time controlling my laughter that I thought I would spare you the shaky video. This song they made up though was my favorite.

Spring is Here?

After a torrential downpour and gale-force winds on the first day of spring, day 3 brought us this:

I think it may have snowed once here in November or December, but not enough to delay or cancel school. So maybe the school district felt they could use some of that time they hadn't used earlier in the year. School was delayed 2 hours for a trace amount of snow that had pretty much entirely disappeared by noon and was replaced by shirt-sleeve weather by late afternoon.

I seem to remember a poem or literary reference comparing the month of March to a temperamental woman. Gender bias aside, this certainly has been a temperamental month.

First Home-Improvement Project

Now that we've been in our house a little over a year, we thought it might be time to actually attempt some of our wish list for making our house our own. Fortunately, the previous owners had done quite a bit of updating, so most of the projects on our list are fairly minor and really just about adding some of our own personal touches and creating spaces that fit our lifestyle.

I guess Jeremy got bit by the DIY bug because just before Christmas he pulled out a box of wood plank flooring we'd been given by a friend and began planning out the re-flooring of our downstairs entry.

Before (but after he'd already cut the carpet out. He had to put it back for the picture.)

However, as I understand is true of all home improvement projects, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than we initially thought. Mainly, our plan to use wood flooring didn't turn out to be the best option since most of the resources didn't recommend installing hardwoods directly on concrete. We didn't want to put in a sub floor over the concrete, and the special adhesive that we could use for installing wood flooring on concrete was expensive and could only be found in a 2-gallon container - way more than we would use on this project. We debated the alternatives for several days and did cost comparisons for several more.

Finally, we settled on using ceramic tile. The previous owner had left the extra tile they'd used in remodeling the bathrooms and the extra grout, so we already had most of the materials. We only needed to buy a few extra small tiles to fill in the space, plus the mortar, trim and renting a carpet stretcher. The tiling turned out to be surprisingly easier than I thought it would be. Jeremy gets all the credit for doing most of the work. I can really only claim credit for the concept. Aside from the time for everything to dry and set, it didn't take all that long to finish once we'd settled on what we were doing. And, I have to say I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

After: A much easier-to-clean entry!

Now that we've successfully completed our first DIY project, our confidence is high! Don't worry, we won't be knocking down any walls - yet!