the hunted

When Pearl woke up from her afternoon nap on Easter Sunday it was time to hunt for Easter baskets. George was quite patient to wait all that time, and when we said he could start looking he was so thrilled. He remembered that last year his basket had been in the dryer so that is the first place he wanted to look :).


He found his basket in the bathtub and immediately started examining its contents.


I love his fist-fulls of Dum Dums.


After he had looked through his basket for a few minutes he left all his goodies on the coffee table so that he could go help Pearl find hers. The best part was that Pearl was not interested in finding hers; she had anything she could have ever dreamed of right there in front of her :).



She's like, "Woooww! Mom! Have you seen all these treats?!"


George was hunting for Pearl's basket in the kitchen and I decided I should probably have John bring her in to join the party. I seriously cannot handle how much I love her up on those tippy toes.


She sat down on the tile and watched over her shoulder as George discovered her basket in a cupboard. He brought it over to her for her to look through and she humored us by glancing down at its contents for a moment before speed-crawling back into the living room to attack George's treats.


We didn't know if we'd be able to do any Easter egg hunting with extended family this year since both of our families were supposed to be out of town, so we planned a mini hunt at our house with a few dozen eggs for the kids to find. George was loving it.


Pearl was less impressed, but she did reach out and grab a few colorful eggs as long as they were within about 2 feet of her :).


One thing she quickly learned to do was pop those little eggs right open and sample the contents.




This was our best attempt at a photo with both of them and their Easter baskets. Pearl could not be bothered to look up from her candy.


In the end, John's mom ended coming back into town to be with the family on Easter so she put together an Easter dinner and hunt at her house that evening. I feel really blessed to have all of this family; George only has one cousin at all right now, and I love that when we get together with John's extended family there are so many more "cousins" to play with. Most of them are actually John's cousins or his cousins' kids, but George loves them all so much and they have so much fun together.

Pearl was loving sitting on Grandpa's lap, especially because he was wearing glasses :). She loves swiping glasses off of people's faces and putting them on her own.


These pictures of Pearl with her great-grandpa (John's grandpa) are some of my most favorite photos ever. I think I love them so much because I know how much Grandpa truly delights in and adores his grandchildren, and that tender love is so evident to me when I look at these. Seeing these pictures makes me want to get photos of my children like this with each of our grandmas and grandpas so that I have them to show my babies someday.


Oh, they seriously melt me. Love these two people so much.


Logan had his basket all ready to go :).


Here are some of the younger kids sitting by the door waiting for the green light to go out and start hunting for eggs.


And they're off!






Aunt Lisa helped Pearl find a few eggs with some special things in them just for her like little hair bows. I love that Pearl totally looks like she should be Lisa's daughter-- so pretty with their dark hair and blue eyes!


Georgie was happy with his findings.


Pearl snuck a few treats that had fallen into the grass from someone's basket. Or, more likely, her brother thought it would be really thoughtful of him to give his little sister some peanut M&Ms to snack on.


After all of the eggs were found we decided it would be a good idea to have a little more sugar, so I made this cake for us to celebrate Grandma and Grandpa's birthdays.


I really like the perspective of these photos-- Grandpa's hand and the cake in focus with him blurred in the background. He was trying to block the wind from blowing out the candles before he and Grandma were ready.


There they go, only a few years old it would appear :).


The cake actually turned out to be pretty tasty, which I was happy about because sometimes elaborate plans to make fancy cakes end up being nice to look at but not so great for eating. Yay for a festive cake that was still worth the calories to eat :). (I cannot remember the website where I got the recipe and idea for this cake from, but I know I linked to it from The Pioneer Woman's cooking blog... if you are curious or want to make it I am sure you could find the link there.)



Mama and baby eating some cake. (This was a momentous occasion since it was the first day John and I had eaten refined sugar in quite sometime after giving it up for Lent this year.)


Daddy and his girl waiting for their piece.


John snapped a few pictures of people as we were eating on the porch and I especially liked this one of Spencer. He is so happy and cute.


And this one of Natalie and Prestley.


With cake and candy-filled bellies the kids decided to hit the trampoline for a little jumping. (I love Prestley's flying ponytail in this second picture.)


Pearl is just like her mama in that she doesn't ever want to miss a party, so she made a beeline off the porch to join the big kids.


Luckily Grandma was there to wrap her up in a blanket and take her out for some stories on the trampoline. Lucky for Pearl, but mostly lucky for me because I was getting cold and really didn't want to have to take her out there myself :).


Wowsers, that was a lot! My final Easter photo this year is just to document my stealth thieving ability. John thought it was totally mean of me to steal this many paint chip samples from Home Depot, but I say, they are free, that is not stealing! Who's with me?! I saw this linked to on lots of blogs this year and decided to make one for myself. I'm sure I could dig up the original site to credit it to if anyone wanted it. I love the cheery, colorful splash it adds to my living room and I still haven't taken it down. Easter egg garland year-round, anyone?

john says i should title this post "halloween post"

Because he is creative like that.

I know that I am late to this party, but my internet was all broken, remember? So, a week late, you get the remainder of our Halloween festivities (well, the ones that made the blog-cut, anyway).

First there was the carving of the pumpkins we picked out at the patch. Pearl and I let the boys get out all the guts.


And while they carved...

(what?? you don't let your three-year-old wield large kitchen knives?)

... Pearl did what she does: licked and gummed.


After sucking on the outside of a pumpkin for quite some time and getting absolutely nothing out of it, I decided to give Pearl the top to one of the pumpkins so that she could suck on the inside edge and at least get a little raw pumpkin flavor.


Here is what we ended up with. George requested scary pumpkins, and I think we mostly delivered. John carved the giant, man-eating mouther, and I carved the evil eye guy.


Next up was the fall festival at our little school. If there is one lesson I have learned repeatedly as a teacher it is that the party days are always way more work and more tiring than the regular days. But I sure do love this little class of mine.


Remember when I alluded to lots of alliteration for us this Halloween? I was talking about my kids' costumes. We were all about "P"s this year-- I had a pirate, a peacock, and a pink poodle, and I must say, they rocked their little costumes out.

George got to dress up in his pirate (more specifically, Captain Hook) costume for the festival and parade at school, and it was so much fun for me to have my own child racing by me in the parade this year. His class sang some Halloween songs for us after, and I just still can't believe that my boy is old enough to be up there with all the other kids. Here are a couple of shots of Pea in her Peacock costume at the school and then G in the parade and singing with his class.

I was determined to get a few decent pictures of my kiddos in their costumes this year. I always have great intentions to do so, but things always get crazy on Halloween and I don't end up having the time to get any pictures with decent light. BUT on Saturday afternoon I had a few spare minutes (and even postponed Pearlie's nap a bit) to get the kids dressed up and pull out my camera. The rain threatened to ruin our efforts, but it held out just long enough to let us get a few shots. Here are my handsome pirate and sweet peacock.

I did not get any good pictures of them together, but here's the best I could do.

If you look closely you will notice the little raindrops starting to show up on Pearl's costume in those last pictures. It was rainy and pretty cold that evening for trick-or-treating, so we swapped out the Peacock for the much warmer Pink Poodle, and even though I was mildly obsessed with the Peacock, I have to say, Pearl makes a pretty darn cute poodle.

We went over to the church for a little trunk-or-treat action that ended up having nothing to do with trunks and more to do with buckets of candy on tables inside (thank you, rain). Whoever invented the whole trunk-or-treat thing was brilliant though-- best way ever to get large quantities of candy in small amounts of time.

The picture on the right is of Miss Poodle in the church, watching all of the costumed kids go by with much wonder. (And her cherubic cheeks just about kill me.)

Even though George scored more than enough candy at the church, he still wanted to go trick-or-treating to a few houses. We started out with our next-door neighbors in the drizzly cold, and although this picture is blurry, I really love it. Love the daddies holding the smallest kids, and the bigger kids walking ahead down the rainy street, and the movement that is trick-or-treating.

I was amazed at George's eagerness to continue trick-or-treating despite the cold. The other kids were freezing and done, but G wanted to keep going. So we did. I actually really loved walking along with him from house to house, reminding him to say "trick-or-treat," and greeting all our neighbors with my sweet little Captain Hook. John held Pearl the whole time and came along, too. My poor freezing Poodle, but we couldn't make her brother miss out on this once-a-year candy giving phenomenon, and John and I both wanted to be with George, too.

So we all trudged on together in the dark and the rain.

George got a LOT of candy. When we got home I introduced him to the fantastic world of dumping out and sorting all your candy to see how many of the good things you got. Pearl was crazy about all the bright colored wrappers and interesting things to grab.

I love this picture because George was trying so carefully to keep Pearl's grabby little hands at bay by sticking his leg out, but oh no, that was not going to stop her. And George is too nice to really get mad and take all the candy completely out of her reach.

See? Nevermind that the sucker still has its wrapper on.

Well good, now that I am caught up with all that (and we have the internet working at our house again), hopefully I can stay a little more current. I take way too many pictures.