April in Pictures

Our first big event was Indie’s 2nd birthday party.  When Amy mentioned it a week before in front of Kenzi, she didn’t have the heart to say no when Kenzi asked in her please-oh-please-oh-please-say-yes voice if it was a dress-up party.  So Kenzi was the one kid who came in costume, not that she or anyone else minded.

That afternoon I gave Kev a haircut, because when you can do this with your son’s hair, it is just out of hand.

Moving on to Easter.  It was a windy, rainy day but we’d miss so much church recently that we were excited to get dressed up and go.  But no cute pics playing out in the grass this year.  You’ll have to settle for them crawling around on the futon, waiting impatiently for me to tell them it was time to grab their Easter baskets and head to church.

We actually had no plans for the rest of the day and it was pretty relaxing.  A little Panda Express for lunch, a little Sequence during naptime, a little walking into Kevey’s room to find that he’d had a blowout during naptime, a little poop on the carpet, a little screaming while Kev got washed off in water that takes way too long to warm up.  But he cheered up once he was in some clean jammies and the kids took a footrace around the house.

The next Saturday was Christopher’s 2nd birthday party.  After a week of perfect weather, we had another chilly, rainy day.  The kids didn’t mind since they got to ride the train at the park.  I stole these pics from Krista’s blog.

Thankfully I haven’t seen any of the pics taken of the carousel.  Bernie was out of town and therefore unable to fulfill his standing responsibility of accompanying the kids on things that make me carsick.  It could have been worse; the kids wanted to sit on this sleigh-looking thing that didn’t move up and down, so I only had to deal with the round-and-round portion.  Blech.  But the kids loved it, and we make sacrifices for the ones we love and all that mumbo-jumbo.

Yesterday we missed yet another week of Bible study week since Kenzi was sick.  (Digression here – how is it that Kenzi is a total veggie-phile and Keves will maybe eat two bites of a carrot in a week’s time, but she’s sick twice as often, and even when he does catch it his symptoms are milder?  Is his self-imposed Fruit and Meat diet the secret weapon to immunity?  It’s hard to convince him that veggies will make him feel good when his sister is crunching on bean sprouts and sweet potato peels, pausing occasionally to hack up a lung.)  Anyway, since we were at home I decided to have the kids help me plant our vegetable garden.  I’m hoping that if Kev is invested in the growth of the veggies, he might more strongly consider eating them.  This is the concrete that Bernie found at the bottom of our garden bed a couple weeks ago.

Who does that?  We’ve found concrete chunks buried in the front yard too.  So annoying.  But now that it’s just soil in there, we were ready to plant.  Our main reason for doing this is to save a little money in the long run, so my rule of thumb is that I will only plant things that I can’t buy at the store for less than a buck a pound.   So, I could buy orange bell peppers for $4/lb, or I can spend $3 on an orange pepper plant that will last us through the summer.  Orange bell pepper it is.  We also did red bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, Big Bertha tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, snow peas, spinach, and butternut squash.  Who knows if any of this will actually grow, but with only $20 worth of veggies here, I’m willing to give it a try.

And a shot of our Gravenstein apple tree.  The teensy blossoms reassure us that we haven’t killed it yet.

The second half of the month includes Bernie performing a wedding, a college girls retreat (Bernie’s first weekend alone with the kids!), a playdate at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and a visit from Nana that coincides with a conference that Bernie and I are attending.  In the course of a week and a half I will have spent as many nights away from my kids as I have in all of my motherhood to date.  Maybe I’ll snap a pic or two somewhere in there?