Happy Spring!

Hurray! We celebrated coming out of a long, dark winter with a spring break visit from Grandpa Dan and Grandma Mary. The winter semester started with a bit of excitement with rolling power outages for a few days and a SNOW DAY but then proceeded to go downhill from there with about a MONTH of sickness (all four of us). Poor Rosemary's class got it hard -- on Valentine's Day there were only five kids (out of 12) in class and all of them had to miss the preschool prom (fortunately we have three more years at St. Marks).

We took the grandparents to San Antonio, the Mercado and the Alamo. It was pretty crowded due to spring break, but we still had fun. While the adults cruised the museum, the kids played with rocks. See Louis's silly face in the video below. He's mostly a very stoic kid, but has been so cheerful lately and sometimes does either this silly face or another one James calls "blue steel" (after Ben Stiller in "Zoolander" --its a pretty good impression!).






When we all got home we tried on our new outfits -- Louis's Mexican button down shirt and Rosemary's sundress -- and had dinner outside. Rosemary helped James work on the treehouse, which is QUITE the construction project, but coming along as you can see.


A morning at the Nature Center. Note the *handmade* outfit that Rosemary is wearing (Grandma Mary found some time to sew!).



And fortunately the Austin Rodeo was in town, so we all enjoyed our first Rodeo. We all really loved the cattledog trials. Rosemary couldn't get enough of it, in fact. Unfortunately Louis is scared of cattledogs, longhorns, cows, sheep, carousel (see his first carousel ride below -- every time I tried to put him on the horse he would burst out in tears so I gave up) and pretty much anything except pigs. On the other hand, Rosemary was brave as could be, riding ponies, carousels and ferris wheels. We really had a fun visit with the grandparents and Rosemary told Grandpa Dan when he was walking out the door to the airport, "It was really fun having you," and told me later, "It was sad to see them go."

In this glorious weather we've gone to Zilker gardens with some of Rosemary's friends. Below is a picture of her in the gardens with Esme (who looks like her sister!) and below, with Flora (Louis wanted to get in the picture above):

























Rosemary learning Japanese dance from her friend Beatrice (who is kind of amazing!):



This winter we've been going to "Music Together," which has been really awesome. Its Louis's first "class" and he's thoroughly enjoyed it. We have a CD of all the songs from class and James and Maureen are pretty sick of hearing it, but the kids are not at all. Rosemary of course insists that you play them in the correct order so we've mostly heard the first half of the CD. Louis dances -- REALLY dances -- when you put it on.



The place where we take classes has a nice waiting area with toys and activities for the kids. Their favorite activity really takes me back: windexing the window. When I was in preschool, we had a similar activity in class, which was my absolute favorite thing to do. So much so that I got my mom to take me to class early so I could secretly switch around our activity "assignments" (we each got a colored bead in our box telling us our activity for the morning) so that I got to windex every day!

In February we also had to say goodbye to our third, adult child, otherwise known as Aunt Mo, who has been living with us since New Year's. Fortunately there was time to celebrate her 22nd birthday with a BOUNCY house in the backyard. Before her friends, the big kids, came at night, we had a party with our friends Terra, Beatrice & Wilder. Wilder was pretty enamored of the keg and Beatrice had a blast getting wet and using the bouncy house as a slip and slide.