Easter Fun!

The weather was perfect for an Easter weekend at home!

On Saturday afternoon we died some Easter eggs. Note to Mommy - every year we buy more dye even though there are 3 or 4 boxes of it in the Easter box - Don't buy dye next year! 

Putting stickers on our finished-colored eggs. 

We even found a fun Easter mold for jello jigglers - they were a big hit! 

Easter morning - up early and ready to go see what the Easter bunny left! Parker was very excited to see that he even had a fun bucket to collect his loot in. 

The Easter bunny left some goodies for Riley next to the gate. Princess shoes, an Easter book, and some Aladdin princess stuff for her castle!

Running through the backyard looking for eggs - and some Easter loot! 

Riley figuring out the whole egg hunt thing. 

Taking a seat to look in the eggs once she figured out there were treats in some of them! 

"Look Daddy - candy!" 

Full bucket of eggs! 

That crazy Easter bunny! He hung Parker's basket in a tree! A new book, and some fun new stuff for his Hot Wheels track. 

Eggs hiding in the sandbox. 

Riley turned out to be the best egg hunter of all. Maybe because she is closest to the ground. 

Daddy helped with a lift to get the egg off the side of the truck. 

Kid loot - silly Easter bunny. 

One of the funniest things of the day - the kids discovering Peeps. Mommy does not enjoy Peeps at all, but the kids took down one each before breakfast. Yuck. 

Tried to make bunny pancakes, did not succeed. 

Delicious Easter dinner. Ham, Ben's Favorite Potatoes, Broccoli Casserole, Homemade rolls, and deviled eggs. 

Good boys who ate dinner even had Strawberry Shortcake for dessert!

Happy Easter!

Springtime at the Zoo!

One Spring day a few weeks ago we decided it was finally warm enough to head out to the zoo for the day! We hadn't been to the zoo since Halloween and Riley is now much more able to have fun and appreciate the adventure.

One of the highlights of the zoo is always the Otters. It is so fun to watch them swim by and the kids always try to chase them. 

The Otters are so playful and love the attention in the glass - they swim by and pop their heads up if there are kids there to play - and if we are early enough we usually have the viewing area to ourselves! 

Strolling along Elephant trail. Riley was excited to be able to walk with big brother along the trail. 

Photo op with Mommy by the pandas. 

We have never seen the pandas outside in all of our trips to the zoo. And a new baby panda was born this winter and we finally got a chance to see it! 

Up the tree is the new baby panda. What we didn't know at the time was this was the first time that Bao Bao had climbed a tree! It was pretty funny to see her climbing up and down. 

Looking for the elephants. We didn't get to see them well today, they were in one of the side pen areas. 

Following lots of adventure we stopped for lunch. We bought some things to supplement the food Mommy brought from home. One of the things they had was couscous - apparently Riley loves it as much as mommy! 
Looking forward to a lot more zoo trips this year!

Enjoying the New House

We love our new house and how open it is. 

 The kids have a bathroom of their own now that Mommy and Daddy have one in their room. It has a nice big bathtub for playing.

We can spy the kids from the couches in the living room and make sure they are playing nicely. Sometimes Parker likes to spy into Riley's room to see if he wants to go play with her. He says his favorite part of the new house is that everyone's rooms are all together. 

We even have some friends close by who we can have over for fun afternoons of NASCAR. Our friends the Andersons came over one of our first weekends and brought Richie and Brady. Riley was excited to have someone else around to read to her. 

The downstairs living room is mostly the playroom - Lots of train tracks, race tracks, and lego creations are sure to be built here. 

Mommy is so excited to have a nice big kitchen were the boys can help out with the dishes. They crank their music up and get washing! 

A regular activity at the new house is running circles though the family room and kitchen. They would run forever if we let them, but it gets a little noisy (and dangerous when they start to elbow eachother out of the way!)