Tonight after supper Levi walked up to me and looked me straight in the eye and said in his nicest, sweetest, softest voice:

“Mama, I have a piece of candy from my candy bucket?”

🙂

(We have a rule that you can have a piece of candy from their bucket after supper if you’ve eaten all your food AND have had a vegetable.)

But I was just mesmerized by how amazingly polite he was in asking.  He can often be quite loud and demanding, but not tonight.  He was so gentle and sweet.  It was amazing.  I love that boy.

It’s teacher appreciation week and for the first time ever I had a student bring me a gift!  Isn’t it so sweet?!

Today was crazy hair day at school.  Both Chloe and Josiah had very specific ideas on how they wanted their hair and I did my best to make their dreams a reality.  Ha!

Chloe even made that little tea cup and attached it to a clip so it would stay in her hair.

When I have a few minutes to myself I enjoy scrolling through Facebook and watching videos of food.  In particular, desserts and cake decorating.  I know, I’m such a nerd.

I just love how beautiful the frosting can turn out with a simple swipe or smoothing motion.  I suppose it’s the same way that artists feel about watching people paint.  But I like this so much more, because after creating a masterpiece I can then EAT IT.  🙂

Although the other day I watched a video of Steve Irwin’s son… Do you remember Steve Irwin?  I really liked him.  He was on Animal Planet all the time.  He had such a passion for animals of all types and was crazy daring with them and knew so much about all of them.  Unfortunately he died a few years back–sadly from a stingray striking him.  But I saw a video the other day of his son, Robert (about 13 years old).  He is just the spitting image of his dad and has the same adorable Australian accent.

AND he has the same amazing passion for animals of ALL KINDS.

The videos that caught my attention the other day were of Robert appearing on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.  I think they are hilarous.  Robert is so cool and collected and comfortable with the animals/reptiles/insects and Jimmy Fallon is clearly not.  I just love how many fascinating facts about the animals Robert shares and how he always introduces each animal with excitement.  Even if it’s a bug!  He’ll say over and over, “isn’t she amazing!  Isn’t that amazing!”  😀  I love it!

This past Thursday was Alisa’s Birthday–and Kumi asked if we would be willing to host a surprise party for her.  Of course, we were more than happy to oblige.  We’ve been careful to not spill the beans to her over the past couple of weeks (and we didn’t tell the kids, just in case, until the morning of the party).  Kumi dropped off decorations and food and I took care of cleaning and getting things set up.  I was anxious that everything would turn out well and live up to everyone’s expectations but I’m happy to report everything went awesome!

She was surprised.  Well, at least she acted surprised.  🙂  A handful of her friends that are still in the area were able to come as well, so they all hung out in the basement and ate tacos and cake and then they hit a pinata (mostly for our kids benefit) and then played Bingo for prizes.  Playing bingo is a birthday tradition in their family.  They are actually the reason that we even own Bingo now.  When we met them (11 years ago!) they were so excited to share how they played every Birthday and how much fun it was–so I thought to myself, “Yes! That is totally a tradition I could see our family doing and loving as well.”  So I went out an bought a set.  It will still be a couple years until all the kids can play it well, but so far we’ve been able to get some good use out of it.  (On a side note, I really need to buy a better set of bingo balls since mine only had the letters printed on the side and most of the numbers have rubbed off, making it VERY tricky to call out numbers! I think they have nicer sets out there with the numbers actually engraved in the side… maybe I’m wrong… I’ll have to do some digging. Or maybe I’ll need to learn how to etch into ours… haha!)

The only catch to the night was that it was also the evening of our school’s Art Fair that Chloe and Josiah had some art work displayed.  Oh, and I should mention I was still teaching as normal.  So… Tim couldn’t take the kids, and neither could I, so Jen was kind enough take them and even take pictures for us!  Then they came back and the big kids were able to hang out with Alisa until bedtime.  It all ended up working smashingly well.

I’ll post more pictures of the Art Fair later this week.

And just like that Alisa, is back at college. She left on Friday morning.   We sure enjoyed having her here for the past couple weeks.

I love the joy in their faces.  I’m sure it was something that Tim said or did to make them all laugh, but I love it.

I only took a couple pictures of the actual Easter Egg hunt… but here they are!

(And yes, Chloe did find an egg up in the tree!)