Penn State Chics Dig Nerds

We spent Memorial Day with part of the Sharp family at Aunt Cindy's house.  Her house was inundated with the 17 year cicadas. The cicadas were everywhere.  Both cicadas and their shells were on this tree.  If you look behind the tree, you can see that the ground is completely covered with shells.  The yard was littered with them. They were loud and there were a lot of them.   Some of us didn't like the cicadas flying around and tried to cover up in a sweatshirt. We discovered that we are not very good volleyball players.  Perhaps we should stick to whiffle ball?  We surely got an A for effort and a positive attitude. Ang looks pretty good in this photo. I just realized that she's like her aunt here - playing in her bare feet! Here were our hecklers. We have fun, even if we are not very good. As I get older, I realize more and more the value of family truly enjoying being together.  I'm blessed in this regard on both sides of the family.  Even...

First we went to the Belleville Easter egg hunt.  I only got a picture of Amie because the other two had already dumped out their eggs.  Next, we went to the Easter celebration with our Sharp family. Second cousins Natalee looks like she's carrying a football, but it's really a large egg. It was a beautiful (but chilly) day!

My aunts held an Easter egg hunt for the kids at my grandma's house. Lined up, ready to go: Thanks to my sister-in-law, Kate, for the pictur es. And, they are off! Amie has been waiting for this egg hunt for at least a month! Brady doesn't have time for pictures anymore. Five of the great-grandkids Even though the aunts "cut back", they still recieved plenty of loot.  I think they've enjoyed the post it notes a lot!  We've found some funny notes sticking around. In addition to the bumble bee riding toy mentioned in a previous post, I found this one humorous:

Here are our naturally colored Easter eggs.  We've had this dye for 3 years now.  It was stored in the freezer.  I would have saved it for another year, but it spilled :/ The crayons worked nicely, too!  For some reason the kids have been riding this bee toy a lot lately.  We've had it for at least 2 years without much use. Do they sense that I want to sell it? Here's what I found on the back of the bee riding toy:  Here's Natalee's school work: After I read it she added, "I need to change it.  I forgot to say that I would go home and EAT it!"

Happy Valentines Day!  We don't typically do anything special for Valentines Day.  In fact, my biggest Valentines Day memory may be when we went skiing in Sandpoint, Idaho, and our friend Andrew injured his collar bone on his first run down the mountain.  However, we do enjoy making heart shaped cookies with the kids.  We love to make cookies! First the rolling and cutting the hearts. We thought it was really funny that a few times Amie got overly anxious to cut when she really did not have enough dough left.  So, some of the hearts look like they already have bites taken out of them! After lunch came time for the icing and decorating.  We used our natural food coloring and sprinkles for this.  In fact I used the "mess up" icing from Christmas when I failed to make green cream cheese icing.  The grey (supposed to be green) icing gradually turned yellowish in the freezer.  I added red to it and we got a pretty pink c...

Natalee had a 1/2 day of school Thursday, so we spent the afternoon dying eggs using red cabbage, turmeric, and red beet dyes. It really was cold this day, so don't be fooled by us dying eggs in short sleeved shirts! One egg suffered a casualty even before it was dyed, so these are 10 of the remaining 11 eggs. We had a fun Easter, but were disappointed that Natalee missed out on most of the activities due to sickness.  It ended up that she had a cold, but she tends to run fevers for everything.  Easter weekend we saw her getting fevers and then the cold came on with a vengence!  She was extremely disappointed to miss the treasure hunt at church and the family meal.  However, I did allow her to go outside and hunt eggs. Honestly, she wasn't feeling well but she looks good here! As you can see, they had a decent amount of eggs in their baskets this year- it's not over flowing!  Never fear, they had a lot of "side" gifts, so re...

Natalee remembered dying eggs with Aunt Rachel a few years ago and asked to do it again.  That is something that we never really did in my family and I've always thought that it is kind of odd.  But, after thinking about it, I decided that eggs really do symbolize new life.  We also have new life through Jesus, which is the whole reason for Easter.  We also see new life all around us at this time of the year as Spring resurrects everything back to life.  So.... we dyed eggs. Since I can't stand to waste anything and I can't fathom feeding my kids hard boiled eggs that might have all of that synthetic dye in them (yes, I cringe when we eat food dye), I found a great deal on all natural egg dye.  I was going to buy red beets, purple cabbage, and turmeric and make it myself, but I was able to buy this kit for much cheaper. First, we stirred up the dyes.  We put an egg in each of the dyes.  Then, we waited, which was torturous.  15 minute...