Baby brother

Catching up...my baby brother and his new wife came to visit last week. It was short but sweet. :) Here are some pictures to sum it up:

From top to bottom, left to right...

• We drove up to Estes Park and ate some yummy lunch (after having had a yummy breakfast before the boys' archery class)...
• then we found a little hike just inside Rocky Mountain National Park (cut it short, partially because of the snow on the ground (which we of course ended up throwing at each other) and partially because it was just darn chilly)...
• and drove further into the park to admire the views...
• and decided that, even though we were freezing, ice cream was in order in downtown Estes Park (yes, before we ate a yummy dinner, lol...lots of good eating that day)...
• We made it home and played some Pictionary and Twister (um, hilarious!)...
• and had to have Uncle Joe make sugar cookies the next morning...
• along with playing some frisbee in the yard...
• before taking some pictures with both my brothers when Zach drove up from Longmont to take Joe & Bridget with him for the rest of their visit...
• and nabbing a picture of Joe & Bridget with the boys...

We also headed down to Longmont that night for some visiting altogether, which was fun. And that was our visit with Joe & Bridget. Yay! ;)

Easter

Hope you all had a lovely Easter! Ours was low key but pretty darn good. It was actually a weekend of egg-cellent fun: (click to make larger)

After a conversation with a fellow mom at archery on Thursday, I decided to make our egg hunts this year a bit more interesting (particularly as the boys seem to be outgrowing them anyhow, even though I found them earlier this week hiding rocks in the back yard to "practice" LOL). So. We normally just hide empty plastic eggs. The boys like hiding and finding them...all good. This year, though, I put various supplies in plastic eggs...ten different types of supplies. I then numbered those eggs 1 through 10 and made up four sets (we had a friend over Saturday and opted to do this all then instead of Sunday). The boys had to find only one set of eggs (so couldn't, for example, have two number 5 eggs).

That took a little longer than anticipated and we never did find one of the number 9 eggs. ;)

Then we took everything inside and had the boys open the eggs. Their expressions were pretty good as they discovered miscellaneous "stuff"...here's a list:

a shuttlecock
a small carabiner
rubber bands
paper clips
string
pipe cleaners
knee high pantyhose
cotton balls
a trash bag
balloons

I then let them know that they each had to use what they had to create an egg drop contraption (I also allowed the use of scissors and tape). They set to work and had great fun! Once everyone was mostly ready, we headed outside where Nathan had set up the ladder over the garage...about a 16 foot drop. We did test runs with hard boiled eggs then allowed any tweaking. Then, we dropped 'em with raw eggs!

Micah and Asher's eggs came out unscathed. Noah and his friend's...not so much. ;) (Noah would want me to insert here that he initially came up with an entirely different contraption based on the idea of lowering the egg to a foot off the ground and then dropping it (as demonstrated by Jamie on Mythbusters)...only to discover that we were dropping the eggs from considerably higher than his string reached. So, he hastily built an alternate and knew it wouldn't hold. He'd also point out that Asher and Micah received a wee bit of parental assistance, lol.)

Still. We all had a blast! :)

After using our contraptions, we decided to have even more fun and managed to get an egg inside a balloon and then filled the balloon with water and dropped it...just to see. ;) Yup, it splatters as one would expect. ;) 

That upper left photo was actually still on Saturday...managed to get in some time at the archery range and finish off the experiment portion of Asher's Options science fair project. (Yay! and whew for having that out of the way, lol!)

On Easter, we continued our egg theme with egg & spoon races...which ended after a frustrated Micah threw his egg, cracking it open...and then my brother collected the hard boiled yolk and bounced it off of Noah's head, which led to much laughter. 

Meanwhile, Micah went back inside for his pantyhose. (He is oddly taken with them and finds them very comfortable. On Saturday he tried getting them over his head but mostly has been now wearing them on his hands/arms. I don't know why.)

And then the boys and my niece all played frisbee in the front yard for a good while, enjoying the gorgeous day.

And that was our Easter. ;) (I'm really happy with how my new take on egg hunts went and hope to continue the tradition next year!)

Laundry room.

Just so you know, amid the bike crash and everything else last weekend, Nathan put up shelves in our laundry room so that we could rearrange things and make room for our growing collection of archery gear. Before the shelves, we had bow cases scattered around the house and were thinking of storing them in the basement. Then we decided to just stack them in the laundry room so boys wouldn't have to lug them up the stairs and through the house (hitting walls as they went).

(The laundry room, btw, is nearest the door to the garage but was occupied with the vacuum and steam cleaner. We figured that we lug the bow cases out of the house twice a week and only get the vacuum cleaner out once a month or so, LOL, so moved the vacuum stuff to the basement instead of the bow cases).

Anyhow, stuff "fit" in the laundry room but was inconvenient...had to take everything out if you wanted anything out. And. Nathan's case is significantly bigger and heavier than the rest of ours and was in my way any time I did laundry. So, here's what we did:

Sorry. I couldn't manage to get the whole shot vertically in a single picture...so the left shows the floor up and the right shows the ceiling down. Nathan's case is way up there on top. The boys each have a spot on the bottom. My stuff (the lightest and smallest) is on the actual shelf there in the middle.

Whew...so much better. ;) Who knew archery gear would take up so much room? :)

Fulfilling a promise...

Lest you think that Micah's just a mischievous imp (which he is, lol)...last week he came to me with a request. It's not your typical six year old request. Since I don't know how else to keep my promise, here's what he wants:

"I don't want to die. Ever. I want you to find someone to invent a machine that will keep me alive forever. And I don't want to be the first person to use it. And I'm willing to wait a couple years since it might take some time to make."

He's completely serious and it took a good bit not to smile or laugh while listening to this request. ;) When I asked him how I should go about finding someone to invent this machine, he said:

"Just google famous scientists or something. But I don't want those guys from Time Warp."

Yup. That's my Micah. He actually hits upon this subject with some regularity...randomly coming up to me in tears or with his determined little face to tell me not to die or that he never wants to die. I don't know precisely where he picked up his very sincere fear of death (both mine and his), but he got me to promise to look into this. So, if you happen to know any famous scientists who might be interested in inventing a machine to keep people alive, please let me know. :)

Note to self...

...just because your first two children were pretty easy (notwithstanding injury, lol), don't assume the third will be. ;)

Yes, this is the post where I'll explain how I lost Micah. ;)

Those of you who know me, know I like to joke that, with Micah, I finally got a "boy." Not that Noah and Asher don't enjoy blowing things up or pretend sword playing and all that...it's just that Micah was my first kid who climbed on counters and ran in the middle of the street and didn't worry when he couldn't find me in a store...know what I mean?

Anyhow, he's been really reminding us lately that we mustn't become complacent in this whole parenting thing. Case in point...a couple weeks ago, we were all coming home from the neighborhood park. Micah and I had driven and Nathan, Noah and Asher were walking. (Noah and I had met them at the park, returning from being out for the day.) On the way home, Micah got miffed at me over my dinner plans for the evening (to go out without him while our neighbor watched them, lol). He stayed in the front yard to mope and wait for the other three. I let him mope...it's usually best to let him be at times like that. When I went to look for him shortly thereafter, though, I could not find the boy. I figured he was hiding and moping still (he does that). I wasn't overly worried. Then, Nathan, Noah and Asher got home and I still couldn't find the boy. Started calling for him and set the other two to looking for him as well. Nathan grabbed his bike and went out to search and I was in the process of gathering the other two to get in the van and go looking...when, thankfully, Micah came strolling back to the house.

He'd taken off and gotten a few blocks away before realizing that Nathan must have taken a different route to walk home...and turned around, himself, to come home. (Fortunately, he knew where he was and how to get home and all that and hadn't crossed any main streets. We actually do walk around the neighborhood quite a bit.) 

Needless to say, Micah got a good talking to about how he should freakin' know that the rule is that he's not to go anywhere alone and that, even if walking someplace with a brother, he's supposed to tell me first. Makes sense, right? Oy.

Anyhow, given that he's six (which we sometimes forget) and that this was somewhat of a first offense and we figured he'd scared himself enough to remember, we let him off with a warning (and a lot of reminders about *why* we have the rules we have). 

All good, right? Wrong.

Just last week (not two weeks after the above incident), the boy got away from us again when we'd all biked to a different park. Not as far away...we could still see him. But. He'd neglected to tell us he was going someplace other than he'd originally set out for, and he'd gone alone. Oh. And did I mention that the place he'd gone was to walk along the railroad tracks?! OY! Not five minutes before that, I'd mentioned to the boys (all three of them) that obviously the FENCE was there to keep us away from the tracks. What did Micah do? He found a spot and went under the dang fence.

Yup. Awesome. It was the other two boys who alerted us to the fact that Micah was up there (we thought he was just beyond a bush, where he'd said he was going to check out one of those exercise station type things). Nathan managed to collect the boy (thankfully, Nathan was with us, as I couldn't have easily gotten over that fence). And...not ten minutes after Nathan got everyone back on the proper side of the fence:

Yeah. Train. Great. (I asked Noah, btw, whether he knew that it wasn't safe to walk on railroad tracks. He looked at me incredulously. I asked whether I'd had to *tell* him that and he said no. Apparently I need to be much more specific with Micah.) Sigh.

So. I feel like I've aged about 10 years in the past couple weeks. Fortunately, both incidents turned out okay (and also, fortunately, my hair was recently colored so you can't see the gazillion white hairs that I'm sure I grew just this month, lol). Here's hoping for a very uneventful April...