Years From Now

Years from now, I just know I'll long to go back to a meal like we just had. We were all eating. Chad, Katie and I were discussing whether or not so-and-so was still dating so-and-so. All of a sudden, Claire pipes up and says, "Mommy, did God make germs??"

Clean-up

On Saturday, Chad and Katie got involved in the neighborhood clean-up day. Mostly people just walked the roads picking up trash. Chad and Katie did a bunch on Rt. 11 next to our development. Katie wasn't real excited about this activity, but I think she ended up having fun. Nice that Daddy took her out to McD for lunch afterward. :)

She's NINE!!

Very hard for me to believe, but our little Jenna isn't so little anymore! On Thursday, she turned 9 years old! Woo-hoo!

In my other posts, I mentioned what a fun day we had that day-- picnic, Wolfgang tour, park, alpacas. Then we went to Gpa and Gma's and had a little party-- presents and cake/ice cream and balloons. This picture is funny-- looks like she was going to sneeze on the cake. She didn't.

Presents-- swimsuit, dress, Pixie Hollow membership cards, favorite candybars, a new Bible and Bible cover, a Francesca Battistelli CD, and colored paperclips from Daddy so she can make paperclip chains to her heart's content. :)

Painted Spring

Also on Thursday, we went to an alpaca farm, called Painted Spring. Very pretty setting by mountains, lovely day, 1875 stone barn, and wonderful alpacas. They were so calm and friendly. We walked right among them, petting them and feeding them out of our hands.

After we left the alpaca farm, I asked Claire what she thought of our visit to see the alpacas. Her response, "It was great! Three HUNDRED percent better than the chocolate tour! It didn't smell bad." :) Now, how many people would say that an alpaca farm smelled better than a chocolate candy factory?

This cat is named Bebe. After her came their other cats named Cece and Dede, and so on. Just wait til they get to the letter X. :)

One reason we were very interested in going to this alpaca farm was because Claire REALLY liked the alpacas we saw at the Farm Show in Jan. Well, when we were by all those alpacas, all she was interested in was the CAT.

The farm owner was a woman named Beth, who got into raising alpacas because she knits (seriously) and has owned a yarn store. Now she also sells items knitted from alpaca wool-- has a little shop set up in the old milk house of the stone barn.

Beth called this an "alpaca sandwich".

I won't tell you the name Katie gave this alpaca-- suffice it to say that she thought several of the alpacas looked like modern boys' haircuts. So she gave them names of people she knows. :)

Wolfgang and park

After our picnic on Thurs, we went to the Wolfgang Chocolate Factory in York. It was very interesting to see how they make many different kinds of candies. Claire was not very excited about this event (she doesn't even like chocolate-- she was holding her nose when she started smelling it) and Katie and Jenna weren't too sure about a TOUR, either. Then, you should have seen them when we had to put on the hairnets! It was pretty difficult to get a decent picture. We even had to walk down the streets in those hairnets, since Wolfgang uses a few different nearby properties in the city.

After the chocolate tour, we spent a little while at a park, soaking up the sunshine. Kids played hide and seek.

Picnic

Thursday was a gorgeous day-- so were Friday and Saturday-- so we were enjoying spring! We had a picnic at Pine Grove Furnace SP. See the furnace behind the table?

Grandpa and Grandma

Last Wed, Chad took the kids up to PA (I stayed home to paint the bathroom). They had a great time, as always, at Gma and Gpa's. One of the kids' spring break requests was to go bowling, so Gpa and Daddy took the girls. And, boy! They sure knocked the pins down! :)

Also had fun dressing up with the clothes Gma has collected.

Jenna's Hagerstown Project-- 4

Last week, we did another stop on Jenna's Washington County project. We still have several to go-- I was hoping to finish last week, but we ran out of time. This one is the Discovery Station. Kinda rinky-dink when you've been to the Children's Museum in Indianapolis, but it was nice. K and J and C and I had fun in there for an hour and a half. Couldn't do any longer cuz I didn't have any more coins for parking, but that amount of time was perfect.

It's right on Washington St (Rt. 40) in Hagerstown.

This was the agrictultural section-- kids could pretend with food and animals and a store, etc. And there was a cow you could climb thru-- weird concept, really. Wish I had a pic of it. You could lift up a flap where the head of the cow was, climb thru it, and then there was a space about 4 ft square where they had diagrams of the inside of a cow, etc-- then the kids could go down a small slide out the cow's back end.

They had a few nice train displays that the kids could push some buttons to operate. There was also a really nice model of the Titanic.

Girls enjoyed sitting in a 2-seater Cessna.

This is a balance beam-- probably the part they had the most fun with. :) Looked like something Papa could build in an hour. You can't tell in the pic, but it's covered in carpet- that was nice when they fell. The vault behind Jenna held an Egyptian sarcophogus and some semi-precious stones, but things were not labelled and explained very well, so I don't feel like we really learned much.

Boy/Girl

Just recently, Micah has figured out the boy/girl concept. So, here was my conversation with him this morning:

me: Is Daddy a boy or girl?
him: A boy.
me: Is Grandpa a boy or girl?
him: A boy.
me: Is Papa a boy or girl?
him: A boy.

[Pause. I was exercising. He was thinking. :)]

him: Is Grammy a boy or girl? [I'm thinking, this is funny, he turned it around so he can ask the questions]
me: A girl.
him: Is Grandma a boy or a girl?
me: A girl.
him: Is Katie a boy or a girl?
me: A girl.
him: Is Jenna a boy or a girl?
me: A girl.
him: Is Claire a boy or a girl?
me: A girl.
him: Is Mommy a boy or a girl?
me: A girl.
him: No-- Mommy's beautiful.

horse videos

Skating

On Monday, we also went ice skating. Well, Chad skated with the girls while Micah and I cheered them on. Katie and Jenna had done this before, so they knew they'd enjoy it. Claire wasn't so sure. And when started out, she looked terrified. The first few times around took her (with Daddy) a LONG time, and she still didn't look like she was enjoying it. Then he found a little cart thing that she could push like a walker-- they got to going with that, and she then thought it was fun. By then end of the hour and a half, she was skating on her own without holding anything for a bit. And now all 3 girls can't wait to do it again!

Horses

Last week was our spring break. (Some "spring" break, huh? It started out 40 degrees and not spring on the calendar or the weather.) However, we had lots of fun things going on, and, by the end of the week, we had an 80 degree day.

Yesterday morning, I took Katie and Claire for free riding lessons with some of our friends from church. It really was great! Michele gave Claire a lesson, while her daughter, Jessica, gave Katie a lesson.

Claire is up in the first pic, on a pony named Brownie. In the pic, she's putting her hands on her head-- the main thing they worked on was how to sit on the horse to keep good balance, so Michele had Claire doing all sorts of things to check if she was balanced.

Katie was on a horse named Badger. Katie esp liked trotting. It's not as much fun to walk, I guess.

They live in a pretty part of the country-- Keedysville, MD, SE of Hagerstown. It was a pretty drive there, and I very much enjoyed being outside watching the girls. It was a bit chilly, tho.

Before ever riding, the girls learned all about the animals by helping to groom them. Fun to hear how interested Claire was in all of it-- and had no hesitations... she wasn't scared of holding the pony's hoof or anything... and she didn't mind getting dirty. :)

It was so fun to see Claire just LOVE it! She has always been interested in horses, and she has riding horses for a short time period, but this was her first up-close, personal introduction. She now loves Brownie and can't wait to see her again. We'll definitely be going back sometime. Maybe when it's a little warmer. :)

One video here. 2 more on another post.

NAME

OK, I need to brag on our latest genius kid. :)

This actually happened 2 or 3 weeks ago...

Micah said to me, "I want to write my name." Of course, I figured he just wanted to scribble, cuz that's pretty much all he had been doing. Very little in recognizable shapes, etc. I gave him paper and crayons, and then I left the room.

A couple minutes later, he said, "Mommy, can you help me with the A?"

He had written MIC... H. He had left a nice little space for an A, but hadn't even attempted it. The MIC and H were beautiful! Nice size, nice order, etc. If you can see the pic above, you can see for yourself. The A is the only one I helped him at all with.

Tom & Jerry

It's me, Chad, doing the blog thing this time with pics of Tom & Jerry, nicknames for our Chrysler & Honda. Our wheels have been serving us well with very little maintenance needed (and not much paid to purchase either). Thought you might be interested in their front plates. Jerry proudly wears the plate that my old '84 Chrysler Laser sported for the 6 years I owned it. The Laser was my first car (and a very cool one for a high school and college kid) - I bought it my Junior year of h.s. and drove it all thru college, on our honeymoon, and thru 1995 until being replaced by Mike & Emily's Chevy Lumina Euro. Great memories. Wish I woulda kept the Laser, even if it was sitting up on blocks in the backyard (would fit nicely with West Virginia, right?). And Yes, Life is Good!

Circus

We took the kids to a circus on Saturday-- they were very excited and definitely enjoyed it. Parts of it were a little suggestive and raunchy, so I would definitely not give it a whole-hearted thumbs up, but there were several parts we did enjoy. In the pic below, there is a 10-year-old girl riding on a man's shoulders on the horse. Maybe our favorite part was this teeny little girl with no bones. Well, anyway, I don't know how she got into the positions she did.

That's a BACKbend. Whoa. She also put a hat on the table, then stood on her hands, and used her feet to put the hat on her head.

We were a little disappointed that there weren't more animals-- just the horses and a fake gorilla (man in a costume). Guess we'll have to go to a bigger circus someday.

Claire's lips

On our birthdays, my mom sends an email out to the family-- about us and our birth, etc. Eric's bday was Sat and mom's email mentioned being in the bathtub when her water broke. I read some of this email to the girls last night. Of course, then I had to explain what it meant that her "water broke". Claire's quick mind-- I knew she was thinking about what she's heard of childbirth being painful; and then, almost immediately, she said, "Do you know another bad thing about being a girl? I think boys' lips probably feel yucky." :)