Easter Weekend & slide shows

I took so many pics (who, me???) so I had to make 2 slide shows of our weekend. The first is Lazy 5 & the other is the rest of the Easter festivities.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Thursday after school, I had the boys do a scavenger hunt around the house for their Easter basket items. They really liked that. I just gave Kensley her basket because, well, she can't read for clues & it's hard enough for her to find eggs. After all the partying we had during the week, we continued on for the weekend. Me & the kids packed up & headed to Statesville for the weekend. We got there Friday night amidst all the down pouring rain we endured along the way. Then Saturday morning was my nephew, Preston's 2nd birthday (sorry, no pics of that), the afternoon we headed to Mooresville to the Lazy 5 Ranch where Corby met up with us for the rest of the weekend. The kids always love this place. Personally, I love to watch them & take pics, but I don't care to touch the animals. Yuk! You'll see why in some of the pictures. I swear they fed a Holstein cow that had a tongue that was 2 feet long! Saturday night the kids dyed eggs & then some very sleepy kids were off to bed. Sunday morning we got up & dressed in our (well, the kids at least) new pretty clothes & headed off to church. Sunday afternoon we enjoyed a wonderful lunch and MamMaw had planned lots of fun games & activities. We had an egg hunt, egg toss, 3 legged race & scavenger hunt. Oh & we celebrated another nephew's birthday too... Nathan is turning 5. Whew! There was plenty of corn hole for the men & some of the women too... I did participate in one game... and lots of fun just being with family.

(Unfortunately, I have a thing now when I visit family...I get sick. I started off Friday night with a sore throat which proceeded to get worse over the weekend & by Sunday I was feeling pretty bad. Stinks, I know. Carter had strep throat last week, so I'm afraid that I probably caught his germs. Corby came home Sunday night & was sick all day Monday with a stomach bug... maybe i gave him my "thing".)

Sunday night me & the kids packed up & headed to Granite Falls to my parents house. It rained the whole time we were there, but my Dad took a couple days off & the boys were plenty entertained helping him. By the way, I want to wish my Daddy a Happy Birthday last Saturday... love you Daddy! and my parents at Happy 35th Anniversary yesterday! Love you both!

Monday I was out of commission most of the day. I thought my throat was the size of a watermelon when I woke up Monday morning, so I laid low most of the day and Mom & Daddy entertained the kids all day for me. Finally after lots of meds, I felt a little better by the evening and finally got a good nights rest that night. Tuesday, it was still raining and the kids were getting bored, so we decided that we would do an indoor egg hunt for the kids. They loved it! Then in the afternoon Mimi & PawPaw took the boys to the Catawba Science Center in Hickory while me & Kensley stayed behind & took a nap. We headed home after supper Tues. night.

It was a nice time to spend with both families and already our spring break is almost over. I guess the rest of the week we will just hand around here & hope for better weather so we can get outside & have some fun. Hope everyone had a wonderful Easter!

Kids Easter Parties 2009

We had a fabulous Easter.... busy, but fun. We started Easter week celebrations on Wednesday with Kensley's preschool party & egg hunt. Those little 2 yr old had so much fun finding eggs. The funny thing was that when the teacher said "go"... to go get the eggs... Kensley kept walking past them & had a frown on her face. She looked at me & said "I don't want no eggs" (or "ay-ughs-uh" which is her language) and then I told her there was candy in them. She picked one up, opened it & discovered the candy herself and then proceed to find as many eggs as she could. It was so funny! Then on Thursday, the boys had both of their class parties. Since they were both about the same time, I had to pull double duty with them. So I had a picnic lunch with Chandler & his class & then we watched Charlie & the Chocolate Factory (the "real" one with Gene Wilder... not the funky weird Johnny Depp version). Then I was off to Carter's class for a egg hunt & ice cream sundaes with his class. Here are a few pictures from our mid-week events.

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

I Remember When: Playing

I know... it's been a really long time since my last post. I'm going to finish up my "I remember when" series today because I've got lots of other great things to post when I get home this week. So here's my tribute to growing up... and all the fun things I remember about playing as a kid.

Back in the day you really had think to play... meaning you had to come up with your own stuff because you didn't have the TV plastered with cartoons 24/7, a computer to entertain you, hand-held video games & if you were "rich" you were lucky to have an Atari video game (I didn't have one). So, here's what I did growing up. It was fun. Really fun & thinking back I wish my kids can have some of these experiences that I did.

I grew up an only child, so I had lots of imaginary things & people to play with. I did have my best friend Julie to play with. We were BFF's from 1st grade on. We stayed at each others house most every weekend and played everything under the sun. One thing that I remember the most was us recording our own teen talk show... Teen Beat. We probably have a dozen or more tapes of us talking & interviewing everyone from New Kids on the Block to Michael Jackson to Kirk Cameron & Ralph Macchio (all pretend of course... sometimes we roped her brother into posing as one of the interviewees). We also would dress up in our dance costumes & perform The Bangles in front of our parents & fight over which one of us would be Suzanna Hoffman (because she was the prettiest).

My parents lived in the woods, so I would clear out a spot beside the house & take some old logs & build a "house" (it was really a pretend house with pretend walls & the logs were usually the stairs from the living room to the kitchen). I would take walks in the woods with my Daddy & we would go to the creek behind our house. I remember him killing a few snakes too.

I loved to go to the skating rink. That was really "cool" then. I had my very own pair of white skates with pink wheels & huge pink pompoms tied to the toes & I would skate around the carport to Wham ..... Wake me up before you go-go, Jitterbug, Careless Whisper.

I didn't have a barbie doll house, so I made my own dollhouse on the hearth of the fireplace. I would lay out baby blankets to separate the rooms. I used shoulder pads for the living room furniture & I used the little white round table-looking-thing (that used to come in the middle of your pizza to keep the box from sinking down onto it) as the TV stand. I had a box of candy that looked like a stereo & used that to set up in the bedrooms.

My parents house is kind of up on a hill & I would ride my hot wheel up & down the driveway for hours. I would also half kills ants & put them in the back of a Hot Wheel ambulance & let it race to the bottom of the driveway & crash. Yes, I liked to play with hot wheel cars.

Saturday used to be the only day that cartoons came on TV. I always looked forward to getting up Saturday morning and watching the Smurfs & Looney Tunes.

I don't remember going out to eat at fast food joints very much. It was a treat to get to go to McDonald's once in a while.

I had lots & lots of dolls. My favorites were Martha-Ann & Martha-Nelle... don't ask! I also had a real adoption doll that had blond hair & blue eyes just like me. Her name was Emily. Cabbage Patch kids were big back in the day. I had a boy doll named Franklin Theodore... I called him Frankie for short... and a baby Cabbage Patch that I have no idea what her name was.

It's fun thinking back to all the wonderful memories I had growing up. It really doesn't seem that long ago, but when I look at my own kids... 8, 6 & 2.... I think, "wow, I'm getting old". I would love to hear some of your favorite memories of growing up. Leave me a comment.