Our little artist

As I was putting Rebekah to bed she said 'I want to paint my room purple.'

Me: 'Purple? I thought you wanted it pink.'

Rebekah: 'No I want to paint purple.'

Me: 'Okay, well it's time for bed, good-night'.

An hour later I hear noises and go to check on her. She has indeed painted her room purple --with nail polish!!!! (stolen from Emma's r00m...when Rebekah was supposed to be in time out earlier today!!)"

Coloring Eggs

It's that time of year again. The girls love to color Easter eggs, but don't want anything to do with eating them.

Here are our finished products. Rebekah did the four on the bottom. Emma did the four on the left. Clay did his famous rainbow eggs, and I did the polka-dot and flower egg.

Egg Hunt

We love going to our town's egg hunt. The girls love all the carnival rides and lots of eggs to pick. Here's Emma trying the rock wall.

The girls got stuck on this ride. It broke down right after they got on. So they made faces at dad while they waited.

Getting ready for Rebekah's turn to hunt.

Then we took a break for some face painting before it was Emma's turn to hunt.

Finally, the girls wanted to inspect their haul. They each found a special prize egg and got to go pick something out.

lucky lady

Emma found this 4-leaf clover on our way home from school today.

swim class

Here's some shots of Rebekah in her last swim class.

Cake Show

This weekend I went with my fellow cake friends, Melinda and Nancy, to the National Area Cake Show. It is so much fun to see what people in the business are doing and what the latest and greatest is in tools. They have competition cakes you can enter (think county or state fair) and then the live competition with famous cake decorators (think Ultimate Cake off).

Here are a couple of cute cakes:

Here are some hand-painted cakes my sister, Holly, would be awesome at:

Alice in Wonderland showed up in a lot of cakes this year, here were a couple good ones:

Here is a Twilight cake and a James Christensen painting:

The string work on these two wedding cakes was amazing:

For all my scrapbook friends, the latest and greatest technique was using a Cricut to decorate cakes:

The theme for this year's Live Cake Competition was the Circus. And the winner was Anne_Heap with this adorable Giraffe cake, it's a mouse circus. Check out the kitty tamer! So cute.

Alice made another appearance at the circus. This cake was by Courtney Cox who won last year:

Here is your traditional circus, very colorful and fun:

These guys went for the scary side of the circus, the kind I used to have nightmares about when I was a kid:

Welcome Spring!!

So glad you came. I've missed you. Please stay for a very long time.

Bowling

Bowling seems to be something that we can all do together that we all enjoy. And it doesn't cost too much to play 2 games of bowling. When we feel like we need to do something fun as a family, we generally turn to bowling.



Did you notice that Turkey (triple strike)... that would be an "M" for Mommy. But Clay still beat me.

National Portrait Gallery

Clay took the day off and we headed to the National Portrait Gallery while Emma was in school.

This is Juliette Lowe, founder of Girl Scouts. I was surprised by how attractive she was. Her dress is absolutely beautiful.

This is Ulysses S. Grant. And while it is a nice portrait of him, it was the frame that caught my eye.

Here is an unfinished portrait of George Washington, the same image on our $1 bill. There was a great story about this on. I believe it is the LAST time he posed for a portrait. His wife commissioned it and was to keep it for herself when it was all done. However, the artist liked it so much that he conveniently never finished it, thus it never left his possession. He used this as a reference for several later paintings. There was also an unfinished portrait of Martha, for the same reasons.

Dance Class

Rebekah just finished taking her first dance class. Here are some pictures of their "performance".

Here are all the girls lined up together.

NYC 4

This is the hotel we stayed in. Melinda got an incredible deal on priceline.


I am very proud to say that we successfully navigated our way through the subway (and during rush hour) the whole time.

We took the Staten Island ferry just so we could see the Statue of Liberty. This was a cool looking dock next to us.

We ate lunch at Caracas (Venezuelan). It was pretty good. I especially like my mango-guava drink.
Immediately following lunch, we walked over to Pom Frites for what is supposed to be the best fries in NYC. The fries were good, but what made it special was the +20 flavors of dipping sauce. My favorite was the roasted eggplant mayo.

We walked through Greenwich Village (home to NYU) and stopped in Washington Square. Very different college scene from my time at Ricks.

Our last stop before heading home was Grand Central Station which was so much prettier than Penn Station where we caught our train home.