Hoppy Easter and Beyond

The only reason I'm posting this picture is that I think for the first time in our marriage, we dressed the whole family in green for St. Patrick's Day. It's really not a very good picture. Eric and I are trying to get the kids to smile at the self-timing camera sitting on our counter. They end up looking great and we end up looking crazy! C'est la vie (which I learned while doing this post is not spelled "se la vi" as I would have spelled it)! After St. Patty's Day. I was in charge of the Thunderkids activity. We made Easter baskets out of milk jugs. This is the one Elia and I had made a few weeks ago. For the Thunderkids we just used crayons instead of cotton balls. That was me trying to simplify. It actually really worked out well. The crayons did a great job making the bunny features and I brought cotton balls for the tails. I've decided that there is no reason to store Easter baskets. We'll just make a new one each year!

Ethan got his ear tubes in last Thursday. The poor kid wasn't allowed to eat until after surgery. Luckily it was at 8:00 a.m., but by the time 9:00 rolled around and he was finished, he was quite upset at me. He seemed to feel better after he nursed and then threw up all he had eaten (which the nurse said was normal because of the air in his stomach from the anesthesia). So, now my little boy has ear tubes. He is doing great. The doctor said not to worry about getting water in his ear --like at the pool. So he doesn't even have to wear ear plugs! From studies, it seems there is no difference in the amount of infections if a kid wears ear plugs or not. I guess time will tell.
My mom came up for Easter weekend and we kindly dragged her to all of our social events. On Saturday, we took her to a Sprouts grocery store Egg hunt, our church Easter picnic and then an LDS network school social. On Sunday we had a fun Easter dinner with our friends: Thanks to Tiffany for these cute kiddy pictures of Ethan, Katelyn and Andrew:
I'm sad (well, not really) to say that the Easter Bunny didn't come to our house this year. After three egg hunts for Elia, he didn't think she needed more candy... plus we know he didn't want to make us non-sugar eaters feel bad. We made up for it by going on Monday to Target and buying two bags of Reeses peanut butter eggs that will be consumed following graduation. Only 5 more weeks to go!
This week has been pretty smooth sailing so far. Eric pretty much spent the whole day with us on Monday because he didn't have classes. The week is flying by. I love these kind of weeks!! Last night we took the kids out to the field at the school to try out these airplanes my mom bought for Eric. It was an excercise in patience because (sorry, Mom) they didn't fly too well and we were supposed to "adjust" them with little stick-on dots. We did our best and at least it got us outside.Ethan didn't seem to feel left out: he was more concerned with climbing around in the stroller:For a change, Elia actually wanted me to take her picture (probably because I was taking Ethan's so much):
What fun kids!