Happy Zombie Jesus Day

Took the kids out to "the farm" Easter Sunday. They had a great time with the fam.

We started the day at home. To date, we've really struggled with motivation to hide eggs--or do much of anything, really--for Easter here at home. But this year we figured Gabe was going to be old enough to actually kind of remember if we did anything or not, so we broke down and bought some baskets. Libby filled them and left them on the porch. We got a couple videos of them discovering their buckets.


Easter just isn't a holiday I get excited about. Don't get me wrong, I love easter candy. It's my favorite. But since they start selling it the day after Valentine's Day, it's not like it's tough to come by or something special that I only get if I appropriately love the actual holiday. So, until this year, we'd just sort of relied on taking the kids out to Nana and Poppa's to fulfill their egg hunting quota for the year and called it good at that. But we don't want to short our kids somehow, so this year we put forth a token effort here at the house before going out to the farm.

Because no Easter is complete without Gabe wearing his basket/bucket like a hat. Pretty sure we have four years of pictures of him doing this, now.

Norah's Easter outfit. The boots add that touch of respect for the meaning of the season, I think.

Norah wasn't afraid to wear the bucket, either. Must be a universal kid thing.

Real eggs were hidden outside and plastic eggs were hidden inside. Here's the outside hunt. We got some video of the inside hunt, too, but it went by so fast and involved the kids running around at such speed that it wasn't a very good video.

Norah hunting eggs.

I got a bit out of order here but I can't be bothered to move these pictures up a few pegs. This was the group picture we managed to get the kids to pose for before they started their outside hunt. I'm not sure what the face is that Gabe is making.

But he more or less held the face the entire time he was on the porch--long enough for us to get three or four pictures with him doing it. Kids are weird.

Mom and Dad have a dog now. Suzie. Or Susie? Not sure how they spell it. Anyway, Suzie eats things. Dad warned us that we would need to watch her or she'd raid all the kids baskets and eat EVERYTHING in them (as she had already eaten quite a bit of chocolate and the wrappers they came in the night before). To keep us from having to pay attention to one more thing, Jon and I put Suzie outside and went about our business of hiding all the eggs, both inside and out. We figured she would leave the outside eggs alone because what self-respecting dog would eat a hard-boiled egg? Turns out Suzie would. As we looked around for the eggs, it became quickly apparent that there weren't as many as Jon and I had hidden a half hour earlier. In fact, we were six eggs short. A quick scan of the rest of the yard turned up remains like these above--the leftover shells that Suzie managed to not eat (we found a few very small piles, too, suggesting that she ate most of the shells for at least three of the six eggs she found). Throughout the rest of the day, Suzie would also eat about four hot dogs, several leftover spoonfuls of the kids sides of beans and potatoes, and who knows what else. She couldn't have felt very good afterwards, and I'm glad I'm not the one that has to clean up her shit today.

The Easter Bunny brought each of the kids a bubble gun. So, after the egg hunting, we batteried up the guns and they decided to go up to Grandma Albers' house (to visit, but she was gone) and proceeded to have a bubble war in her back yard.



I like this Annie Oakley thing she's got going on here. Kind of awesome.

"In a world where bubbles are the law, one little girl has decided to take the law into her own hands. This summer, Bubble Girl will pop all of your preconceived notions about soapy spheres."

Kansas wind sucks for taking cute videos of children roaming through the wheat. The wheat, incidentally, is already heading out--a full month earlier than it should be. I'm not sure how that will bode, but I'm guessing very badly in the minds of most farmers (everything bodes very poorly in the minds of farmers, though--they are a "hard times" kind of people).

According to the kids, this was some kind of Star Wars reenactment. Gabe is Luke and Norah is Leia.

I don't remember the scene, but it made for a cute picture, I guess.

A couple weeks back I went ahead and caved in completely to my baser instincts of bad parenting and gave Gabe the gameboy I bought about a decade ago. I don't particularly like that I have come to rely on these kinds of distractions to keep my kids occupied long enough for my throat to rest between bouts of frustrated shouts to the heavens, but they have also returned a modicum of sanity to my life. I have a weapon at my disposal that will take one of the kids out of the fight. And, usually, that's all I need to do. On their own, our kids are awesome. They play well, they use their imaginations, and they rarely do anything that causes great destruction or angst. Together, though, they are constantly at each others' throats. They bicker and fight and tease and cry and whine and spill everything everywhere and generally make life pretty unpleasant most of the time. It's a phase, I know, but it's an UGLY phase and one that has nearly broken me.

Anyway, I found a used copy of a Star Wars Lego game on ebay and Gabe gets to earn time on it by doing chores or taking naps or doing anything else that is bribe-worthy. The nice thing, right now at least, is that it's pretty easy to spot when he is trying to sneak some playing time on the gameboy because these are the noises he makes whenever he is playing.

And, finally, One Man and Two Man. Saturday night, Norah created this song about two dude she saw walking on the street. It's become an instant hit in our household (in the way that, if played often and long enough, just about any song will become so familiar that you can't help but have it in your head all the time). It's kind of interesting how differently our kids process music. Gabe likes music. He's been around it his whole life and I think he has an appreciation for it, but making music doesn't seem to come very easily to him. He's only just sort of started recognizing pitch and rhythm, but still tends to mostly sing in a kind of monotone, not-quite-speaking voice. Norah, on the other hand, is already finding pitches. Sort of (not quite so much in this video, but she'd been singing this song all day already, so I don't think she was putting forth much effort).

When we got home, we decided to go to McDonalds to get the kids something to eat. It was coming close to bed time and they had managed to get through the day without eating anything of substance since breakfast--preferring, obviously, to eat only candy. It was getting late and we were too tired to think about making something at home, so we got them happy meals. While driving through, Libby spotted this. You can't really see from the angle of the picture, but this rascal is parked in a parking spot outside, like a car. For some reason, it struck us as funny.

Then, finally at home, Libby went out to put the chickens up and gather their eggs. This is what she found in their roost. We haven't discovered which friends left us the surprise, but we're reasonably sure we know.