Easter

We had a great Easter.  It was beautiful outside.  Yeah!  Usually it seems like it is always freezing on Easter and rainy.  On Good Friday we dyed eggs. We have dyed eggs on Good Friday ever since I was a kid so I carried on the tradition with my kids.   Aurora and Corina had a good time dyeing eggs.  I had some boxes of dye and so Corina got her own box and Aurora had her own.  It worked out wonderfully.

Easter morning the girls were so excited.  Especially Aurora.  Her voice was almost a squeal every time she found and egg.  She is 3 this year so she is really able to enjoy it.  Gwyneth was really just excited about the toys she got in her Easter basket and she just wanted to check them out.  Mark tried to get her to look for eggs but she kept going back to her toys in her Easter basket.

On a bitter sweet note Corina asked this morning if the Easter Bunny was real and if I got the gifts and eggs. I asked her what she thought.  She said that she thought that I had gotten them and then she asked me if I did.  I had to say yes. She had asked me the night before and I told her I would tell her later.  At least she didn't ask about Santa.  I'm sure she will figure it out soon enough.  Anyway then she was asking why they had the Easter Bunny so I told her we would look up the history of the Easter Bunny.  Also that she had better not tell Aurora that the Easter Bunny isn't real.

So I'm posting one picture this week and then I made a slide show of the rest with smile box.  This week it was so nice outside.  It was almost 80.  The girls wanted to have a water fight outside and wanted to know if they could put on their bathing suits.  I thought might as well.  Actually we all got a little tan from being outside this week.

The girls getting a tan in the hot English weather.

Here are all of our Easter Pics.  I put them in a super cute slide show by smilebox.

Another free digital slideshow by Smilebox

I hope everyone else has a great Easter too and has a great rest of the week.

A Good Week.

This week was a pretty good week.  It seems like we did a ton of stuff.  

Sunday was my birthday.  I told Mark that I really didn't want much for my birthday and I really didn't want to do much.  He couldn't believe that I didn't really want to do anything.  The day of my birthday he secretly invited the neighbors over for cake and then he had a baby sitter lined up and we went to the movies.  I was surprised.  It was a really good day.  

We are having a little spring break this week from our homeschooling.  I got all of our 3rd grade homeschool stuff the other day.  Corina is already excited about 3rd grade and me too.  She is going to be learning a lot of cool stuff next year.    Plus Aurora is going to be starting some things and she is excited about having her own school books.  

Tonight we went for a walk.  It was super nice outside and all the flowers are out.  It was so pretty.  We walked around the pond in the back of our house and fed the ducks and swans.  The girls and Mark and I had a good time.

So now to start the picture lineup.  

Here is Gwyneth at the beginning of the week.  Corina left her watercolors out and Gwyneth took advantage.  She had a good time watercoloring.  

Here is Mark and Aurora coming off the slide at the park.  The parks on the bases are great. 

 Gwyneth getting a shoulder ride.  The cherry trees are all in bloom here.  It makes me think of the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC.  

So it seems inevitable that every time we have spaghetti that there will not be a spaghetti explosion.  Every time we have it Gwyneth eats it like it's the best thing ever.  I guess it must be to her. 

Here are a picture of the swans (and the little duck) that we fed.  

Here is Gwyneth feeding the swans.  

She was pretty excited about it.  

 Here are Mark and the girls by the lake.  It was such a nice night.  

So hopefully next week I will have some awesome pictures.  Not only is it Easter but here is St. George's Day.  They have things going on all weekend at different places all over England.  Festivals and jousting events so that should be really interesting.  

Have a great week.  

Finally Spring!!!

It had been so nice here lately.  It really had been such a treat.  The kids have been able to play outside and we have finally been able to get out and got to some more sites.  Over the winter we had tried to go to a castle called Bolsover.  We almost couldn't get out of the parking lot because it was so snowy up there.  So we decided to go yesterday.  They had a special day where period actors were there riding horses and acting.  Also the weekend before we went to a birthday party.  They had hired a face painter.  She did a really good job.  But first of all in the picture line up is some of Mark's promotion pictures.  He worked so hard on getting promoted.  I'm so proud of him.   They let the wives take off the old rank and put on the new rank.

 Me putting on Mark's new rank.  

 Corina and Aurora with their faces painted at the birthday party.

Here is our trip to Bolsover Castle. 

 This was part of the play that we saw there.  Corina got to pet this horse.  It even had it's hair braided.  The girls thought that was cool.  

 Head kiss.

Corina and Aurora in one of the exhibits. This is a portrait of the king and queen at Bolsover.   

 Family pic. If you look through the doors you can see the valley behind.  

View from the castle.   

 Little Gwyneth in front of a big castle.

You could get on a wooden horse and try on riding clothes.  

 Gwyneth at the end of the day.  I'm pretty sure we were just in the car for about 5 minutes and then she was asleep.  

That's all for this week.  I hope everyone had a great week.

And the verdict is.....

It's a boy!!!  We finally had our sonogram today and found out.  I don't think we could have waited anymore.  The suspense was about to kill us.  Now it's time to get some boy stuff.  I almost won't know what to do with a boy after having 3 girls.  I'm sure we will figure it out though.  ha ha.  We have our name picked out since we thought Corina was a boy.  ha!  Wesley Carter.  That is our grandma's maiden names put together.

Here is a smilebox creation I made.  It's just of our weekend.  Smilebox is so wonderful I think. They have such cute layout.  It's really just digital scrapbooking.  Just download your pictures drag them over to the smilebox and then drag them into the layout you picked.  So EASY!

Digital scrapbooking design created with Smilebox

So a few weeks ago I posted on facebook that I had just read The Magicians Nephew by C.S. Lewis.  (the same guy who wrote Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.)  When I was in Jr. High I read A Wrinkle in Time and I couldn't put it down.  I was SO into that book.  I felt the same way when I was reading this.  It's the very first book in the Narnia series.  I really love that series and this made everything come together.   Anyway I thought that after I was done that I should read it to Corina.  She really likes the movies.  So everynight we have been reading a chapter in The Magicians Nephew.  She can not miss a night of it.  I remember then I was younger my mom read to me Fried Green Tomatoes.  (If you haven't read that book you should.  It's so much better than the movie.)  It was a special time and now Corina and I are doing it.  She loves it.  We only have 2 more chapters to read so we'd better find another story to read soon.  

Tea Party is the Theme

Last week I'm pretty sure that the girls had a tea party everyday.  We have had our little tea party set for a while.  It's just a little plastic Cinderella tea set that Corina got for Christmas one year.  Well Aurora has rediscovered it.  The first day Aurora and Corina played with the tea set and got it all set up and played with Aurora's fake food.  By the end of the week they were using water in the pitcher for tea and real food.  They had a really good time.  One time Mark went upstairs and found Aurora having a tea party in our room on the floor at the foot of the bed.  I guess she thought a smaller sister would not bother her there.  he he.  Finally at the end of the week I decided to take some pictures.  I think this was the last tea party. You can really only have so many tea parties I guess.

Here is the tea party group.  

Corina and Auror enjoying their tea (water)  Pinkies out!

Corina daintily drinking her tea.

Here is Gwyneth.  She thinks she a big girl having a tea party too and sitting in the big chair at the counter.  

Other than tea parties I have been preparing for homeschool next year and trying to figure out what to buy.  Also, next week we go for out sonogram appointment to see what we are having.  My neighbor says she thinks it a boy.  Everyone she knows is having boys so maybe it will spread to me.  My friend said she thinks it a girl. She said we  have 3 girls might as well have one more.   We will see.  

Have a great week.  

Might be Spring

Our daffodils finally bloomed.  Here is a picture of them.  The girls were so excited.  I was too.  It feels like Spring is finally here.  All the flowers are starting to bloom, the days are getting warmer, and the sun is starting to come up earlier and go down later.  

 We had a really nice warm day last week with out rain.  I love this picture.  It's the girls examining an earthworm.  They were finding them and then transplanting them to the flower garden.

Here is Aurora on the trampoline.  Gotta love static electricity.

Gwyneth was excited about the balls.  This was a lucky find in the garage.  The person that lived here before left them here.

Last but not least Gwyneth turned 18 months on Valentines Day.  I did a little scrapbook page of her.  Here it is.  

Also if you didn't notice I changed my background and header.  Let me know what you think.

Have a great week.

The Dentist and some other stuff.

 This week we went on a homeschool field trip to the dentist's office that see's the people on the bases nearest us.  It was really nice. They had a powerpoint for the kids and a goody bag.  They took them on a tour of the clinic and even checked their teeth really quick.

This is Corina in the lab where they make dentures and crowns and things like that.  See all the teeth molds behind her?  We even got to see how they make gold teeth.  

Here is Corina getting her teeth checked.  No Cavities!

They even checked Aurora's teeth. She didn't want to get in the chair so this was the next best thing.  No Cavities for Aurora either.  Yeah!

On a different note my daffodils are about to bloom.  If we had one warm day here I'm pretty sure they would.  We already saw some in bloom when we were driving the other day.  It's still pretty rainy and cloudy here but it's starting to be nice.  Spring is on it's way here. Last year when we came there was a festival in York called the Jorvik Viking Festival.  We missed it though and we missed it again this year.  It's going on all this week though.  maybe next year we will be able to go.  Recently Mark had been working super hard at work.  The vikings ruled England until 1066 when when William the Conqueror took the throne at the Battle of Hastings.  In Corina's homeschool curriculum she has to learn about the beginning history of England and why the English language is the way it is.  That was part of our lesson the other day.  How lucky is it that we have actually been to the spot where that took place and I could actually show her pictures of us there.  That is so amazing!!!!

Last but not least Gwyneth thought she would be a little mischievous and draw on the wall with a pencil the other day.  I have to say that under the circumstances she did and interesting job.  It kind of looks like she made a creepy face.  that must have been the mischief coming out.  Click on the picture to make it bigger if you can't see it.  

Well, that's all for this week. I hope everyone has a great week.