and because i forgot to post them earlier...

Here's a selection of our Easter pictures:

first movie

Tonight we took the boys to see their first movie, Horton Hears a Who, at the rundown but still classic Rees Theater downtown. The movie was scheduled to start at 7:00, so we got there at 6:50 and went proceeded to the single screen...only to find that we were the only people in the place. Eventually, we were joined by about 10 other movie-goers. Guess everyone prefers the modern conveniences of our local big-box cineplex on the outskirts of town. We were a little worried because the boys were kind of jumpy after 15 minutes of waiting, but then the movie started, and they sat rapt in their seats the rest of the time.


Amazingly, they only showed one preview before the movie. Unfortunately, it was for one of the many Ice Age sequels, and featured a really scary dinosaur. That really got the whole thing off on the wrong foot for Liam. He sat quietly and watched, but his review after the movie was negative: "It was too loud and scary and long and I didn't like it!" There's some hope, though: He did say that he wants to see another movie sometime. Max, on the other hand, said that he liked the movie, but honestly he seemed more interested in his ice water and M&Ms. By the way, I have to add that the concessions were CHEAP: I got a bottle of water for the boys to split, a soda for myself, and a bag of M&Ms for $4. I seem to recall spending that much on a single soda the last time we went to the cineplex.

aunt bethany knows how to show the boys a good time

My dad's been digging holes and clearing brush around their field in preparation for spring (yay, spring!). Apparently, a local boy saw him out there burning some brush the other day and stopped to ask what he was doing. My dad's response: "I'm clearing this land so I can build six or seven spec homes out here."

"Really?!?"

"Nah, but you can tell people that if they start asking." That's good stuff! Anyway, Bethany earned the boys' undying devotion by taking them out during the Easter festivities to explore the big holes. I can think of only a few things that they boys like better than getting dirty playing outdoors.

presenting the circus forticus portrait studio

Last night I was playing with the settings of the camera -- yes, this was before I realized that the boys had already been there and done that! Liam and Max were enthralled with some quality children's programming (The Aristocats, which Liam got in his Easter basket) so I took the opportunity to test out the new setting on them. Yeah, I know, you've seen this technique already, but I'm still pretty excited about these pictures. It's a good thing that they were both wearing green, too!





Confidential to Avalon: I think I see this year's fair photo project shaping up. Heh!

forgive the time lapse

It's been a busy week! We had an action-packed Easter weekend and we haven't slowed down since. So here's a quick recap: Saturday, Mike and the boys headed to Michigan to visit with Barb and Kevin. Reports indicate that they had a wonderful time jumping (Max) and discovering the wonders of the automotive bungee cord (Liam), but Mike forgot to bring a camera, so I have no visual evidence. Guess we'll all just have to take his word for it.

Easter was fun! The boys were excited to see the wonderful things that the Easter Bunny had brought them (a new puzzle and new DVD each). Of course, they also got presents from B&K and a basket from my parents as well (with Melissa & Doug toolboxes!) The big family gathering (for 55) was at my mom's this year, and everyone had a wonderful time. We ate great food, visited, and watched the kids scurry around in the frenzy of the egg hunt.

And that's where things get interesting. Let me backtrack a couple of days to tell you about the time Mike caught the boys in our room, using my new camera. That's right, my precious birthday camera. When Mike took it away from them, the lens was a little smudged, but it seemed all right otherwise. Hah -- famous last words! When I uploaded pictures tonight, I found this little gem, which I definitely didn't take myself (I also definitely didn't authorize Max to sneak that much chocolate down his gullet!):


So, back to Easter. I didn't realize that Liam had changed all of the settings, so imagine my surprise when the first half of the pictures turned out to have funky coloring. Some of them turned out quite nicely! I guess I have to give the devious little guy some credit.





I'm especially fond of that last one with the mailbox. The coloration really shows off my mom's delicate paintwork. By comparison, the color pictures seemed almost dull:



In typical holiday fashion, the boys ate themselves silly. We kept taking their candy away, only to turn around and find that they'd conned a cousin into giving them more. A couple of times we had to pry Jolly Ranchers and jawbreakers out of their mouths. But really, if that's not the mark of a happy Easter in the mind of a little boy, what is?

peep show

backyardigans

Signs of spring have enchanted us this week. So far we've seen two robins, one bee, and one brave tulip trying to sprout. Tonight after dinner, we decided to do a little walkabout in the yard to see how it fared over the winter, and to give the boys some running-around time. We've got all kinds of plans for the yard, but most of them are going to be over the very long term. Also, you should know that all of them are Mike's plans, so any details won't be forthcoming from me. All I know is that there may be terraces involved, but that Mike has vetoed something called a "hydro-garden." There has been talk of stump removal, and of plant, um, transplanting. Yeah, that's about all I know. Well, that and the boys love it out there. They ran around like wild things, yelling with joy tonight. Spring is good.

cabbage patch kids

In their own special way, Liam and Max would like to wish you a happy St. Patrick's Day. Only one of them is wearing green, but they're both proclaiming their Irish heritage proudly with their choice of headwear. Oh, cabbage. How can you taste so vile boiled with corned beef on Saturday, yet be so delicious in cole slaw on Sunday? It's one of the great mysteries of life.

springing

Ah, spring. We've missed you! It was such a nice day today, so after dinner the boys and I decided to take a walk. I surprised them by walking to a playground we've never visited before, and as you can see they were thrilled by the chance to run around and play outside after so many months of being cooped up indoors. They swung, they slid, they teeter-tottered to their hearts' content. Max even made several trips to the top of the curly slide (and back down) all by himself.





But of course, nothing good comes without a price. In this case, the penalty for taking advantage of our sudden warm front was enduring the mud that melting snow had made of the playground. The boys fell a couple of times and got themselves thoroughly dirty. You can see it in many of the pictures, but take a look at this close-up of Max's knees from the end of the trip:


Needless to say, I spent the evening doing laundry and scrubbing all the mud off of our shoes. On a side note, Max is suddenly developing a fascination for doing what the big kids do. Today he demanded "no lid" when I poured his milk into a sippy cup. I took pictures of him drinking straight out of the cup like a big boy (he didn't spill at all!) but unfortunately it looks like I did some damage last weekend when I dropped the camera (luckily it's our old one, not the super new one Mike and the boys got me for my birthday). I thought the screen looked funny, and figured I had damaged it but that the pictures would turn out fine. But then I discovered halfway through our fun at the park that the problem was that the lens cover wasn't opening completely. I fixed it right away, but half of my pictures from the day turned out like this:


Which would be kind of cool if any of them had also been in focus. Ah, well.

daylight savings time: thumbs down

Sure, it's nice to have that extra hour of daylight in the evening or whatever, but Ben Franklin obviously didn't have parents of young children in mind when he developed this ridiculous time change. Suddenly, Liam and Max are going to bed when it's light outside. And Liam is well aware that it's light out, and fights the idea of going to bed "early." Yes, I know that eventually, when we hit summer, he'll be going to bed when it's light out anyway, but that's a gradual process. With the stupidey stupid time change, he was going to bed in the dark one night, and then bam! the next night he's going to bed in daylight.

As if that wasn't enough, here in the Hoosier State, we have plenty of other time issues to keep us busy. Check out this link if you want maps and stuff, but suffice it to say that it's more stupidey stupidity. Two years ago, there was a big move to reform the time zones, since some counties were on CST and observed daylight savings, some were on EST and observed daylight savings, and most were in the Eastern Time Zone but did not observe daylight savings. So as part of the big reform, counties got to request which time zone they wanted to be in. Then the state mostly ignored the requests, assigned some counties to CST and some to EST, and decided that everyone would follow daylight savings. Yippee. As a result, my parents, in the next county over, are an hour behind us. My parents and sister both live in CST but work in EST. My little brother and sister live in CST but go to school on EST. Planning any event requires a lot of "Oh, at noon? Is that noon your time or noon my time?" nonsense.

Apparently, there's a referendum in the works to let each county vote on which time zone it will follow, so things could change again. But I think that daylight savings is here to stay. Damn you, Ben Franklin!

penny savers

A couple of years ago, Liam got a green plastic piggy bank from Grandpa Kevin. He loved getting coins so he could put them in his bank. On occasion, he's even gotten dollar bills as rewards from Joe and Bethany, and he never wants to spend his money on anything fun like matchbox cars -- nope, it's been straight in the bank for him. (Which, by the way, I think is an excellent habit to foster!) That is, until last week, when Max threw the bank on the floor and managed to shatter it into several pieces. Liam was crushed, so I promised him a new bank. Off I went yesterday to our local Evil Empire Superstore. I trudged up and down every aisle in the toy section -- no banks. I asked a salesperson, who pointed me to the stationery aisle, where they keep coin wrappers and sorters -- no bank. I asked another salesperson, who told me that they haven't carried piggy banks in a long time. I trudged to the checkout in defeat, and there they were: cardboard Tootsie Roll banks, only 94 cents each! So I got one for each of the boys.


Oh, the merriment that ensued! The studious concentration as they raced to see who could shove the most coins into their bank the fastest! The joy as they shook the cardboard tubes to hear the rattling of the currency inside. And then came the inevitable fall: They shook their banks too hard, and the little plastic tops came off, scattering coins everywhere. Suffice it to say, these banks are not made from the highest quality materials in the land. They'll do quite nicely for now, but I'm still on the hunt for a couple of sturdy, preferably unbreakable banks. Send us your tips, if you've got them.

high school? um, no.

I have to say that the kindergarten kids were much better behaved and less prone to tantrums than the high-schoolers. There was a change in plans, so instead of teaching English, I got Science for two days. Loni is probably a better authority than me, but my impression was that most of these kids were sophomores. Don't they learn manners by then? And as Hoosiers, they should certainly know the words of one of the state's favored sons, John Cougar Mellencamp: "When I fight authority, authority always wins." In this case, I was authority, and I won, but I'm kind of wondering if it was worth it. The first day was chock-full of challenges, requests for bathroom breaks, "smart" comments, cheating (cheating!), and even furniture disassembly. I sent three kids to the principal's office in one period alone. It really boggles my mind. I'm trying not to sound too old here, but these kids were brazenly disrespectful. Each period is 48 minutes long, and they only had to endure my presence for one period per day, but apparently that was too much. Needless to say, the second day (today), the students were dismayed to find that I'd (foolishly) come back for more. Luckily, today I followed the finest of substitute teaching traditions and showed a movie during every period. There was still plenty of sass, and I overheard some conversations that showed a remarkable lack of judgement on their parts (ok, so I wasn't surprised), but nobody went to the office, so I guess the day was a success.

in like a lion

March already! March, finally! This weekend was really nice, temperature-wise. Despite all the snow that's still lingering out in the yard, it was warm enough to spend a lot of time outside. We started Saturday morning by going out and shoveling some snow, an activity that the boys are inexplicably fond of.



Later in the morning, we took a nice drive to South Bend to run a bunch of errands and eat at Chipotle. The boys were in heaven with their cheese quesadillas and lemonade!

Sunday morning, Liam and Max headed out with Mike to the hardware store, where they bought, among other things, seed packets for green beans and watermelons. Perhaps it's a little early in the season yet to think about planting, but there's a definite change in the air that suggests this long winter may be coming to an end. After the hardware store, they took advantage of the warm weather to head to the park, much to the delight of two little boys who are tired of being cooped up in the house.





In the afternoon, Liam and I took on the big job of cleaning out the garage. We assembled a couple of sets of shelves (purchased the day before on our shopping errands) and loaded them up. It really makes a big difference in there to have things stored neatly and organized. We'll be doubly glad once it gets warm enough to start some outdoor projects. After a couple of hours, Max joined us outside, and the boys had a blast riding their bikes on the sidewalk and loading up what's left of the snow into their sand buckets (which we unearthed in the great garage clean-up).



In other news, last week I spent the whole week subbing for a kindergarten class. Oh, the tantrums! The bickering! The incessant questioning of what I was doing and why I would dare not to do it exactly as their regular teacher does! For the coming week, I'm already signed up for three days of subbing -- two days of high-school English, and one day of first grade. I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that the high-school days will prove to be just as challenging as kindergarten, just in a more subtle way. On the plus side, a couple of the teachers asked me if I had a teaching license, and were surprised that I don't, because they said I did really well in the classroom. I'm still not sure I have the right temperament to be a teacher full-time, but it was definitely nice to have some positive reinforcement.

All in all, I have to say that March has gotten off to a good start. We had a nice warm weekend, and plenty of time together as a family, which seems a commodity in short supply these days. What more could I ask for?

brotherly love

Finally, it seems like the boys have enough in common to really become good friends. Once Max came onto the scene, Liam didn't seem to have much use for him. He cried, he slept a lot, and he wasn't mobile enough to run around with. But lately it's like a switch has been flipped, and they have so much fun together. They play, tell jokes to each other, giggle, and yes, wrestle. What a nice development!

mr. max head

Max loves his new Mr. Potato Head. Well, mostly the accessories that go with it...