The Rest of March

 Eating lunch with Mikayla and Austin at school and enjoying the
school playground is always a treat!

 

 Making cookies with not just 1 helper but 4 is lots of fun!

 My little laundry helper

 The 2nd grade at Wayside got to go over to the YMCA during school one week for swim lessons.

 We introduced the Hyde family to bike riding on the pathfinder. We did about 5 miles on this day.

It was Katelyn's first long bike ride in the carrier. She did great!

 We had a baby shower for Kristi at the end of March.

 Mikayla and Kambria were invited to come and they were pretty excited about that!

They helped with the "guess how many M&M's in the bottle" game. 

 And Kristi kindly let them open most of the baby gifts. She got lots of cute stuff for baby girl!

 We surprised the girls with a date to the movies to watch the new Beauty and the Beast.

It was fantastic!

These guys biked all the way out to Dave's house which is about 7 miles from our house. We met up with them there and watched the movie "Sing" in his theater room!

Welcome Baby MaKenzie

Kristi and Chris welcomed a new addition to their family the end of April!

These girls were eager to hold their newest cousin!

Carter was pretty interested in her too.



She is a cutie and already adored by her older cousins!

Happy Easter!

 Enjoyed Easter morning which began with watching a video about the life of Jesus Christ, his sacrifice, death, and resurrection which is what we truly celebrate on Easter.
The girls were excited to wear their new Easter dresses to church. (Austin got new sandals which he did not wear to church)

Later we had dinner and egg hunt at Dave and Debbie's house.Katelyn quickly figured out what to do.

Enjoying the goods!

Brooklyn quickly took off gathering up eggs as fast as she could.

And ended up with a whole basket full of eggs!

And so did these old pro's!

(Not to worry....all the cousins had a basket full of eggs too! The Easter bunny left quite the lute at Dave and Debbie's house) Between this and the Easter baskets we got at Vicki's house the day before we had enough candy to last for a couple months. Somehow it was gone after 2 weeks! Oops!

Crystal Digging

We were invited by the Hyde family to go crystal digging at the Great Salt Plains in Oklahoma.

  I am always up for an adventure especially when it involves something outdoors and nature.

 When we first got there I wasn't exactly sure how the kids would react to it. But kids love to dig in water and mud especially when there is something to find! (at least mine do!) And there were plenty of crystals to find of all shapes and sizes.

The challenge was on for finding the best "hourglass" crystal. Oklahoma is the only place in the world where this type of crystal can be found. Because of the particular way the sand, salt and water combine, the sediment collects in the center of the crystal to form the hourglass shape.

 I barely saw Austin cause he was off on his own exploring and searching the salt plains with his friend Russell. His family unexpectedly showed up about 10 minutes after us and the Hyde family arrived. Such a funny coincidence!

 Brooklyn was so excited when she found her first crystal all by herself!

Katelyn wanted held at first but then discovered that getting wet and muddy wasn't so bad after all!

Every seemed to be enjoying themselves! We were crystal digging for a couple hours.

It was super windy out there! But that didn't slow them down when there was "treasure" to find!

   Honestly, I think the older kids would have been happy out there another hour or so but figured we better rap it up before the little ones got too cranky.  

We walked away with a bucket full of crystals. It was definitely a unique and fun adventure!

TSC Hurricane '06

It has been another great soccer season!

These boys have worked so hard and are developing into a pretty good little team!

We went to the Lexus Cup tournament in April

I love watching Austin play soccer and he loves the game!

Austin after he scored a goal with the assist from his teammate Tomas

Austin's cousin Klayton is our goalkeeper and played awesome!

After the last game the coach had the players walk over to us parents on the sideline and clap for us  to acknowledge our part in their accomplishment. We were on the sideline cheering for them because they had gone undefeated in the tournament and were the champions for their age division!!

It was all a team effort and they played great together as a team!

Obviously winning isn't everything but it is a nice feeling to win every once in a while!

The smiles on their faces were priceless!

Craig and Copeland were soccer teammates in high school so it was kind of fun to have him coach Austin this last year. Thank you Coach Copeland for an amazing season and great year of player development! Austin and his teammates were blessed with the opportunity to be coached by one of the best!