March 2017

As if right on cue, March arrived with flowers a'bloom, Oklahoma winds raging, and much nicer weather!  With an unusually large number of sick days for this typically healthy family, we didn't enjoy the month of March as much as we normally do, but we still made a lot of great memories!

we've been letting the chickens out a lot lately in the afternoons - Bruce has been working with them, and they've become so tame!

playing chase with Daddy after dinner is still the thing they look forward to most every day

Bruce built a bird nest in our cherry tree, and fully expects a local to take up residency there...

and the bugs are back!  and so are the million empty-yogurt-containers-now-bug-prisons all over the house...  This photo is courtesy of Abbs, and is of Bruce's katydid eggs that finally hatched out - pretty cool

Towards the beginning of the month, Bruce got to tag along with Charlie to a job site!  Bruce loved it, but I think the work crew enjoyed it more!

showing the guys his drawings

Abbs is potty-trained!  She's not 100% accident-free, but I feel confident to classify her as "trained" - woo-hoo!  It seems like this was the last milestone we needed to pass to feel officially out of the early years, and as I've been telling people - I think we're getting ready to enter the glory days!  I'm so excited!  Not to say I think it will be all smooth sailing from here on out, but the past five and a half years have been so challenging taking care of these tiny humans - I'm really looking forward to this next season!

There were two different opportunities for builds at the Lego store this month.  One of Bruce's besties has been coming with us the past few months, which only makes it even more fun!  And I cannot believe how awesome Bruce is getting with his master builds!  It's really fun that Abby has started to enjoy building too.  I think the store wouldn't mind her signing up for the meetings, but technically you're supposed to be 6, and at only 3, I think we might be pushing it a bit.  Abby's got a good friend/employee at the store though who always lets her take a kit home.

we also built leprechaun traps with our home school lego group!

This semester our home school nature club has been meeting at the same park every other week, instead of rotating around town.  It's been fun to watch the same place change from winter into spring little by little!  And bonus - we found a creek bed to explore there, a new favorite!

The Oklahoma City Zoo made a great effort over Spring Break to bring exciting zoo-mobile presentations to the various libraries in the area.  We were able to catch two of the shows and had a blast!  Now Bruce and Abby love to play "zoo-mobile" at home, which involves them loading different stuffed animals into cardboard boxes and pushing them into the living room for a show-and-tell of sorts.  It's pretty cute.

after reading the fable, and telling us a little about the different animals, we got to watch a race between a tortoise and a hare (rabbit) - and the tortoise won both times!

and the following week she brought an armadillo to our library!

now Bruce wants a pet armadillo...

We went on some fun field trips this month for school!  We visited a yoga studio, a small zoo in Texas, the post office, and a fun children's museum called the Jasmine Moran Center.  We're still "doing school" just as a family most of the time, but we having been joining other families more frequently, which has been fun!

the dog stole the show at the yoga studio...

We met a friend and her boys at the zoo in Gainesville, just across the border.  Bruce threw up right before we got there, but I thought he was just car sick from having to do some math worksheets in the car.  He was acting pretty puny though, so I rented a wheelchair to push them around in...  And, even though he didn't throw up at the zoo at all, it turned out he was actually pretty sick - and threw up countless more times on the way home.  I think I earned another motherhood badge that day - catching throw up in a bucket while driving down the interstate looking for an exit to pull over at...  

exploring a mail truck

checking out groceries at the children's museum

I love that home schooling lets us have so many out-of-the-box learning experiences - like hunting for rose rocks with a friend

and participating in the grandparents program at the local VA center

and exploring broken baby monitors

and reading a million library books  (I seriously regret not starting a book log at the beginning of the year - I'd love to know how many books we've actually read!)

and randomly finding fossils at a park!

treasures

Oh my goodness!  Charlie and I went on a date!!!  Charlie's company gave him a gift card to a fancy-schmancy restaurant in OKC when he was promoted last fall, and can you believe it has taken us this long for Charlie to be in town, with everyone healthy, on a night when our baby-sitter was available?  But it finally happened, and it was glorious!

 

Charlie worked the ground over and we put the beginnings of our garden in!

We needed compost, which meant a trip to Todd's (the guy Charlie works with) horse barn to pick up van loads of poop... The kids loved chasing the barn cats around of course

we planted potatoes on St. Patrick's Day, and then the root veggies went in.  Next up - salad greens!

As March faded into April, we found ourselves driving down to Texas for a reunion - right smack in the middle of bluebonnet season.  It's the little joys in life!  (More on the reunion next time though)

it was the kids' first time to experience the bluebonnets

needless to say - they loved it.  

we found this gorgeous field on the northbound side of Highway 6, just south of Waco

And is it really a crime to pick the state flower???  oops...

this one is courtesy of Bruce!

Thanks Ladybird