We're not in Kansas anymore...

... or perhaps Kansas was EXACTLY where we were last night. Rachel here. Last night the girls and I were hiding from tornadoes under our stairs into the wee hours of this morning. (Sexy pic huh? Muahahaha! Let's everyone take a deep breath... the Budweiser boxes are not full... they were at one time, but they are GREAT storage boxes... for realsies.)

Don't worry... Bryan was with us via Skype. Oy Vey! To be perfectly honest, the weather was yucky... we were in the path... and got lucky. In fact Bryan saw WAY MORE ACTION, sadly, than we did... while he was on the computer with us trying to keep me calm. He's a saint. For real. This entire predicament has only spawned more tornado obsession from Reese. Today she only painted pictures of the "spinny tomatoes." I'm not sure if I should feed into this learning opportunity or not... I'm afraid the girl is going to have nightmares and need therapy. Ahhhh... this is the story of our lives. :)

Looking forward...

... to doing a lot of this...

... and even some of this for the rest of Spring and Summer. :)

Mother Nature

Rachel here. Tornadoes seem to be running rampant across the U.S. lately... Mother Nature can be so beautiful and yet so brutal. Sadly an area about 30 minutes from us was hit... hard. Coming back from Bryan's parents' house yesterday, we decided to drive through and see how they fared. In general it didn't appear too horrible... there was one area that was just about completely destroyed. Words can not even describe how we were feeling...

Reese was super worried and very confused by what she was seeing. "Why don't those houses have any roofes?" It was really hard to explain without her being scared. She's been asking to watch tornado videos on YouTube since we've gotten home. They're pretty incredible. I've been trying my best to explain to her that the donations we've been making are going to help these people who were hurt and who's homes were hurt in the storms. Hopefully she understands... even just a little bit.

Emma Grace

Rachel here. Here are some sweet picture of my wee one that I just couldn't help but share. She's growing up so much and honestly it hurts. :-/

Happy Easter!

I hope everyone had a super great Easter with family and friends! We began the festivities by making these adorable little Easter basket cupcakes for the nice folks that work with Daddy. CUTE RIGHT?!
The Friday before Easter we dyed eggs... this was my first time ever (EG's too). It was awesomely messy, and we'll need to perfect our course of action for next year.

Emma Grace smashed two of them together, so we were able to try a hard boiled egg. I didn't think it was too shabby, while EG nearly gagged. Good times.

We hit up the Bburg Easter Egg Hunt and happened to see two of our absolute besties there... we just love them.

The big man was there as well... Emma Grace ignored him like the plague... I adore him.

The search was then on. I, being an old pro, wasted no time and racked up quite the load of eggs. EG on the other hand... made her trusty little helper do all the manual labor while she mainly stood and looked adorbs.

Then we were off to Grandma and Grandaddy's for the night WITHOUT the parentals... PARTYYYYYY! Look at the scrumptious goodies we made. :)

After church on Sunday there was more egg hunting to be had...

... and more goodies.

Upon returning home, we discovered the Reester Bunny made his grand appearance!

Don't you just love holidays? :)

Vesuvius

Rachel here. After a few painstaking days of our volcano drying... Reese was able to paint it... yellow. ;)

She even sang a little ditty for you while doing so...

The moment you've all been waiting for...

Non-Easter on the shelves

Rachel here. There were a few activities not on the shelf that Reese was interested in. One was working in her workbooks... but first... sharpening her pencil... for 10 minutes straight. :)

Working with her moveable alphabet on a few red words.

The ever famous... washing of the dishes. And finally, shape sorting from smallest to tallest. Reese struggled with this until I told her to do the outer frames first, and then move to the inner shapes... then there was no stopping her. :)

Easter Shelves

Rachel here. Here are some Easter activities the girls did on their shelves this week. I actually had a few more for them, but neither seemed interested. :(

I was attempting to find activities for the girls to do involving the plastic eggs that we seem to have 35,000 of. This was really neat, and I've actually seen it on a number of sites but can't remember which ones in particular. Basically you write a word family on one side, and various letters on the other and spin to read different words. For example... -ig... I can twist one side and read the word p-ig, twist and read r-ig, twist and read, b-ig. Super cute. Easter egg matching (kidsparkz).This was a really cute little matching game I found at our local toy store... each side of the egg matches to make a particular shape on the inside. Reese listening to a bunny story on tape at her listening center.Transferring plastic eggs.This was another cute idea I found somewhere (I really should write these things down)... it's a listening activity. There are 6 pairs of sounds, and the idea is to match them. I used wooden circles, pennies, rice, cotton balls, pencil erasers, and pasta. Reese did AWESOME and was able to match each one correctly!
Matching halved eggs.
Upper/lowercase matching with plastic eggs (and now that I think about it... I think I found most of these egg activities on The Activity Mom).From Counting Coconuts.Playdoh and Easter cookie cutters. Transferring giant chicks.