Family Pictures

 

Singing Time with Katy

Meet the newest three-year-old in our house:

She is quickly turning into a goofy little know-it-all preschooler. Tonight I just had to share a conversation that I had with her as I was singing to her and trying to put her to bed. One of her favorite songs is a children's song from church--in our house we refer to it as "Song of a Bird", although I think its actual title is "My Heavenly Father Loves Me". Tonight as I tried to sing it to her, it went something like this:

Me: Whenever I hear the song of a bird, or look at the blue, blue sky...
K: Why is our sky dark?
Me: Because it's been raining all day
K: Why is the sky dark?
Me Because the sun went down.
K: Oh...Why did the sun goed down?
Me: Because it's time for bed.
K: Oh.

Me (trying to remember the tune from before): Whenever I feel the rain on my face or the wind as it rushes by, When ever I touch a velvet rose or walk by our lilac tree...
K: I didn't touched a velvet rose! You picked up a frog!
(I did, in fact, pick up a frog about 2 weeks ago and let her pet it)
Me: ....
K: There's more song!

And so I finished singing her the song. I think she managed to keep quiet for two whole minutes so I could sing her the rest of that song.

Purple Pole Beans

This spring I bought a packet of Purple Podded Pole Bean seeds.  I'm a sucker for red or purple vegetables. Maybe they just seem tastier if they aren't green (This year I bought Red Malabar Spinach, a couple varieties of eggplant, and a purple tomato variety along with my pole beans). Our pole beans are the one thing in our garden that's really thriving. (Please excuse my blurry pictures. A two-year-old ran off with my camera, so I used the iPod, which needs some improvement in the auto-focus department).

Here are the pole bean plants climbing all over their trellis:

I love the pretty little purple flowers.

But the coolest thing about them are the bean pods themselves.  See that deep purple color?

 When you snap them, you can see that they really are green beans with a thin purple coating

 
But then you throw them in a pot and boil them for a few minutes and abracadabra...







You have green beans!

Pretty cool, huh?

Legoland

We went to Legoland yesterday. Bonnie organized a Home School group visit that got us in for a pretty good deal. We had about 25 kids and their families. The older kids liked the roller coasters and even Andrew overcame his fears and by the end of the day was wishing he could ride them over and over again. The Legoland park is where the old Cypress Gardens park used to be and they did a good job of maintaining much of what the old theme park included. Cypress Gardens was the first theme park in Florida built in the 30s. The new park still has the beautiful botanical gardens including an impressive Banyan tree. They also kept the live waterskiing shows, but with a Lego Pirates theme. It was a long day and we were all very worn out but all had a good time.

What we've been up to lately

I have spent most of this weekend sick in bed. It's not the flu and it's not pneumonia, but it's certainly managed to knock me out for the last few days. Now that I am feeling well enough to sit up and eat a little bit (but not do much of anything else) I've been looking through the pictures that Kevin has taken over the last few months and I thought I'd share them (I've taken one or two of the pictures here, but it's become painfully obvious to me that all of my pictures turn out blurry or have a random person walking in front of the camera or have children missing heads or limbs).

In February we went camping. It was ideal camping weather and lots of fun.

 

March started off with an Odyssey of the Mind competition. Andrew's (non-competitive) Primary team got lots of praise from the judges with their pirate ship skit.

 

Matthew and Maggie's team placed 7th out of 10 teams. We were satisfied with that, as we had two coaches (including yours truly) and 6 out of 7 team members who had never  been to an Odyssey competition before. Here they are right after their skit. Their background fell down behind them while we took pictures. It was truly a miracle that it made it through the whole skit before collapsing.

 

 Finally, last month we went to the zoo. It has a new dinosaur exhibit and zipline courses. The older kids had a lot of fun on the "Chutes and Ladders" zipline course for kids.