Family Pictures

Yay!

Thanks Kacey!!

More here.

It's true what they say, about it being better to give than receive.

If you haven't given Nate a gift lately you don't know what you're missing.

Here are a few of the Thank You notes he wrote for his birthday presents.

To his Grandparents, who I doubt have even heard of SpaceBalls.

To his Grandpa, who will be happy to see the penmanship improvement.

And finally, to his favorite weirdos....

I think my granny would be proud of the job I've done teaching my children the importance of a sincere note of appreciation and also about the proper use of punctuation, capitalization and mistake correcting.  My work here is done. May the shorts be with me. (I KNOW it's Schwartz not shorts.)

Where does the time go?

Last month was SUPER fun for Nate.

First he got his permit. 

I can't begin to tell you how excited I am about the idea of having ANOTHER teen driver in the house (and on our insurance). yay.

Then he went to the Mountain Man Rendezvous. It's a camp out where all the boys (and men) get all grizzly and wear smelly homemade wool blanket coats and eat beef jerky and trade weapons.

Here's Nate in his Mountain Man/Jedi coat. He was trying to stop me from taking his picture by using a mind trick-"These are not the droids you're looking for, put down the camera." But I don't believe in Yoda so it didn't work. (I'm just kidding. I TOTALLY know Yoda is real.)

 Here's the knife he came home with. Apparently when men are in charge, common sense goes out the window. That stupid knife is just as big as it looks. yay.

We also celebrated March Madness as a family this year. I wrote all about it here and here. It was a very touching and emotional bonding experience. As I'm sure you can imagine.

Here's Ivy filling out her bracket.

Eli ended up using mascots to pick his winners.

Which, as it turns out, is not a bad plan. He beat us all, even Jon and Scott, and won the team shirt of his choice. Which, as it turns out, was Texas. Go figure.

This always seems to be a busy time of year. School is wrapping up, Eli is writing his country report on New Zealand, Ivy is writing her state report on Virginia, and Nate is writing his biology report on Syphilis. 

Don't ask. 

I don't have the energy to worry about biology report topics, I'm too busy counting the days until summer break while trying to freeze time so everyone stops growing up. Anyone know a Jedi trick for that?