Life in PICTURES

 ART time with neighbor kids.  Had a hard time finding a pic without other people's kids in it.  Turns out all kids love art.  Who knew?

 One of our more recent beach adventures.  Paradise Cove :)

 Yeah, he pretty much froze in this position for the entire time.  At least he wasn't screaming this time.  That would be normal for a beach trip for him.

 Pinewood Derby car testing.  Making sure it's fast enough!

 Oh look, a picture I don't HATE!  Taken by the up-and-coming photographer, Demetri.  So glad I don't have to develop rolls of film anymore with tons of random photos taken by kids.  On the other hand, now they take hundreds!

 Our Easter egg hunt.  He's just waiting till it's over now so he can eat the candy.

 Olie was a little more into finding all the eggs.

 Dad hid Demetri's eggs really really well.

 It took forever.

Xander, cleaning up.  Actually, he thinks these are balls and throws them all over the place.

For the most part, this is in chronological order.  Homeschool, Beach, Pinewood Derby, Easter.  Yep, that's what we've been up to.

Last week. Well, the memorable parts of it anyway :)

We’ve had some interesting times lately.  Wednesday we went to Paradise Cove with friends and swam with the turtles.  The kids explored, and the baby sat in a sort of stunned/comatose state as he warily watched the water and sand around him.  Demetri got a little careless and jumped from rock to rock instead of slowly climbing them, resulting in a pretty good fall.  I thought for sure it was another trip to the ER as an adult helped him get back to me.  His foot was covered in blood.  But after it was cleaned up, we saw it was just a shallow cut.  It didn’t stop him from screaming into a towel for the next 20 minutes, but I guess that’s just part of his dramatic personality. 

Friday we had “friend homeschool,” as a couple friends like to join us most Fridays.  We wrote beach stories for our books, and now I need to print the pictures of the turtle for them.  Then we played math computer games.  More neighborhood children wandered in and listened to Pandora while I cleaned.  A pillow fight eventually developed, and I had to stop cleaning to make some ground rules. 

1.      Anyone who hits the fan, tv, etc is out till the next round. 

2.      You can’t hit anyone who doesn’t have a pillow. 

3.      If you drop your pillow or sit down on the couch you’re out until the next round. 

4.      If you’re too hard on the little kids and they get hurt you’re out. 

5.      The baby is a bomb.  Anyone who touches him is out.

They had a blast!  We had to stop for a mandatory water break because I could see the sweat dripping from the older boys.  All in all, I think we had 12 children and a whole lot of pillows in the living room.  They did a great job at following the rules!  While they were waiting for Uncle Shawn to get home (because I told them he could whip them all in a pillow fight) we ended up doing karaoke to Disney songs on Youtube.  And the Hokey Pokey.  You should have seen the “too-cool-for-you” 8-12-year-old boys doing the Hokey Pokey.  It was all for Xander.  Sweet kids :).

Saturday one of our (8 yr old) friends came over and made bread with me.  Then we all made personal pizzas.  During lunch he exclaimed, “This is like my second home!”  And my kids told him he was welcome to live here forever and be a brother. Hmm...do I have a say in this? Haha.