Sunday, March 31, 2013

Misc. March Iphone Pics

I may have been out of the blogging loop, but I just discovered you can sync your iphone pics directly to your blog! WooHoo!  That's awesome!  I am getting really bad about carrying my DSLR around and usually take so many pics with my iphone.

 St Patrick's Day!!!

Of course the Leprechauns visited!
And we made rainbow cookies again.  Grandpa joined us for dinner of corned beef and cabbage!

The boys and I stopped for Shamrock Shakes while in town.  

Carter had an assignment to write about the person in his life that is worth their weight in gold.  He chose his brother. He wrote 1 1/2 pages about what a good person and brother Alex is!  Melt my heart!!!  I love how my boys are best friends and I should add that the girls are pretty good friends too!
My Birthday was in March.  The kids took me to my favorite place to eat in Iowa so far. 
 Nadya was at a  sleep over so Hallie's Best friend joined us too. Alex ordered their
garbage burger and didn't come close to finishing it. 
Grandpa went to school for Grandparents' Day.  
He had to bop around four different classrooms to visited everyone.
Alex interviewed and wrote a report about Grandpa.
 
And calving season officially began which kept Doug pretty busy.  He checked on his cows twice a day.  Once in the morning and once at night to make sure they were doing okay. Sometimes I would join him.  This little cutie was born on my birthday.
Meet Stormy.  This is actually Grandpa's calf, but Doug and Alex found him in pretty bad shape as he was born during a March snow storm.  His mom had died and left him cold and wet in a pile of snow which is not great for a young calf.  Doug, Grandpa and Alex spent hours working on him trying to warm him up and get him to eat. It was quite a learning experience for Alex. I was a little worried because Doug didn't think he'd make it.  It looks like he is taking the bottle in this picture, but he didn't.  They had to tube him for a few days before he finally decided to suck.  I am happy to report that stormy is doing fantastic and all of cousins have enjoyed having a bottle calf around.  This is stormy the night we found him and after he was dry and warm.

Friday, March 29, 2013

St. Louis

A family vacation for Spring Break wasn't looking too promising.  Doug was super busy farming--
Hallie was off to Utah so the boys, Nadya and I decided to check out St. Louis!
 I invited two of my teacher friends to join us.  We had a blast!

Our hotel had a beautiful view of downtown St. Louis.  
We visited The Arch first.  The kids enjoyed it and they weren't scared at all. 
 Alex had the most questions about safety, and I could tell he was a little timid, 
but he once he saw the capsule we were riding in all was good in his world.  
The arch is amazing!

Going UP!!!!!!!!!
 
630 Feet High!!!

 We walked around downtown a little bit and ate dinner at Hard rock Cafe.  After dinner we continued to explore and stumbled across a few statues.  Alex had to pick this Statue's Nose!

The next day I took the boys and Nadya to the City Museum and Leah and McKenna spent the day shopping and sight seeing.  The City Museum is the coolest museum we've ever visited.  It is a 600,000 square foot "playground" which was formerly home to the international shoe factory.  Everything has been reclaimed and re-purposed. It's full of curved steel, slides, fiberglass, and loads of stuff to climb on and through.  It even has a ten story slide that use to be an old shoe chute.  We bumped our way down first thing when we arrived!  Pretty awesome slide!  The boys could have spent another day there!  Because it is so difficult to describe, I took many pictures!  We can't wait to go again!
The Ten Story Slide

On our last day we visited Six Flags.  It was their opening weekend and surprisingly wasn't too crowded.
It was such a great weekend!  Thank you Leah and McKenna for joining us!

Friday, March 15, 2013

Easter

We decorated Eggs as usual, but we  missed our egg decorating tradition with Kris and Laurence.  
We missed Hallie as well as she spent Spring Break with her mom.
Easter morning the kids searched high and low for their baskets.  
Our new house is bigger and as a result it took them longer to find their baskets. 
Later the boys set off to find all the eggs hidden by the Easter Bunny.  We have a MUCH larger yard, so the boys definitely got their exercise.  Nadya didn't participate.  She said she was too old.