Welcome Spring!

 Cherry trees are big here. Craig loves it since it was a pretty big deal in Japan also. The blossoms are beautiful but what I think really makes it phenomenal is the grouping of so many! Our Sunday afternoon walk was spent in a magical grove of falling flowers. When we brought the stroller back in we had to knock gobs of flower petals off the wheels.

A visit from Grandpa

We had a visit from Grandpa last weekend and it was a blast! We got to see the beginnings of the cherry blossom festival down town which was beautiful, visit frying pan farm park, fly a kite, enjoy the beautiful spring weather northern Virginia affords this time of year, and take Dad to see our new home (I can call it that right? we are closing in 6 days!) We even got to finish out a great weekend with dinner at Bob Evens!

I can't get over how cute this little guy is!

Elizabeth was perfectly happy to let Grandpa hold her lots!

It was sad to say goodbye but we had a lot of fun and I was so glad to see Ethan get to really meet his Grandpa. The next day he kept saying "Gapa all gone" and he was so sad. It was also neat for Grandpa to meet Elizabeth for the first time. We sure wish they were closer!

An Artistic Beginning

I am sure I am not the first mom to have this idea--but I still felt pretty ingenious when the idea occurred to me. Ethan loves to paint but I hate to clean up messes...pretty much in any form, so he paints with water and all my old art brushes on colored construction paper. It's just like painting to him and when it spills, it's only water! When he tries to paint the table, walls, and himself--it's only water! He says over and over "I painting me Mama" and I say-- "go for it!" it's actually just a bath.

We had been outlining his hand and when I left him alone for a minute he started doing this. He said he was "drawing my head".

This would be the outcome of his simplified silhouette. Is he a genius or what?

He has a display on one wall where he gets to hang up his art. He was very excited to add his paintings to the wall but was sad when he went back an hour later and the paintings had disappeared--so we go to do it all again. This has kept him occupied for days now.

Valentines Sweetheart

 It would just be wrong to not share these. Doesn't she look festive in her heart headband and leg-warmers?

I could eat this girl with a spoon.

Everything about her is a miracle to me.

Blessed with rice

Here is Ethan enjoying one of our pastries

Good stuff!
He was not happy when he realized he had to share.

Tonight we made a special trip to the 'Lotte Mart' --a popular Korean store around here--for some rice and our favorite Asian pastries. With the plan to increase our food storage we opted to buy a forty pound bag of rice. Food storage has been one of my recent topics of study since we will soon have more room. As we made our way through the store with forty pounds of rice hefted on Craig's back, we were stopped and asked to participate in a survey on Korean soup spices. As a girl who worked for several years in high school doing phone surveys I am usually willing to participate--I was thrilled to learn with this survey I would be given a $10 certificate! When Craig realized the survey was five pages it took some convincing, but in the end we both took the survey, tried the soups in question, signed away our lives and came home with a nearly free forty pounds of rice.

We are being blessed already for our food storage efforts! And we will probably forever laugh at the English translation of the survey asking if we thought hot sauce or Korean pepper powder was more 'curious'.