Easter, Brought to You By: The Bee Movie

What says "Easter" more than bees? Apparently last year (or was it the year before?) "The Bee Movie" came out right around Easter time. As a part of their multi-pronged marketing push, somehow we acquired an official "Bee Movie" Easter Egg Decorating Kit complete with Bee Movie stickers, Bee Movie egg holders, and other Bee Movie branded Easter items. As long as there is money to be made I suppose we'll have sponsors for everything. (Speaking of which, this Friday is brought to you by Nathan and Megan.)





Despite the corporate sponsorship, we had a wonderful Easter. We tried our best to help the kids remember and understand that the true reason for Easter is to celebrate the Resurrection, and that egg hunts and bunnies are just a fun tradition that we do. They got the right answer every time we quizzed them--except, of course, when we were in public and asked them the reason for Easter, in which case they purposefully threw the game and answered the question wrong to ensure that we didn't get too proud of our parenting skills. (How thoughtful!)


Alison, Kaitlyn and Maxwell each participated in egg hunts at various locations and were successfully able to gorge on sweets (thanks Carroll family and Grandma and Grandpa Carlson!). Max was particularly slow, however, because he thought you were supposed to consume everything in one egg before moving on to the next one.

On Easter morning, the Easter bunny left some baskets with fun toys and treat-filled eggs for the kids. And, Alison made cute cards on her own for each of us wishing us a Happy Easter!

We also made sure to procure the traditional Easter outfits--and our kids looked absolutely adorable (in our highly biased and opinionated view)!

All in all, a wonderful Easter. We hope yours was too.

Random Stories, Wonderlab and General Conference

Stories about our children, in no particular order:

Kaitlyn, Kaitlyn, Kaitlyn. She just says whatever comes to her mind. The other day as she was going on and on she said, "...I love Rebecca (her friend from church and from pre-school) more than Jesus. But, I do love Jesus."

Here she is building the "temple" out of building blocks in our empty dining room.


We've mentioned Kaitlyn's stylish outfits before. Let's see one of her latest:

Below Kaitlyn is sporting a pair of pajama pants on her arms as as a bolero sleeve thingy, a night gown with only one arm in the sleeve, another pair of pajama pants as pants, and a green head band with a pink headband wrapped around it to look like a flower.


Maybe we could make it a weekly feature--Kaitlyn's Crazy Outfit of the Week.

For Spring Break, Megan asked the kids what they wanted to do during their week off of school. Their suggestions included: ride bikes, eat Macaroni and Cheese, develop innovative homemade pizza products and services, and go to WonderLab. Megan uploaded several pictures from the week so we could blog about them. However, since I was out of town while Megan accomplished all of these Spring Break activities, I'll just have to guess at what it all means.

At WonderLab they had a powerful shrinking machine which was able to miniturize Alison and her friend (Rebecca's sister) Susan. Either that or they had a giant, two-story, spider web inside the building that the kids loved climbing on. Ali told me at least 5 times about the "giant leaf" they could play on when we spoke on the phone.


Both Max and Kaitlyn enjoyed the lighted table with the green plastic implementations. It was probably their favorite.


Max (and Megan) really liked the powerful magnet which was able to hold nails, bolts and washers so strongly that you couldn't pull them off. It was probably their favorite.


When Max wasn't trying to learn the secrets of electricity and magnetism, currents, magnetic fields, forces and the right-hand rule (he's pretty advanced for his age), he was busy trying to jam out on the colored drum-pad looking things. He also liked the big square brown thing in the background. Probably.


Another crowd favorite at the WonderLabs was the full-size wall of nails where you could crash your body parts into one side and see the form of your shapes on the other side. (Alongside Kaitlyn in this picture is the saintly Rebecca.)


As last weekend was General Conference and we were able to watch it on BYUTV, we set up tables in front of the TV and printed off the traditional conference packets with the usual try-to-get-your-kids-to-pay-attention games: General Conference talk bingo, General Authority tie coloring pages, and General Conference announcement trivia questions (How many members? Who is the new member of the Quorum of the Twelve? How many missionaries? Etc.).

While we've done this every year, this time it seemed to work especially well--so much so that Alison was concerned on Sunday night after conference was over that she didn't hear President Packer speak. I reassured her that I heard him speak during the Priesthood Session on Saturday night.

Even Max got into it. Briefly.

The Law of the Harvest

Weekends are full of fun. And by "fun" I mean "projects." That's right, I said projects are fun. Futbol! About a week ago Megan and I were chatting about the economy, the state of the world, self-reliance and counsel from the leaders of the church and we concluded that one of these days we should plant a garden. The next day, Megan had already consulted a variety of sources and determined what kind of garden it was that we should procure.

So, at the next available opportunity we (and by "we" I mean "Megan and the kids" since I was in Pittsburgh for business) went to Home Depot and picked up some treated wood, Behr Premium Paint (note: only buy Behr), screws and garden soil. Then, Saturday morning between sessions of General Conference we set out to farm.

Step 1 was assembling the wood components. Megan took care of that while I was gone too. Next, we picked a place to place the planks. Since we plan on acquiring a basketball hoop for the end of our driveway at some point we shot an airball from an appropriate distance to make sure that a real airball would have a low probability of bouncing into the garden and ruining our hard work.


Since the ground was extremely muddy, and since the "grass" in our backyard is rather patchy, I decided that an essential next step was tight rolling my jeans (like you had to do in 7th grade) in order to keep from completely enmuddifying my apparel.


When Alison and Kaitlyn saw how much fun digging up patchy sod was, they begged us to join in. We obliged by giving them shovels and instructions.


However, it wasn't long until they politely returned the shovels.


After we installed the special garden soil, Max was anxious to consume some of the fruits of our labor. So, he took a Wheat Thin and scooped up a big dip full of soil and helped himself to a big mouthful and found out that the vegetables weren't done yet.

Megan shared Max's sentiment when she said, "We've spent 8 hours working on this garden and I still don't have any vegetables to show for it."

Finally, we planted some carrots in random places, some peas, some lettuce and some other stuff. In 75 days we'll let you know how it all turned out.

(Pictures courtesy of our neighbor Amy, who came running out when she saw what we were doing and said, "I'm taking pictures so you can blog about it.")