Disclaimer: This post is pretty much just for the family history record books, so feel free to skim = ).
All while waiting for baby Graham to make his arrival, we kept busy with the Easter holiday and with a well-timed trip from Aunt Aubrey. The funny part was she even came later versus earlier to ensure she was here to meet the baby. She made it by one day (she had to go home the day after he was born)! But, though the pre-birth may not be as exciting as post-birth, we were so glad to have her to distract us while we waited 5 days past the due date for little Graham.
One of the most exciting parts of Aunt Aubrey's visit was that she brought the smaller of her two dogs for a road trip companion. The boys are DYING for a dog. I told them we couldn't have one until we have a backyard (i.e. the next house, which should be bigger and we should be done with crawling babies). So, they were ecstatic to have a dog for a week. I felt bad for Aubrey - her dog Sam was definitely the star of every day. To this day every dog is "Sammy" to Luke and Nathan is convinced that Sam is the perfect dog. These three boys definitely wore Sam out with all their loving!
These PJs Nana had gotten Luke for his birthday and now they are "sammy" pjs because the doggie on them looks just like Sam...well, not entirely, but in Lukie's world it does.
I love the happy look Carter has in this picture, though it makes him look so old. It gives me a glipse of him as a goofy teenager.
Then came Easter. Saturday morning the boys got to go on an easter basket hunt with clues. After 15 minutes of clue following (I purposely put one clue's answer downstairs and then the next answer upstairs to take more time and wear them out. It works great, though Nathan caught on this time to my ways!), they found their baskets in the van.
The boy's loot was minimal, but exciting for them - a new transformer and some candy. Yum!
Then, after listening to the first session of Conference, we headed on over to the city easter egg hunt at a local park. I made the boys sit on the strangely large Easter Bunny's lap (only so many more years that I can do this for!), including Luke, who was understandably terrified. I mean, when was the last time you saw a bunny this large with a pasted on smile?
Then on to the bean bag tosses and egg roll races. I laughed at the form difference between Nathan and Carter in these pictures. Guess we will see if early inclinations for sports ability pans out...
Nathan going for the "shove it" granny shot approach...
Carter with beautiful form in his swing, even with follow through. Who knew there was a technique to this game?!
Finally the egg hunt! The boys were lucky and actually had two egg hunts, the city one (which these pictures are from) and then a family one that we did amongst friends. Needless to say, they had plenty of candy until the next candy holiday! Though Carter is funny - once he has candy, he just sits down and eats it. All of it. In one setting. Then he spends the next week hounding Nathan to share the candy that Nathan carefully is only one piece a day of.
Here they are chomping at the bit, waiting for the starting whistle...
Then when it finally blew, Carter got so anxious that he had about 10 eggs in his bucket and then he tripped and fell and dumped everything back onto the ground. Poor guy!
Oh, and we braved easter egg decoration, which always goes so quickly. I think I had three dozen eggs and they knocked them out in like 15-20 minutes. And we definitely had to do it when Luke was asleep, that would have been a colorful disaster! But, the coolest thing we found was this roll on paint egg dye - no dipping, you just roll on the dye with little mini rollers. We got such bright awesome colors and it was much less of a pain we are doing that again next year!
Thanks Aunt Aubrey for helping us stay busy and celebrating the holiday with us!
