Hendricks Spring Carnival - Open Stage

The neighborhood elementary school that Chelsea attends has an annual spring carnival. All the standard booths - cake walk, ring toss, face painting, dunking booth (mental note...post picture of Andy in dunking booth!), etc. All the while, there is a stage set up and kids are entertaining the folks that want to sit still. The performances range from those who seem to wander on stage and decide what to do when they get there to the costumed and choreographed. It's a riot - kids on pogo sticks, with hula hoops, gymnasts, singers, dancers, air guitar players, knock knock joke tellers and so on. Here are Chelsea and her friends performing at the carnival last year


And here they are a couple of weeks ago at this year's carnival (minus one of the performers who is at another school this year)



Headed out to the ball field now - it's a beautiful day for it. Enjoy the journey...and the weekend!

Easter Weekend

Peep

We had lots of family here in Jax for Easter weekend. As I mentioned last time, my sister was already here. Next, my brother Ken and his family arrived (a.k.a. the Kens) from Baton Rouge, and then the Dans arrived for a shorter stay from the old homestead in Ormond Beach. We had a fun and relaxing cookout in my mom's back yard Friday night after the brothers and their families arrived.

here are the brothers

See Bob, told you you should have showed up. Now these two clowns are on my blog being called 'the brothers'. What does that make you??? (stay tuned)

As you can see, the one on the right likes to talk

and talk

and explain

which occasionally puts his wife, JoAnn, to sleep

Dan is probably wondering right now why I am making fun of my one and only blog fan right here on my blog! Good question....let me think on that!

Truth be told, the favorite mealtime pastime of the brothers (both pictured and not) is synchronized speaking.

Not as much wine on this table, but they're still managing to have fun! Okay, guess which guest isn't related to me.

So, besides Easter, we were also celebrating many March and April birthdays. Chelsea did a fabulous job with the cake decorating!

Stylish part hats, right?

Here's Dan, showing off his uncley-ness.

And, my sister and I showing off our twinishness.

The next night, we went out to dinner. And, guess who showed up?? Brother #3, now known to all far and wide as....

Grandpa Bob!

Seriously! We were just being seated at the restaurant, when Bob got a text from his daughter Amber telling him she is PREGNANT!! Yay!! I tried to take a picture of the phone screen with the text message on it, but that didn't work so well, so you'll just have to trust me on this one.

I was seated right across from my niece, Sophia when she got her dessert. So, obviously, I had to take these...







I got a family Easter present for us all. A game called Bananagrams that I had heard rave reviews of from some unschooling friends. It was a hit!




Sunday night Bob came back - this time with his family :-) My sister made some of her now famous cobbler and we played more Bananagrams. Here's Bob's daughter Rachel with Chelsea...



Thanks so much to all who traveled to see us. It was a blast. I'm still full!

Spring Break II

Okay - so, it's been really hard to make myself keep up this blogging thing, but I'm determined to do it. Or, at least determined not to give it up yet! So, I'm going to nix the attempts to arrange pictures into little groups of two or four and add captions or any of that. I don't actually know how to code in html, so when I want to do something new, I poke around the internet until I find an explanation or example and then cut and paste code to imitate it. Then, when I want to do it again later, I go in and edit an old post where I did it before and cut and paste some more. It all ends up getting pretty confusing and time consuming. The uploading of the pictures themselves is time consuming as well, but I'm hoping if I nix the embedded coding it will help. So, here we go.

I think I left off when the kids had set up a tent in my mom's backyard one night when a major storm was expected. I drove in the worst rain storm I'd ever driven through that night to the airport to pick up my sister who, as it turns out, had been rerouted to Orlando because of said storm. I had heard earlier in the evening that the kids had been spotted in Mom's cottage cooking pop-corn in the microwave and eating ice cream they found in the deep freezer. So, I assumed that is where they ended up for the night. But, it turns out all but one or two of them actually slept in the tent. This was a REALLY big storm! But, they all survived - here's the after picture. Notice the crutches in front of the tent, LOL. I promise this kid was already on crutches before we got a hold of him!

My sister, Suzanne (a.k.a. Zanny or occaaionally Aunt Zanny), did finally arrive. Here you can spot her in the background. She appears to be making a serious study of Matthew's Mario Kart techniques.


So, the next big sleepover involved a couple of neighborhood girls (that we had to import because our resident girl, Chelsea, was off gallivanting around Savannah with her gal-pals) who decided to use their hair-dressing and fashion sense on the boys. Several boys ended up updating their respective Facebook and MySpace pages after this modeling session!

It all started with Patrick...






Here he is with his hair-dressers






Now they've recruited their next victim...



Introducing..........Matthew









Ahhh...yet another customer!



They had to make a midnight run to get Devin's hair straightener before getting to work on Conner








Jono apparently needed no work at all, just some shades.



Not sure what Matthew and Jono are up to here.



Are these some kind of gang signs???



Oh right, I forgot....that's the international symbol for "Hey mama, I need a bagel!"



Hey, give me one too!


That's all I've got! We tried for a perfect sleepover record during Spring Break, but we didn't quite hit it. We had guests 8 of 10 nights though, which we all agreed was pretty impressive, and most importantly...lots of FUN!

Haircut

Before



After

Spring Break

So - the kids are on Spring Break, and you know what that means. Sleepover City! I must admit we did have one night with no extra kids at our house. And, if you don't count the ones in my mom's backyard, we have no kids at all tonight! Although I have a sneaking suspicion we could have some before morning!




Here's the tent after preparing for the thunderstorms scheduled to roll in tonight....



Meanwhile, Chelsea has been jet setting around with her friends - spending the front part of her break in Daytona Beach, then 2 nights at home before heading off to Savannah for more girl time. I had to miss out on this mother/daughter trip with a few other families because I was away from work 3 days last week on jury duty.

Patrick, in his typical social director fashion, has been arranging for there to be friends around at all times.




Andy took a gang of kids up to the baseball field on Monday and Tuesday afternoon for some fun (but took no pictures...boo!!) We also headed downtown on Tuesday night with group of friends from Matthew's baseball team for a UF vs FSU baseball game that was being played here in town. Again...no camera! The game was called due to rain in the middle of the 5th inning, but it was fun while it lasted.

During Chelsea's brief time home between trips, she set up a facebook page. This required a little photo shoot to come up with just the right profile picture.



Here are a few more random pictures of Matthew and his friend Jack's Spring Break fun.





I'm headed out to the airport to pick up my sister now. Yea!!