29 April 2021

More drawings from Rosebud.  Notice the arm hair.

This one is my hand.  You can see my wedding rings on the ring finger.
 

28 April 2021

Happy birthday, Bobo! He's stretching the celebration out over a couple days and that included cake for breakfast this morning.  Rose Pink made it for him - it has ice cream in the middle.  He took donuts to school yesterday to share with his class.  Tonight we are going to a pizza buffet for his birthday dinner so that he can eat pizza to his heart's content.  He actually asked for cake for breakfast because he didn't want to have to leave any room for cake when he is eating pizza tonight.

Sure love this boy.  So glad he and his happy smiley personality came to live with our family.

25 April 2021

Finally documenting our spring break trip!  We went to San Antonio for three days.  We started at Sea World.  We liked the animal shows but felt that the rides required too much standing in line.  The older kids rode a couple of the big coasters and loved it.  We all loved the orca show the best - we were in front and got completely drenched a couple of times by cold salt water splashed on us by black and white whales.  It was an amazing show!

The next day we started by going downtown.  We walked around Market Square and bought pastries at the bakery there.  Also there was the adventure of looking for a bathroom, and which was one of the reasons that we bought pastries.  But the pastries were lovely.

We walked around downtown on the Riverwalk, and then had lunch at Whataburger, which is a Texas experience that we hadn't had yet.

Back to the hotel to swim - it was too cold for me and Mr. Brown, but the kids had fun while we soaked up some sun.  That evening we went to Cheesecake Factory for dinner, and yes, we had cheesecake!  It was in a mall and we got to walk around the mall for awhile waiting for our turn to come up to go in.

The next morning we went to the San Antonio Zoo.  It was a little crowded and we were a little nonplussed with the idea of standing in lines again, when it looked like we would have to stand in line for the entrance.  But there weren't actually too many lines, and the zoo was very nice.  A little small but very nice.  I liked how the animals' areas were scooped out of the hills so that they were lined with limestone.

We saw the big cats and the elephants and the snakes and pretty much everything... it's not a super large zoo and just the right size to spend a couple hours.  After the zoo, we headed home.  Some of us ate Cheesecake Factory leftovers for lunch in the car, and the rest of us picked up brisket sandwiches at Buc-ee's - another Texas experience not to be missed.  We love Buc-ee's!

It was a nice trip!  There were many things we didn't see that we wanted to, so we're already thinking about going back to visit again.

24 April 2021

We read 2 Nephi 32:3 and tried to make decision trees about how we could find out if something was the words of Christ.  We didn't come to good conclusions but it was a good discussion.

Family scripture study this morning.  This picture is not posed.

23 April 2021

Sometimes there is an awful lot of cuteness happening at our house.  She asked me to put her hair up as "leopard ears" to go with her costume.

It rained today and all the snails were out.  Rosebud collected a bunch of them in the backyard and called it a "snail party".  She and Bobo played with them for awhile and started sticking them up on the sliding door.

21 April 2021

A conversation that Nut Brown had with Mr. Brown, as recounted by Mr. Brown:

Nut Brown: I hate English.  English is stupid.

Mr. Brown: What's going on?

Nut Brown: It all seems to be trying to get us to figure out what the author was thinking.  Who cares what the author was thinking?!

Mr. Brown: I think it's supposed to be teaching you how to write.

Nut Brown: How to write fiction??

20 April 2021

Bobo created the below at school as part of an assignment about writing instructions.  He was so pleased with it that he brought it home and put it up on the wall in his bedroom. 

15 April 2021

Nut Brown's art teacher assigns them each week to create some art related to something that makes them happy.  This week he created the art in the photo, and told me that he was turning it in to say "making art makes me happy".

13 April 2021

Rosebud drew a talking tree this morning, and she liked it so much that she went upstairs and drew another one using markers.

12 April 2021

Collage that Nut Brown made in art class.  He was very pleased with it.  Mr. Brown and I have been pleased with how well his art teacher has engaged him and helped him explore different media for creation.

9 April 2021

We have our first official pet!  Rose Pink kept a plant alive for six months and was given permission to get a fish.  So she has a female beta named Reyna in a fishbowl on her desk that she is caring for.  I think the next step is a rodent of some sort, and then she will graduate and she can get the dog that she actually wants.

Artwork from Rosebud: Sharpie on white copy paper

5 April 2021

Bobo is fascinated with outer space and celestial bodies.  A few days ago we went for a bike ride around and around the circle near our house and he transformed it into an imaginative orbital experience.  Rosebud was along also on her balance bike and I was named as Jupiter and she was Europa.  He called himself Io because he wanted to be the moon with all the volcanoes.  Eventually I convinced him to ride around the block and we tagged all the trash cans as we rode past and said we were "turning off" the satellites".

4 April 2021

Bobo's artwork generally involves video games, whichever one that he's in love with at the moment.

This is a rocket that he colored and folded at school.  When he got home, he made another one for Rosebud and they flew them around together.

 

3 April 2021

Rose Pink's theater group at school participated in the one-act play competition for the city, performing an adaptation of "Men On Boats", about the first mapping expedition led by John Powell down the Grand Canyon.  We got to see it before the competition, and it was a pretty fun show.  Rose Pink is part of the tech crew.  At competition, her group came in 5th of 8, so they didn't progress to the next level.  She was extremely disappointed.  But then the next day, she found out that the tech crew won the medal for the best tech, and she was so excited about that.  We went out to dinner to celebrate.  We told her that we knew all along that it was the actors' fault that they hadn't won.

When she was taking the photo for me of herself with the medal, Nut Brown randomly walked behind her to get something and said, "Lonely!"  It was funny in one of those random funny things kind of way.

1 April 2021

Nut Brown has been taking art this year in school.  His teacher has really helped him get creative and explore various media.  Here are a couple colored pencil drawings that he did last fall.

Right now he's working on a collage (all our old magazines have disappeared upstairs) and he's been collecting toilet paper tubes for awhile for another project.  The latest drawing he showed me in his sketchbook was a city block with two points of perspective (and a nuclear explosion going off in the background).
 

1 April 2021

This week the baby, our Rosebud, graduated from her five-point harness car seat to a booster AND she found her first loose tooth.  She is excited about the booster seat but anxious about her tooth and that it hurts her a bit.