Easter fun

A belated "stuff we did on Easter post"!

Easter morning, the kids got up and had to hunt for their candy, hidden inside of plastic eggs, all over the living room. Then they got to open their sugar eggs from their Grandma Jacki.

It was a breakfast of jelly beans, chocolate, and hot cross buns. They bounced off the walls for hours.

A closer look at the sugar egg that didn't get its decorations eaten off in the first hour. Isn't it gorgeous?

That afternoon, we headed to the other Grandma's to hunt eggs.

They had so much fun that their teenage uncles had a hunt of their own, for an egg containing five bucks. It was hidden deviously well and took them a long time to find.

We concluded the evening by doing communion and the Resurrection Eggs (12 eggs with little items in them that tell the story of Jesus's death and resurrection).

It was a very nice Easter. :-)

Presents!

Here's a sample of our present-opening carnage.

It's amazing how fast all those toys get scattered throughout the entire house, despite my best efforts to confine them to one room.

Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Everybody's posting posts about Merry Christmas, or baking, or decorating, or all kinds of other things.

What do I post about?

Why, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's Hazy Annex!

Alex was impressed.

This is the SR-71 Blackbird. Incidentally, it's the one they used in Transformers 2, because they filmed that bit of it in the actual museum. They even had a TV off to one side, playing the clip. It was funny to look around and see all the exact same planes the actors were running around in.

We dropped in to visit the Space hanger, and the space shuttle there.

The space shuttle is big.

Alex was all set to jump the fence and go climb into one of the planes. We had to let him know that the planes were all locked and we didn't have the keys.

We went up into the seven-story-tall observation tower, too. Here's the view looking east, toward town, I think. Anyway there was no airport in that direction. This museum is right by Dulles Airport, so we got to see big passenger jets flying in and landing.

Holly really liked the museum, too. But she kept wanting to take off on self-guided tours, so she had to get carted around.

She and Alex were sick of the stroller. I hope they sleep really good tonight, because they hiked all over that place.

Arizona trip

On Wednesday we took off to Arizona for four days.

This happened to coincide with a big storm. Storms over the Grapevine are ooooh so fun.



We fought the storm down past Valencia and Magic Mountain. (This was not a day to visit the coasters.)



We didn't outrun the storm until we hit Arizona.



I even noticed interesting cloud shapes.



Then we arrived, and stayed with my husband's paternal grandmother.



The kids bonded to her real quick. Also, Alex was entranced by her grandfather clock. He learned quickly that it chimed at the half hour and the top of the hour, and where the hands had to be in order for that to happen. We got used to him announcing, "Bong in two minutes!"



We also visited my husband's maternal grandmother.



One of his aunts was there, who was quite willing to sit on the floor and play with her grand-niece and nephew.




Alex and Holly really liked the balcony. Me, not so much. "You might fall off and DIE!"



On the way home, I snapped pictures of wildflowers.