Alex brought my camera on a walk this morning

Alex, Charlie and I went for a walk in the sunshine this morning.  Alex brought my camera along and took these pictures.  He sat with me as we put them on the computer and directed me as to how he wanted them cropped.

"snow fleas" were out like crazy today.

We followed several well worn deer trails and found spots under trees where they had bedded down last night.

Here they had dug up some delicious lichen.

But this is now, the second week of April.

The snow has come in waves, mixed with just about every other form of precipitation you can imagine.  We've got layers of ice, crusty snow, more ice and now today we are getting a layer of fluffy snow.  The kids had snow days this week on Wednesday and Friday.  Yesterday we went out for an "icy hike".

From this point on, Alex took the pictures.

This one time, a few weeks ago...the snow was almost gone...

And we played outside with no hats and lighter jackets......

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The year of the orange ukulele

We came home from our trip on Friday so we'd be home for Easter weekend.  Maya has been eyeing up these brightly colored ukuleles at the music store where Alex takes guitar lessons.  She has been wanting the orange one in particular so she can "practice" along with Ben and Alex when they play guitar.  Well she got it in her basket.

Alex had a little trouble finding his basket this year.  He didn't think the Easter bunny would put things under our clean laundry.....but he did!

The spring break that wasn't

We had big plans for spring break.  Smokey mountains, Mammoth Caves....road trip extraordinaire.....

Then it was still pretty cold in the mountains so we nixed the Smokey mountain portion and decided on the Indy children's museum, an indoor water park and then Mammoth Cave.  Then the middle of the country and most of Indiana was predicted to get a nasty winter storm right when we would have been driving through.  We'd had enough nasty driving conditions at home and did not care to drive south into worse weather than we had in the great white north.  So after spending a day trying to figure out how we could make this work we decided we should just cancel the whole thing.

So we went to Wisconsin.

Alex in his wisdom declared that the only thing better than going to a national park was spending time with family.  So that's what we did.

I just realized as I loaded these pictures that I have a bunch more on Ben's phone that he needs to email to me!  The regular camera battery died right after we got to the museum.

We spent time with family, went to the new children's museum in Green Bay.  Went to one of those indoor places full of giant bounce houses and slides.  We were able to get the snow tires changed back to regular tires on the car (although with our current weather that was maybe not the greatest plan).

Bowling for Ben

For Ben's birthday we took the whole family bowling.  Alex had bowled before at a birthday party but this was Maya's first time.  The bowling alley has automatic bumpers (which are so nice, you program which players want to use bumpers into the scoring computer and then they raise and lower as needed depending on whose turn it is) and they also have these ramps that smaller kids can use to roll the ball down and get more momentum.  Of course Maya deemed herself far to mature to need such a thing and insisted on throwing it herself.  We never got the ball stuck but there was more than a few times that everyone around us was holding their breath to see if the ball would actually make it the whole way!

When we thought it was "finally" spring :D

Oh these pictures are making me laugh now.  We met friends at the nature center one sunny "warm" afternoon towards the middle of March to hike....so excited because the day had that tinge of spring.  This is it!  we thought, this is the beginning....it will just warm up from here and here comes spring!
Well I am sitting here typing this mid April while it snows and sleets outside my window and we had yet another snow day today (the second snow day this week).

March - 100th day of school and Winterfest

With all the snow days it took several tries to hit the 100th day of school this year.  But the day finally came. Maya decided she wanted to make her shirt out of fabric so we used some steam a seam and ironed on the numbers in fabric she picked out.

There was no issue with having enough snow for winter fest this year.  We got there a little late because of Maya's dance class in the morning and then I worked the last hour in the room with the cake walk so I only had time to snap a few pictures.

UP200 weekend in Marquette

We took a long weekend mid-February up in Marquette.  It was the weekend of the UP200 dog sled race plus quite a few other events including an urban ski and snowboard competition downtown.  We packed quite a bit into the weekend!
Friday night we hit town just in time to see the start of the Midnight Run (the shorter of the 2 dog sled races) and the crowd downtown had cleared out enough that we got to be right up against the barricades and got a great view.

Both kids got to try out a dog sled Saturday morning at the "Kiddy mutt run" where anyone can bring their regular dog down and hook them up to a sled and the kids get to "drive" the sleds.  It was very entertaining!

Saturday afternoon we had a great snowshoe.  It was cold and very windy but we stayed out of the wind for the most part and had a great time.

Saturday night we braved below zero temps to check out the urban snowboarding competition.  It was, um, quite an interesting mix of people.  And very loud dance/techno music.  And snowboarding.  Over all it was fun and cool to watch but too cold to stay for too long.  We couldn't stay long enough to see the skiing.

Sunday we went Bergeon style "backcountry sledding".  That means we found a really big hill that was on a hiking trail, not exactly a designated sledding hill, but just couldn't pass up the chance to try riding down it on a sled.  Yes we sent a grown up down first to make sure it was sort of safe.  Yes Maya came home with road rash on her face but she said it was worth it.