Solar Cars

Kylee was selected to be a part of the three member Solar Car team representing Bob Lewis Elementary School.  She and her teammates, Erin and John Adam, spent afternoons at the school designing and building an electric car powered by solar panels to be raced at a district wide competition.  Northside ISD is a huge school district, so there were about 50 teams at the competition held at the NISD stadium.  The teams raced in numerous heats on both sides of the stadium.  The little cars were pretty fragile, but fortunately there was onsite assistance available for last minute soldering and hot glue repairs.  Kylee and her team did great.

Blake's birthday

The theme of Blake's 3 previous birthdays have related to one of his stuffed animal buddies.  Soon after he had his 3rd birthday with the theme of a frog he said that he wanted a sting ray birthday for his next birthday.  Normally the birthday cake is a surprise, but because he would remind us every time we celebrated someone's birthday that he wanted a stingray birthday, Matt decided to do it.

We had cinnamon rolls the morning of his birthday, but we he went on the father and son camp out that afternoon so we didn't celebrate as a family until the next night.

Blake had his birthday dinner at Red Robin and then Carlos came over and we had cake and ice cream and Blake opened his presents.

Some fun facts about Blake:
    -He only likes the middle of the Oreos
    -He responds to anything he is told with "I know that".
    -He is generous with hugs and kisses.
    -Many times a day he will randomly state, "Mom (or Dad), I love you".

in it to win it

This year at Bob Lewis the theme for field day was In It to Win It.  They changed the traditional relay races to short one minute competitions patterned after the Minute To Win It game show.  Each child had a partner that they would stay with as they chose between 50 different games to do as many as they wanted in a couple of hours.  

Brayden and his partner Aiden

Kylee and her partner Kara.

Julia and her partner Alexa.

It was nice that Blake was allowed to take part in some of the games.

The consensus at the end of the day by the kids was that they liked the traditional games better.  I thought that this new way was a lot more chaotic.  The kids had the freedom to wander around and not really do much.  The little kids were kind of running around not really knowing what to do.

Fiesta

Bob Lewis Elementary does a pretty good job celebrating Fiesta week.  This year they wanted to make sure that each of the grades were able to do something special.  The Kindergarden classes are involved in the Fiesta Float Parade and the 3rd Graders get to do the Wax Museum, so it was the first year that 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th were apart of a science hat parade.  Each child was given a science term that they had to represent on a hat, and they could be however creative they wanted.  Kylee was not very good about communicating the assignment.  We bought the materials and she made it in one night since it was already past due.  On April 12th they had a parade and all the grades involved showed off their science hats.

This year was Julia's turn for the Fiesta Float Parade.  I tried to make things a little easier and found a foam kit at Michael's that she used with her fairies to make a fairy land.  We cut out a lot of foam flowers to add to it.   

This year they had a better set up to view the parade which was on April 20th.  In years past we had to stand in the hallway as the kids pulled their fiesta float through the hallways.  This year that set up chairs in the gym so the parents could sit down and watch the kids pull their floats by.  They even had them go through twice.   

At Blake's MDO they also got to make a Fiesta hat on April 26th.

crazy cat people

We didn't really notice cats in the neighborhood too often before Oreo.  Then our neighbor, Andy's cat, had a litter of cats that started hanging out in our yard.  After he failed to do anything about the problem and one of the cat in the litter went into heat, we trapped the four cats and had them fixed.  No sooner had we fixed the last cat, Mama cat (so dubbed by Kristel) had another litter on our porch in the middle of the night.  After a couple of weeks we were able to get that litter to a "foster family" and got Mama Cat fixed, ending the cycle of madness.  Since then, though, we are hyper aware of all the cats that prowl our neighborhood, and Kristel has named them all.

Of course there is Mama Cat, who is not too friendly, with the litter she had on our back porch

And Oreo, Pumpkin, Petal, Shazam, and Chip (named by the kids).

There is Ugly Cat, 

Bloody Cat (who looked normal from the front, 

but had a nasty chronic non-healing sore on the back of his head),

Garfield Cat, and more.  Way too many cats.

Easter / Matt's Birthday

Easter picture

Easter landed on Matt's birthday this year.  The Easter bunny didn't really want to visit our house and took a long time to get there.  I guess with the million of cats that live in our yard the Easter bunny figured it would be better to do a hunt in the house.  

He hid picture clues of objects in the house and they had to follow the clues to the next location.  The last location was in the garage with Oreo.  The buckets were right in front of them, but they didn't notice them because they were loving on Oreo.

To celebrate Matt's birthday we made Matt an Easter themed birthday cake with edible Easter grass on top.  It turns out that when you light the birthday candles the Easter grass is also flammable. 

We didn't get our Easter Egg coloring done until the next week on April 15th.  It turned out to not be a very good kit because the eggs didn't really hold the color.  

washing machine entertainment

After a several week long slow death, the Maytag repair man informed us that our washing machine of twelve years was not going to make it, or at least it would cost more than it was worth to repair.  This lead to the purchase of a new front loading washer, which apparently is much more entertaining for the kids.  They discovered that it is fun to watch the cycle spinning around and at the end of the cycle it plays is a fun little tune.  The minutes count down on the digital display, and when there are just a few minutes left whoever is around will call the others to come and sit down and watch until the end of the cycle.