Look who's riding a two-wheeler!

It's Vitali!!

And what's this? A flower for Mommy that he picked at the end of the street in the ditch. Already driving out to get flowers for his Mama...what a good boy!

School Day.

Once breakfast is put away each morning and the house gets tidied up, it is time to begin the schoolwork for the day. The older boys are good about getting their math books and getting started. The girls put it off and hope I won't notice. (I always do!)

Although we usually start at the kitchen table, sometimes the kids spread out to other rooms due to distractions from the others. Sometimes a certain child IS the distraction and then he/she just moves/is moved to another room.Sometimes I am the distraction, like, when I walk around with my camera clicking while they are trying to work...The nice thing about home schooling is that, with everyone in close proximity, the younger kids pick up some of what the older kids are learning. Even the chickens seem to want to be exposed to higher learning.

I have three in second grade and Ivy and Vitali are in a kind of Pre-K sort of thing. Ivy has been doing well and all of the sudden is showing that she is ready to start reading! Vitali, not so much. He still has a hard time sitting still! He is mostly interested in World Domination right now and would rather not be bothered with letter sounds and how they go together.

Although, sometimes he works quite diligently on his papers. He is easily encouraged by a few "Good Work!" stars scrawled beside his meticulously crafted letters.

And then there's Annette:
My little Annie speeds through her math but groans at the thought of too much writing in her language book. Schoolwork comes easily for her but she finds writing to be a tedious task. I see her eyes quickly develop red-rims when a page requires her to "write six sentences about..." Poor Annette. :-)

Misha usually works at the table but today went off to his room. As soon as I took this picture, I made a mental note to have the boys tidy their bedroom after school time. As soon as I walked out of the room, I forgot. It took a couple of days for me to remember.
School will be done in about a month. We finish the end of May. I CANNOT WAIT!!! I know I will have to keep up somewhat with the boys over the summer. Max and Misha still struggle so much with school and Max has a lot of catching up to do but it will be nice to have the daily grind behind us!

petal pink

Remember that tree in the last post? Now, all those pretty pink flowers have dropped their petals and the ground under the tree is covered in a pretty pink carpet.

It makes a great place for a princess to play with her royal chicken.

Look at that happy chicken!


Or a little girl all dressed in pink might like to play there with her baby dolls
(also in pink; yes, on purpose)

The boys spend time in the petals, too. But for them, it is just the only way to get up into the climbing tree. Then, they track the petals in through the back door on their cowboy boots.

Even these ladies have pink petals in their toes. :-)

Six in a Tree

Can you spot all six in the flowering cherry tree?

Taller that Tali

Vitali and Ivy were playing with Legos the other day. Ivy made a car and put a person (lego girl) in it and was done. Vitali meticulously worked on a "house" (sans doors and windows). Filling the edges of a base piece to make his walls, he carefully and with great attention built his 'house' up until it was about eight inches high. He worked on this most of the day so that when Steve came home from work Vitali was bursting with pride to show off his creation. Steve complimented it with all the praise Vitali desired and then sat on the floor and said, "Let's make it bigger!"For several days, the boys worked, joined on occasion by the other kids as they faded in and out of interest. Finally, the tower was complete! It still stands in my living room and Vitali is still very proud of his "house" as he still calls it. Can you tell?!

Easter weekend.

Our family, Mom, Dad, Grandpa Anderson, my brothers, sister, in-laws, and nieces, nephews and my own family are numbering 28 now with two new babies expected before the year is out! This past Easter weekend all were in attendance at my parent's house for a short weekend get-together. Saturday we had a cookout/egg hunt/run-and-play evening at our house. We had a great time but I had left my camera at my parents' house so I have to wait for some of those siblings, and siblings-in-law to post some pictures for me to steal before I can share that fun evening with you all. (yes, Lynn, Kari, and Beth, that WAS a hint! *wink, wink*)

I did take pictures, though. I just had to wait till Sunday. :-)

As always, there was visiting...

....pictures of each other all dressed up after church...

...playing with cousins...

...Snuggling with the newest baby
(this time it was Nathan and Elise's little Harrison)...

...and eating leftovers...

...or cereal.

And of course, moms (like me!) taking photos of
their little ones' happy faces.

An Outside Boy.

Max loves to be outside whether it is playing basketball in the driveway, riding his bike down the street, hitting trees with sticks (or whatever it is boys like to do with sticks), or playing with the animals, he's out there in the heat or cold or rain and definitely if there is snow!

An early riser, he goes out each morning to unlock the chicken coop and let the chickens out to roam. Today he was giving some stale bread to the chickens and I decided to take a couple pictures:

Holding Kelsey, a floppy combed leghorn who is slightly very dumb, he's feeding Tit (Ivy named her), the bald-backed chicken. That's not a breed, just the after effects of a dog attack a while ago. She survived but lost all her back feathers and walks with a gimp. That gimp doesn't stop her from jumping up to get Max's offering of bread, though!

Over there to the side you can see the white and black rooster, General Tso, head down and pretending not to care about silly things like bread until....Hey! get back here!


There. That's better.

Signs of Spring...

Like this...

...and this

...this...

...And these.

And, oh yeah, this:

The First Cookout of the Season!

hi

I thought I should post something. After all, it's been a while. Trouble is, not much is going on around here, I mean, we're busy but not anything that I'd take pictures of. Just schoolwork, chicken stuff, church, and that sort of thing. No one has fallen and cut themselves open lately, or won any large amounts of money (darn), or won the Nobel Peace Prize.

So, hey! What's up with you all? What is the most mundane thing you've done today? Me? I think it would have to be smearing Vaseline on a chapped kid. :-) Top that!

Knock on wood...

...That's what I said to Steve last night after he commented that it is amazing we haven't had any big injuries or broken bones. But Steve didn't do it.(Vitali, Before.)

Today, little Vitali was dancing through the basement when he fell and knocked his eye hard enough to split it open on a wooden chair. The girls heard him crying and came running to get me, Hannah carrying Vitali up the stairs where I met up with my bloody-faced little guy.

(Vitali, After)

He had a split that would likely have needed two stitches if we had taken him in. I decided to see if it looked like it would hold together with butterfly bandages before we went in for the stitches. Fortunately, while there was a lot of blood at first, it also stopped quickly so I was able to get the bandages to stick well and not have to worry about them slipping off and opening the wound. Satisfied with how they were pulling it together I bundled my little guy up for a little snuggle, warmed a blanket in the dryer, and let him pick a movie (He picked Zoro--a nice, long movie) to watch with Ivy to keep him still while it began to knit.

Then, we all watched another movie together (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs--a very dumb movie) after dinner and he and daddy snuggled on the couch together.
He's worried about going to church tomorrow with bandages. He is always so concerned about looking perfect. I told him it would be cool to get to tell everyone about it. He didn't buy my story. Oh, well. Should've knocked on wood.

35th birthday party.

Anyone from my family and those who have grown up with my family will appreciate this picture. In fact, I am glad I took it. A picture of dad getting his "arrival of the guests" video. I am pretty sure he was glad that my birthday was on a weekend so we could have the party midday for better lighting in the videos! Ha ha!

We were invited to my mom and dad's for lunch Sunday to celebrate how young I look for 35. Or something like that....

Mom made me this peanut butter frosted chocolate cake studded with peanut butter chocolate chips and what looked like way more than thirty five candles. Mmmmm....Then came the gifts! I think that in this picture I am opening Ivy's gift which was a pair of red plastic goblets with pink plastic hearts decorating the stems. Lovely! LOL! I love the gifts the kids pick out when given free range at the Dollar store!

Then we played this game, My mom, Dad, Evan and me. Mom won. So we played again.

I tried to win based on the fact that it was my birthday. But I had to settle for winning because I'm AWESOME!!!

This is what I looked like while I was busy beating the socks off of everyone.
We had this pretty view out the back door due to a freezing rain the night before. I am apparently not as good at capturing the light on the ice as I was hoping. This picture is not nearly as pretty as it was in person.

As we were leaving, I saw what the kids were doing while we were playing the board game.
Ain't he cute?