Easter

Our preparations for Easter were underway last weekend.  I boiled 18 eggs and Evie colored all of them!  She has gotten more creative through the years and was very interested this year in making striped eggs.

We also did some planting of some new flowers before the cold snap came, so we could bring them inside.

Evie still believes in Santa and seems to still believe in the Easter Bunny as well.  She had many questions about the Easter Bunny this year, particularly wondering if the Bunny is a boy or a girl.  She decided to leave the Bunny some carrot chips and wondered if any other children would do so.  She also wrote a letter to ask the Bunny his/her sex.

The Easter Bunny certainly delivered.  It was Evie's idea to set out the smaller buckets for the dogs.

Evie's letters:

Dear Easter Bunny,

These carrot chips are for you.  Are you a female or a male?  What is your name?

Turns out the Easter Bunny is male and his name is Peter.

Evie had picked out this dress for Easter, so we dressed up Easter morning.

School continues this week as an at-home adventure.  One of our activities this week involved learning about the different classifications of hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and geosphere.  This girl was very clever and easily figured out where the items we saw on our walk.  She is using a clipboard that was mine when I was a kid.  It was my favorite color, purple, and had my name put on it.  Evie saw it at my parents' house when we were going through boxes of my old books and she said she wished she had a clipboard with her name on it, but in her favorite color, red.  Of course, my magical mom painted mine red and covered up the "ily" from "Emily" so now it has Evie's initials "EM" on it.  

Part of Evie's lesson was to create her own island and describe the different items found in all the different spheres.  She came up with an island that would have different seasons on each part, and then described what it would be like in the summer quarter.

She's been doing a lot of reading too.  Her current independent book is The Boxcar Children which she reads easily.  She likes to read aloud and Edison is happy to listen.

Since we are spending more time at home and I am cooking all our meals, we've decided to invest in an outdoor eating area.  We bought this new table and benches that easily fold up and allow us to enjoy dinners outside together.

Evie sometimes comes inside to help me make a dessert afterwards.  Here she's helping me make what ended up being named "Mama's Mistake Cookies" because we put all the dry ingredients together in a bowl, then all the wet in another, and I foolishly forgot to combine the two before scooping the wet into cookie shape, putting one pan of them in the oven.  They were in for about 1 minute as I scooped the rest when I realized I had goofed, so we pulled them back out and added them to the dry ingredients.  The chocolate chips and butter had all melted from the one half of the wet ingredients I baked, so they ended up being chocolate chocolate chip cookies and were actually pretty tasty.  Evie said they were the best cookies she'd ever tasted and wants me to make them again for her birthday.

Today we went to Granna and Granndaddy's house for another distant picnic.  Granna had set up an Easter egg hunt for Evie in the backyard and it was a lot of fun watching her searching for them.