Easter, Spring Break and Lots of Bunnies.

Last weekend we celebrated Ukrainian Easter. The kids colored their eggs and a few hours later we went to the church to bless babka, eggs, kovbasa, butter and salt.

Why do my kids looks so tired? We headed to the city during their nap time, were stuck in traffic for over an hour, so they fell asleep in a car 15 minutes before we arrived to the church.

Of course, Julia "woke up" as soon as we arrived to a friend's birthday party two hours later.

On Easter Sunday Seth took the kids hiking at 7:30 am, so I could get some sleep (I love sleeping in late on the weekends).

When they got back, David ran into a house telling me about 7 deer and a blue bird he saw.

Last week David was off from school for a spring break. I wonder who the breaks are for. Not for the parents and definitely not for the children. What do they need a break from -- running in the playground? David kept asking me at least twice a day when he's going back to school.
The week didn't exactly go as smoothly as the winter break did. At this point, David was bored of playing the same games over and over again. He is over mazes and connect the dots activities. He still likes to color, but not at as long intervals as a few months ago. So, there wasn't much for me to do, but to introduce him to some new activities .... like math. Well, not exactly, but I did try to teach him some adding. He finished almost two books of simple additions and wanted to proceed to subtractions. We stopped at that.

I tried not to push him to do anything that he didn't want to do. Occasionally, he would just get his notebook and start copying short words from his various board games. Julia would join him sometimes when she wasn't busy coloring.

For the past month, as I would drive David to school, he would tell me what letter craft he wanted to do when he got back from school. So, almost every afternoon, I would borrow an idea for the letter of the week project from No Time For Flashcards and the kids would do the craft project. David loves it as he thinks he came up with the project and thus he controls what we are doing. Afterwords, we would practice writing letters and do all sorts of other activities.
But I decided to try to make the last week as much fun as possible. So, instead of the letters, we were making lots of silly bunnies. I am sure that most if not all of the craft project ideas came from Ramblings of a Crazy Woman . We made some bunny ears which the kids would wear as soon as they woke up and insisted on wearing them outdoors.

David decided to draw his own bunny. He asked me to help him, but instead of drawing a bunny on his paper, I drew it on my own and then he copied it and colored it. And so did Julia although I can't find her drawing.

The kids liked making a bunny wreath since it involved splashing lots of paint all over their little fingers.

And then they made some bunnies some time between finishing their dinner and waiting for Seth to come home. I really felt like every second of that week was monitored by me because when it wasn't, all hell would break loose ... literally in my house.

I did my own craft project that week as well. I just needed to unwind at night and knitting was that kind of therapy for me. I found a few links to the beautiful pictures of knitted Easter eggs and I just couldn't get them out of my mind. I had some spare yarn from knitting my kids' blankets, so I decided to give it a try. It took me about a week to figure out a pattern since the one I worked with produced rather ostrich size eggs. Once I figured out the pattern, I realized I didn't know how to work using multiple color yarn. I was originally planning to hang them on the branches full of blooming flowers. So, every time I went for a jog, I would memorize where in our town the prettiest tree grew. Seth told me not to even think of going back and cutting the branches. Long story short, here are my knitted eggs, in a basket.

A few weeks ago Julia's furniture was delivered and assembled. They did a horrible job on putting it together. We are having someone come in this week and hopefully get it all fixed. Julia wasn't even remotely as excited with her new bed as David was with his furniture a year ago. She does love sleeping in it though and she stopped climbing into our bed in a middle of the night. We changed the dresser's pink panels to white as I figured this room already blinds me with too much bright color.

Oh, and on top of all this, both kids got a fifth disease which I wouldn't really worry about since all it really is a rash. But last week before the rash even became visible we had a few playdates, at the time when my kids were contagious. One of our friends went to Aruba afterwords, two more are going away this weekend and one is still a baby. I keep my fingers crossed that no mom was pregnant since from what I understand this disease is very harmful to a fetus.
So, that's been our week. We survived it somehow. David is again a happy camper once he went back to school and even more so because he visited a doc's office today. I think he is the only child on this planet who gets visibly upset when his sister gets a shot and he doesn't. Again, I am trying not to question this too much.