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A BEAUTIFUL, GREEN WEEKEND

The sun pulled us all outside this weekend!  We all wore green, dyed our food green, and played in the green grass!  Yay for "holidays" that give us an excuse to do silly things!  Thanks, St. Patrick!

Kate learned to ride her bike this weekend!  She holds the record of less than an hour to figure it out!  Ben spent a few minutes with her one night, and the next day, she got on and rode away!

My kids, Ethan in particular, are CRAZY about critters!!

This was a frog that Ethan remembered was still in his critter house.  It died last summer!  So the dead frog has been sitting in our basement the whole winter!

Ethan will also never forget this weekend because he caught his first snake!!  Ethan is fearless when it comes to animals - yikes!  He comes around the corner holding this flailing snake by the tail.  The kid is crazy!  He found it in a drain and it is now one of Ethan's captive pets!

Yes, that is a frog that the snake regurgitated!  The creepy thing must have just eaten when Ethan found him and with all the excitement, the snake...lost his lunch!  GROSS!

The window wells of the church are where Ethan holds all of his creatures captive!!

We can't keep the kid out of them!!

This is the secondary place of captivity!  They carry this box, full of critters, all over the place.  It rides nicely on the handle bars of their bikes, hangs off the slides and swings, etc.  

FROGS... they're everywhere you want to go!

This is "Goliath".  He holds the record of the longest lived frog in captivity!  Yay, Goliath!  The boys frond him last summer and this huge frog has made the window well his home!  His winter slumber was disturbed many times over the winter!

This post was in desperate need of something cute!  What could be cuter than those fat legs and baby sandals! 

Snake Update

      *shudder

These are a few shots of Scar hanging around!!  We finally had to move the gauges out of his tank because he kept curling up on them until they fell down!  I never actually got to see the crash, but I'm sure it would have been comical.  :)

 Things have been going well with the creature and I have to admit that I am getting used to him and the creep factor has slightly diminished.  Many of you may have read my fb status the other day...  

Part of Ethan's routine in the mornings before he heads off to school is to hold Scar and make sure he is taken care of for the day.  Well when I peeked in on the boys, they had Scar wrapped around the ladder to their bunks.  Well, school time came and the boys ran off to school.  A hour or so later, I went into their room to put away some laundry and noticed that the room seemed dark.  I was curiously looking around and then... with a long blink, and short, quiet gasp, my eyes landed on the snake cage... DARK!  The lamp was on the floor, the tank was open, and the snake was g-o-n-e!!  Of course, the boys were on a field trip and Ben was driving for the field trip so they were not around (living next door to school has it's perks - like marching next door and pulling Ethan from his classroom to rescue his mother from his missing snake!!  *mom tapping foot on floor giving intense glare with one eyebrow raised).  

Well, Kate came to my rescue, found Scar tightly squeezed between Luke's mattress and bed frame, and put him back into his tank where he was locked in good.  She is now my favorite child :)  As for Ethan... (while trying to hide his smile), he was firmly told that Scar better be tightly locked up BEFORE he goes to school in the mornings!!

other less horrifing happenings:

We all gathered around last week to watch Scar shed.  This was at the beginning when he was just starting to scratch off the skin on his head.

This was a day or so later when he finally finished.  

It was fun to watch.

Officially a TODDLER...

sigh... here we go

FINALLY!!

This little boy is so proud his long awaited for missing tooth.  He told me at Christmas, "Mom, all I want for Christmas is for my 2 front teeth...to fall out!"

Well, he is halfway there!