If this were my Journal...

My posts would probably be more spread apart. But that's just being totally honest, and not trying to pretend that I write in my journal. I used to be good at doing that. Then I had kids, and made them my excuse for not writing. I should do better. I'll keep telling myself that.

ANYWAY, this was not started to air my faults. Though there are plenty of those! I thought people wanted, instead, to see what the children have been up to.

Margaret lost her first tooth. And then she had a birthday.

Margaret's birthday: The beginning of February, pictures never posted. Well, here they are. (FYI, I'm even farther behind on my scrapbooking than I am on my journal writing.)

WOW! Look at all the fun stuff you get when you turn 6!!!

Strawberry "TALL" cake... if you eat tall foods, you'll be tall! If you eat short foods, you'll stay short!

Grandma Pierce made this super fun dress. Bloomers and EVERYTHING!

Caroline, a few weeks later, turned 2. Silly girl, she appeared to be afraid of her chocolate brownie sundae...

March came in like a lion. A BIG, White, FLUFFY lion. It snowed for 26 hours - without melting! It was fantastic to wake up to some Alaskan weather... MUCH more snow than we normally see here, so school was - of necessity - cancelled. (When there isn't much snow, you cancel homeschool to play. That's how we chose to roll that day...)

We ended up with about 6 inches this snowfall. Not much, but 6 inches more than we normally get!

I miss it when the trees look like this!

Note the thinning snow on the roof... 

Our Western Pasture...

Andrew stayed home to participate in one of his favorite activities... Shoveling the SNOW!

March continued like a wet dog with lots of rain for most of the remainder of the month. Oregon officially had the RAINIEST MARCH ON RECORD, if that says anything... Not like the snow my Alaska family had, but... The END of the month brought another 8 inches of snow. Public school wasn't cancelled - they used up all their snow days on hoar frost, but we cancelled so the children could play! My pictures from THAT snow are stuck on my phone. I'll post them later.

April is working on redeeming itself with better weather. So far, it's doing better. I'll be satisfied when we have the SUNNIEST SUMMER on record. Probably won't happen, but hey... I can dream.

April started with me vacuuming water out of the basement. Again. I wasn't super thrilled to be on flood watch - still. Nevertheless, Conference was fantastic, and I'm looking forward to re-reading the talks I missed while vacuuming water.

Then came the annual decorating of the Egg! This year, both Aunt Rachel and Aunt Laurel joined our tradition at Grandma Stahr's house. (Grandpa lives there to, but he didn't decorate eggs this year.) LeGrand still is a dipper - all one color, 1 second per egg. He's done with is dozen in 12 seconds flat. No time wasted here! This year, we asked him to do them all over again, and to use different colors. Not his most favorite idea. Caroline spilled green dye all over Grandma (it comes out with hot water if you catch it right away) and herself, but had fun. Margaret was a champion dyer with the patience of Job waiting for just the perfect color. Savannah experimented this year with different styles of decorating. All in all, we completed 8 dozen eggs - and taught Savannah how to tell the difference between a raw egg and a hard boiled one; without breaking the egg.

Our Easter egg hunt happened, this year, on Easter. LeGrand and Savannah were the big egg winners - each getting the prized $1 egg; Margaret was the hostess with the mostess! She picked the eggs one by one off the trees, and filled her basket to the top. Doesn't hurt that Grandma has about 200 eggs that she hides!

This was Caroline's second year of hunting, but her first year of realizing the the eggs are filled with candy...

She was fascinated. Note the basket of eggs... they're all hers. This year, LeGrand got to hunt eggs from the BIG yard, and he managed to escape Caroline helping herself to his eggs. He was pleased as punch to get each egg.

Other noteworthy news: Bailey FINALLY has a tooth! And another on the way. She isn't ready to share yet, but I'll get a photo soon!

 Because she didn't dye eggs and slept through the hunt, HERE SHE IS!

Bailey is constantly on the go. She's faster than a blink at moving from one place to another, and her favorite destination is the stairs. She can be quieted simply by someone saying my name - but that's a temporary fix. she'd much rather have Mom.

If you've read through all of this, you are now officially caught up. Until tomorrow.