We think Spring in here.

So this last week brought us quite a bit of rain, which means that the trees are starting to have pollen, so Beki is miserable, but every one else seems to be happy that the cold months are almost over.  This was a pretty quite week with the normally every day stuff.  We did go visit a pre-school/day care on Thursday that we are considering for Owen in the Fall and on Saturday we watched some kids for our friends so they go to the Temple, but other then that, just the same old stuff.  

Chris has been frustrated because this week all the kids are taking the (Maryland State Achievement) MSA test (thank you standardized tests that tell you nothing, waste your time, and lead your principal to actually tell teachers to, "Teach them what is on the test."  If you want to know what is wrong with the education system, Chris will do a post sometime and tell you - if only they had asked an actual teacher about their wonderful legislation).   So he has had hardly any students coming to band and to add insult to injury, they asked him to "help" proctor some of the exams (i.e. make sure the kids complete the test and have tissues - again Chris will do a post later).  They have one more week of this and then things will return to "normal".  Beki has been busy at work with failed experiments and repeating things over and over and over and over again.  This next week is spring break for her, so at least she doesn't have to go to class.  She is getting ready to select her Research Committee and so has been spending a lot of time thinking about and arranging that.  To make matters worse, her phone decided to give up the ghost on Saturday and so now she has to find a new one and since we don't want to buy a new one because we are switching to Verizon on October, things are going to be interested for the next couple of days until we find a solution.  Chris' phone also has issues - it got washed in the washing machine and so the buttons don't really work, but he can talk on it - if your number is programed into your phone or you call him - no texting either.  So we are having phone issues and I am sure that it would cost us a lot of money to get out of our contract with T-Mobile, so we will hobble along.

Here are some highlight pictures of the week.

One day Chris came home from work and found Owen wearing his Nemo swimming shorts.  He thought that I had dressed him that way (right, that is what I said), but we finally figured out that he had found them and wanted to put them on, so he did it himself.  He refused to take them off, even for his bath, so he went "swimming" in the bathtub.  Thought it was pretty cool - then we had to do it again for the next two nights - and then he forgot about wearing Nemo, and baths are back to normal.

This week Owen also discovered Papa's old piggy-bank, complete with REALLY old coins.  He thought that is was totally awesome and spent a long time dumping out all the coins and putting them back in.  Something old is now new again.

On Wednesday, Papa got to play basketball with some other men from church, so all of his "athletic" stuff was out.  Owen found these and decided that he needed to wear them.  He put them on and proceeded to tell us that he was a superhero, complete with pose!

We had some friends over on Saturday (see above) and they watch a movie and consumed copious amounts of popcorn.  Lots of fun all around!

After the movie, they went to play in Owen's room, and when we checked on them, this is what we found.  We asked them what they had done and Owen said that they were making "S'Winter" (If you are not familiar with Phineas and Ferb - they decided one summer day to make a mountain of snow and called it S'Winter [complete with song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMuK9nSbD0M], they are on Disney XD and are quite funny even for adults.)  They had found some Styrofoam and crushed it into very small pieces that stuck to everything.  I was even cleaning it out of Owen's nose!!!