Time to catch up before getting behind.

We are trying to enjoy Spring Break this week - lovely weather mixed with dips in temperature and brief storms, mixed in with a fever and cough jumping from child to child.  But we had some lovely company in town for the last couple of days which always brightens things up a bit.

However, before I get to that, we had lots of other stuff happening last week too.

Just a few days after Hazel's birthday we celebrated Sho.  We love having Sho in our lives and try not to feel too guilty about surrounding her amazingly serene, beautiful, kind hearted loveliness with our loud, obnoxious ways.

We love her enough to blow up 50 tiny balloons (note to self: read balloon packages more carefully to assess size of final products.)

 I'm so glad she remembered to bring her pretty party hat that Carrie made her last year.

Spring is so schizophrenic.  Some days we have a 30 degree swing in temperature.  We have been trying to enjoy every nice day possible.  On this particular day it meant making mud under the swing and creating caveman hand prints up the driveway.

 ...and lots of sidewalk chalk.  I like to buy it in bulk.  My favorite is when they draw street lines into the garage to show Clark where to park his car.

 Hazel had an accident at the park and I thought plastic-garbage-bag underwear was the answer to keeping her carseat from smelling like urine.  Turns out it just makes you super sweaty. (note to self: don't try to market plastic underwear...it won't sell.)

 We traveled down and descended upon the Millers once again (we love doing that-it's our favorite place to descend upon) so Clark and Mike could run their first half marathon.  These men are doing amazing.  I don't think either one of them has ever run more than 5 miles in their lives before and they are well on their way to their marathon in November....planters fasciitis and all.  Mike could apparently use a lesson or two on how to pose like a goon for pictures, from Clark.

 No matter how he was doing, he was sure peppy at our cheer-points.  High fives, alright.

 (That's Clark in the blue all the way to the right with his finish time.  Not bad for the first time running 13.1 miles ever, I'd say.)

 Mike was close behind and graced us with high fives as well.

Well done boys.  Well done.

 They had free horse rides for the kids between the half marathon and the kids' run.

Aren't these kids adorable? I think they certainly are that.

 Even Ben who was desperately trying to look like he wasn't having fun riding a horse.  (He was.)

 They were adorable and excited.

Ben came in fourth overall, awesome.

 Haley and Emma were not far behind.

 I started running with Mia but told her to go ahead when I had the fortunate excuse to slow it down a bit with Abby.

 This is Abby being a champ and running all the way (and my rear end.) Poor girl was sore for two days after.  Definitely my daughter.

 We finally hit the road later that evening to head home and narrowly missed some 240 tornadoes that touched down in the surrounding area.  It was the scariest weather I have ever driven through.  The sky was the color of mud.  Before the weather was even cloudy we drove through a mile of road in Williamsburg where the trees were either uprooted or torn clean off, 20 feet up....it ran that way down one side of the road, hopped into the median and then on over to the other side of the road.  We are sure that we had just missed a tornado minutes before as cars were slowing down to miss debris all over the place.  We apparently had left the Millers in the perfect window.  Even though we drove through this sky and torrential rain for a short time, we made it to that blue sky on the other side.  I was very very grateful to have missed it....to say the least though I was keeping my eyes peeled for any kind of sewer tunnel to hide in with my family should we have had to abandon our vehicle.

Despite what it kind of looks like in this picture, it was not a lovely sunset.  Those are ugly, menacing clouds of doom and destruction.

I hate tornadoes.

But I love Spring Break...so more on that, later.

Since we moved here in October we had no idea that the trees at the end of our driveway did this.  

The Cherry Blossoms have suffered through this chilly spring but the dogwoods have exploded this week almost overnight. They are quite lovely.