Technicolor Pancakes

Do NOT adjust your set! These colors are accurate! It may look like a science experiment but we decided to have BLUE pancakes last week! Monday (my first day off of Spring Break - yippee!) I got up and decided to make a special breakfast with the kiddos. Pancakes is always a treat, but these would be even better - they would be blue! ... and red ... and green ... and what ever other colors of food coloring we could find. Just 3 drops of color in a quarter cup of batter was plenty to color a single cake. Isaac thought it was pretty neato. Julia's frame of reference being somewhat shorter, she didn't seem as impressed but ate them none-the-less. The effect is pretty neat! I highly recommend it (even if they don't taste any different!)

One Hundred!

Wow, this is my 100th post on Blogger! That is a lot of posts. I thought it would be a good time to stop and look back at this whole blogging thing. I put up my first blog here at Blogger in November 2004 - W0w! 4 years ago... Back then I wanted to blog about current events, get my big heady thoughts down ... that took about 3 posts. I didn't do much with that first blog. I didn't really get started blogging in earnest until August of 2006 when I started a Yahoo 360 blog. That blog was a lot of fun and quickly became the family oriented blog that I keep today. Counting my Yahoo 360 blogs, this would actually be close to 200. One of these days, I hope to retrieve those posts and move them here.

Probably the most exciting thing to happen in the last year has been to see my wife and family start keeping blogs! Cheryl's blog is awesome and often gives me a peek at what's going on while I'm at work. Cheryl has really taken off with blogging and has even racked up hits from around the world (she actually had hits from Tel Aviv and London!) I especially love that I can keep up my brothers' families via their blogs and even my Mom has taken a stab at it (if she can ever remember her password!) What a great tool.

Here are a couple of posts that I especially enjoyed from the first 100; let me know if you remember one that you liked!

• Prayer in School - 3 Parts
  
• Cock-a-roaches!
• Can I Hold Your Hand, Papa?

Hope you enjoy this as much as I do!

An Enchanted Trip

Today was one of my best days. It was one of those days that when I'm old and gray, I will remember with fondness and laughter. We took the kids to Enchanted Rock and had an absolute blast! The day began not too early with driving out to the park. Despite traffic and a long line to get in, we got there in great spirits (translation: the kids weren't tired of sitting in the van to the point of screaming - a real danger with that much sitting still on the road).

Julia rode on my back up the "mountain" and Isaac hoofed it. He loved jumping from rock to rock and exploring every nook and cranny. Cheryl and I enjoyed being free to let him for the most part. At the top, Isaac marveled at being able to see for miles in all directions!

Our biggest adventure was for Isaac and I. Cheryl waited with Julia and freed me to take Isaac through the cave! If you are unfamiliar with the cave at enchanted rock, it is a 'fissure' cave - not the lighted, guided type where you walk past formations in cavernous rooms. This is a series of connected cracks in the rock and there is NO LIGHT! ... save what you bring in yourself. HE LOVED IT! We climbed around, slithered on our backs, got dirty and wet in places - all the things a kid enjoys! (...and his dad, too!). Isaac at four was boldly going where kiddos twice his age were backing out of! That is a proud papa moment, for sure!

What made the day special for me was sharing Enchanted Rock with my children. "E-Rock" holds a special place in my heart, if for no other reason than I've been to this park more times than I can count and almost every chapter of my adult life since college has included time spent there. Rock climbing and camping, singles trips (where Cheryl first did the cave!), and now as a husband and father. What a great thing to hand down!

Here is some video we took throughout the day...

M: Mud Storm

Last night we had a big rain full of mud from Mexico! I walked out after dark to find this thick covering of mud/dust over both of our cars. Yuck! Actually raining mud is a new one for me.

Two Men and a Baby

Ok, so it was really one man, a boy and a girl but I couldn't think of a catchy title along those lines. The kids and I flew solo last weekend while Mama was enjoying girl time with her sister. The time with my children was great! What was not so great was getting ready for an Open House (we're trying to sell) at the same time as trying to spend quality time with the munchkins!

As for the kiddos, we did some really fun things. We got started Saturday with a trip to the park for a picnic lunch, climbing on the playground and kite flying! What a great day for kite flying. Our kite is shaped like a goldfish - we picked it up on a whim last year thinking we'd get a lot of use out of it, but there just aren't a lot of good kite flying days out there. After nap we made pudding, played in the yard and then grilled hot dogs for a dinner out on the patio.

Saturday night after the kiddos went down was my chance to clean up for the showing... until 2am! I had to finish some of the tasks Sunday AM and we barely made it to church. Our friends Kyle and Kelly were generous enough to host us Sunday afternoon while the house was being shown. Visiting them is always a treat for the kids which made the whole weekend a real bang for them.

I love my wife and the kiddos love their mother, so her return Sunday evening made the perfect ending to a great weekend. A little papa time is good here and there but it doesn't hold a candle to "all-together" time! Here a few photos from the big weekend: