This week was all about Easter and eggs! We had a fun Easter Egg hunt at our neighbor Brian’s house with a few of our other neighbors. The kiddos enjoyed hunting down the eggs in his backyard and afterward we had a nice cookout at Nate and AJ’s place. It is so nice to have kids in the neighborhood and neighbors that we enjoy spending time with! 
While I was working on Saturday Kevin was quite brave and took Griffin along with all of the Manning girls to the Egg Drop at Liberty High School in Powell. It is a HUGE egg event organized by age groups. And for each age group a helicopter drops a bag of eggs from the sky. Those eggs are in addition to the 10,000 eggs already on the ground!!
Griffin was spoiled with quite a deluxe easter basket. He got all kinds of candy, but also socks, wooden cars, a candy fan and other things. His facial expression when he came downstairs and saw it on the counter melted my heart. 
Our front garden is looking really pretty right now with the creeping phlox blooming and the pretty flowers on our Rising Sun Redbud that we planted last year. And it is always one of my favorite weeks of the year when the viburnum blooms in our backyard near the patio and porch. The sweet spicy smell is so lovely! And Griffin was outside enjoying and observing nature too!
Easter Sunday 2017 🙂
Griffin also had loads of fun coloring Easter eggs with Debbie this week. 
Brutus continues to grow big! Check him out – from the day we got him (upper left) to this week (right) he continues to grow and is inching up on Griffin!
This week we had a fun outing to make a surprise gift for Grandma Beilstein’s 70th birthday! Finn and I met up with the Bethune’s and made a hand print platter. Each of the cousins picked their own flower color and the stems each have the number of leaves that represents each kids age. Then on the back they each did a thumbprint animal and wrote their own names. 
Griffin was given his class Tony the Tiger for the weekend too. We had a far more relaxing time with Tony compared to his visit in the fall. We adventured to Costco and had lots of snuggles at home. Oh, and we made sure we kept him away from Brutus!
One day I snapped some house photos complete with the dogs as props. Finn was having fun putting party hats on Lily and Brutus. Lily still wasn’t feeling very well yet, she hasn’t yet gotten her full appetite back yet and her eyes just don’t look like her normal self. She was getting in some snuggles with me on the couch and didn’t really care much for partying 🙁
In getting ready for our upcoming trip to Florida we brought up a couple of air mattresses from our basement and blew them up to make sure they were good to go. Finn liked testing them out. 
Griffin really enjoys artwork both at home during the day with Debbie or at school. He makes some really creative projects!
And here we are with a pre-Valentine’s treat at Starbucks. A tasty chocolate cake-pop. 
The next phase of our bedroom move-arounds happened this weekend when Grandma and Grandpa Armstrong came to pickup the king bed out of our guest room, which we are converting to Chestnut’s nursery. It was a lot of moving heavy stuffs and Finn got in to help where he could, going around and getting his appropriate tools!
Well, another week with a lot of doggy snuggles around here. This week Brutus had another checkup at the Vet. At his “booster” shot appointment a week or so previous the veterinarian thought his colon seemed bumpy so he was on a broad spectrum medication for parasites, even though none were found in his stool sample. He took the meds for three days with his dinner (which he ate so s-l-o-w-l-y) and then at his re-check she thought he seemed better. He seems fine to us with his normal spunky behavior, but I was concerned nonetheless! So they have said just to watch for abnormal bowel movements but otherwise they will check it again when he is neutered around 6 months.
The Generosity Initiative at church had our first evening “dessert” information session on February 1st at 7 pm. We setup a nice spread of desserts, coffee, and waters. The attendance was pretty low, unfortunately, but we did record the message so that it can be posted online. 
Finn is getting more and more practice writing his name, typically Finn rather than Griffin. And he loved coloring a rainbow while sitting through the Generosity message at church. 
Fun stuff this week for Finn included making dirt pudding for the first time, complete with gummy worms. He was so excited to tell me about it and he was so sweet that he told Debbie he wanted to save one for me and Chestnut so she made a cute little note for me. 🙂
On Friday Finn had to come with me to work for a little bit as Sam had strep and Debbie stayed home with him. He was an excellent work-mate and loved modeling our new “gifts” for our mentoring program for new hires. 
On Friday Finn, Kevin and I ended the night with a sweet treat at Graeter’s. Yummers. 