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the newts life cycle is fun.

A newts life cycle is very cool. It's a tadpole at first.

then a baby newt.

then it gets bigger and bigger.

and bigger and still lives under water.

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After the birthday party, we headed out to Clinton Lake for the annual department picnic.

Anthropologists socializing

Lots of grilled food, good company, and plenty of room for the kids to run around like crazed monkeys.

Or sit like crazed monkeys, in Kaity's case...

Anne also organized a grad student vs. faculty volleyball challenge, but the grad student who promised to bring the volleyball was a no show, so we improvised.  Yay for moms, like Kristie, who bring extra stuff for the kids to play with.

Missed point

Kaity subbed for me, since I wasn’t in any condition to play volleyball. She’s a great server.

Serve!

The faculty won the first game handily, but the grad students rallied and beat them in the second game.

Volleyball challenge

It was a fun way to spend an afternoon, even if I couldn’t actually play volleyball.

Proving to Hannah that the camera works

And afterwards, we stopped by the movie theatre to see Star Trek.

One of the best Star Trek movies, though I still think First Contact is my favorite.

At our house, Easter means dyeing a bunch of eggs the night before, our typical big breakfast on Sunday morning (during which one of Brae’s dyed eggs was sacrificed to his appetite), lots of chocolate, and an Easter egg hunt in the back yard.

Found one!

(There were actually three hidden here, Kaity and Hannah found the others – after Brae had looked).

Hannah checking hiding places in the grill

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It doesn’t quite seem possible, but our little Hannah turns 7 today.  Next thing you know, she’ll be driving.

Hannah is almost 7, and we were beginning to wonder if she was ever going to lose her baby teeth. Kaity started losing teeth when she was 5, and Brae was 6.  In his first grade picture, he’s missing all four of his front teeth.

Hannah - sans her two front teeth

When we picked her up tonight, she ran up to us with a wide – and newly toothless – grin. She lost two teeth in one week! Making up for lost time, apparently. Not to be outdone, Brae also showed up missing a tooth (Note: trying to open a frozen water bottle with your mouth is a bad idea). The tooth fairy had a busy, bank-busting week!

PS.  Hannah read the first paragraph of this post all by herself!

The kids are coming home today, so we met Mimi (and Jonah) in Bentonville to pick them up.

Brandon says Bojangles is better than Popeye’s. It’s definitely better than KFC.

Mimi and Brae

Now, we’re on our way home.

The view from Highway 71 North

Dee and CJ took Brae and Hannah back to Arkansas for a two week vacation, saving us the 8 hour drive there and back.  We miss them already, but the kids will have a great time hanging out with cousins, going to the water park, playing video games, and being fawned over by various family members.

She wrote it all by herself.

I taught Brae and Hannah how to knit last night, while watching a Valentine’s episode of Buffy. Today, Hannah had this:

She’s working on another one made from the scrap yarn left over from her afghan. Mismatched armwarmers! Complete with a thumb hole made from a mistaken yarn over.

She says she wants knitting stuff for her birthday, but is already angling for my stash and some circular needles.

Sounds like some terminal disease, doesn’t it? The doctor says I have Intarsia. For the non-knitters, it’s a way of knitting with multiple blocks of color where they aren’t stranded across the back of the work. All of the multi-color blocks I have knit so far have been done using stranding, which I discovered today is also Fair Isle. I’ve been Fair Isle knitting for months and had no idea. Unlike Fair Isle, Intarsia involves lots of yarn bobbins, which thankfully Granny sent me this summer.

I’m now 3 squares away from having Hannah’s afghan ready to join. The plan is to make a kid’s size afghan using 27 LTKA squares and 3 “special” squares from other sources. I’ve finished all the squares I picked from the Learn To Knit Afghan Book, so I decided to start on the initial square. Originally, I had just planned a two-color design with a large block H in the center. But I found a Celtic Alphabet cross-stitch pattern generator online, and decided to use the Celtic H instead.

I laid the pattern out in my knitting journal, cast on 40 stitches, and began knitting the background. Seven rows in, it was time to join the new color, and it occurred to me that I have no idea how to do it. Googling intarsia instructions brought up a link to KnittingHelp.com with a how-to intarsia video (it’s under the knitting with two colors section). My biggest concern was how to start the new color without leaving a hole, and the site also has good video directions for joining yarn in the Knitting Tips section.

I did have to frog the square, however, when I realized that I had purled the first row, so that the H was going to be backwards. But it was practice.