We all visited Jasmine's house and did some easter egg decorating!
Elliott snarfs Jasmine's O.J.		Ahh... anticipation!
Um, Elliott, where is that egg going?	Usually we take the shell off first, but whatever..	Charlie has fun dipping
Where'd that egg go? (green is clearly Jasmien's top choice today)	oooh, paint!	our amazing multi-tasking kid
there goes dad, getting all serious again!	Elliott's far more interested in the water than the eggs	Jess working on the perfect "yeyyow" egg
Um, you're sure about that color?	our masterpieces
The many faces of Sir Elliott - you can see (in retrospect) that he was about to come down with a bad cold here:
	Chip, the guinea pig we pigg-sat for - Elliott was his faithful fridge servant for the weekend
For fun, I decided to trade Jasmine and Elliott's eyes - a surprisingly bizarre effect:
We had fun this week gearing up for easter. "Gearing up" for me, just to be clear, means talking about bunnies, and singing a few bunny songs.. that's about it. In general, the holidays always pass me by - by the time I start singing appropriate songs, the holiday's over, and we're lucky if we get the decorations out a few das in advance. If it wasn't for my on-the-ball friends here, we'd probably be decorating eggs in May.. as it is, we still haven't done the easter egg hunt I was hoping to do, because of Elliott's illness. Elliott definitely had fun decorating eggs, but his favorite part is banging the eggs on the table (hard-boiled, luckily), then squeezing them and mashing his thumbs into their center. He can't understand why this bothers us. We finally gave him an egg in a ziploc baggie, and let him mash it to his heart's content. It was quite pretty afterward actually.. pale chips of lavendar and chalky blue, with a hint of yellow and shades of white and cloudy blue mixed in.. but I wouldn't want to eat it. We went on an adventure on Tuesday, though I have no pictures to show for it. A UVM friend who teaches an animal companion class invited me to talk about bunnies and bunny rescue, so I packed up all 3 bunnies, a litterbox, ha, water, food, veggies, a pen, towels and a sheet for the floor, and various other bits of bunny-related stuff.. and all of Elliott's diaper stuff, toy stuff, etc. and trekked off to UVM. I wish I'd gotten a photo of me pushing the stroller with the bunny carrier in it, and all the stuff piled on top.. with Elliott in the backpack. Our friend Stef took care of the kiddo while I gave my talk. Little did I know that his spaced-out-ness that day was the dawn of a terrible illness. Thank goodness Stef didn't catch it. For the next 5 nights, he had a raging fever, and had a yucky juice cough, and a runny chapped-lip sort of nose. He was really out of it. Poor guy. Mike's been sick too, and I'm starting to get a cough. It's all a big bummer. I think Elliott's on the mend though. Luckily the weather has been gorgeous (I joked with my mom that it hasn't rained since she gave Elliott that cute umbrella last week!). We go outside every day, usually for quite a while. Elliott's a confident and competent walker now, so I can rake, do a little weeding and garden clearing, or other chores while keeping an eye on him. It's fantastic, though the yard looks like someone lives here with serious ADD - 10 square feet raked here, some half-filled buckets there, a few weeds pulled and left on the ground, half a flower bed cleared, etc. I maintain the illusion that eventually it will all get done and come together, in spite of the fact that I only got a random 10% of the yard raked last fall befoer the snow flew (my 2-dimensional piles are still scattered across the lawn). The bad news is that Elliott has no idea where not to step, so I'm constantly pulling him out of the gardens. It's going to be a long summer. He knows "we don't step on the flowers and plants", but he has no idea where the lawn stops and the plants start. He's only a baby still, really. We may need to construct a more obvious visual barrier than a line of low rocks, around the flower beds. The sweet thing though, is that Elliott's REALLY into flowers. He wants to "go outdied" and "tzee" the "wow-uhz" every day. He can name their colors, and we go through this routine: E: wow-uhz! J: yes, nice flowers, these are crocuses.. E: eat it? J: we don't eat it, no... but did someone eat those flowers? E: yeah.. J: who did it? E: duurh! Oh NO! J: Oh no! We'll have to spray soap on the flowers so the deer won't eat them E: yeah.. away? J: yes, the deer will try to eat the flowers, and say "ucky" and go away E: blah! yeah! This often segways into "poop?" and we start talking about deer poop, and how they go potty outside, and we don't touch poop.. etc. On one hand, it's fascinating and fun to see his world widen, along with his vocabulary and understanding.. on the other hand, it's tedious to the point of delerium sometimes, to repeat the same banter da after day.. like a bad Monty Python skit. I'm getting very good at doing dirty laundry - by that, I mean "dirt". Elliott loves digging, and I'm realizing our annual flower box is going to be his digging space for the next few years. He has a few tools, but mostly he likes to pick up handfuls of soil and fling them. Sigh!