Easter Eggs

 

We decorated Easter eggs just before we went to Arizona. Here are some of the highlights.

 

Easter Portrait

 

This is a simple portrait of me in my Easter outfit. As usual, it was a warm, sunny day in Walnut Creek on Easter. I ran around yelling "charge" after church much to the delight (and consternation) of the other children.

Happy Easter

 

Well, it's about a week late, but I thought I'd wish everyone a Happy Easter anyway. It was a craxy Easter for us. I got up at dawn to go Easter egg hunting, then we went off to church. Afterwards, there was the obligatory photo shoot. The picture with Mommy is one of the highlights. You can see all the pictures here.

Then we had to pack to fly to Arizona in the afternoon. It was such a rushed day that Easter dinner was...pizza!

Golden ticket

Last weekend I went on an Easter Egg hunt in Pleasant Hill. While these are always fun, it was really my lucky day. Instead of getting candy or a toy in one of the Easter eggs I found, I got a golden ticket. The ticket gave me the big prize of an Easter basket filled with candies, games, and two stuffies. My new friends are pictured in their basket above.

Happy Easter.

School

I've been busy with lots of activities in school. I'm in the talent show, I've been getting better at reading and writing, and so on. Here are some highlights.

1. Counting

For some reason, I decided to see how high I could write numbers. I made it all the way up to 121. Here's sheet 1 of the counting list.



2. Letter of the week. A couple of weeks ago the letter of the week was "k". Now, this is a tough letter in that you have to come up with "k" words that you can draw pictures of. I disconvered an important research tool--the dictionary. It turns out that dictiionaries have pictures of some of the things the words describe as well as spelling. For "k", here's what I came up with:

Friends

Yesterday I went to Target with Mommy. Nothing unusual about that. What is unusual is that I actually bought stuff there with my own money. I bought a couple of Hot Wheels cars as well as a small stuffed bear. You can see him above. He's a really good friend.

Later that afternoon, we went out and played together. We went on the swing.



We climbed up the ladder to the sliding board and then slid down landing in the wod chips.





We went on the trapeze.


We even rode scooters together



He's a great friend.

Hit Down to Go Up

When my friend Chase was visiting this Sunday, we played golf out in the yard together. I found a finish line flag on a stick and poked that into the ground in various spots in the yard to be the "hole". I then picked out a spot for the tee box and off we went. There were some very creative holes including a dogleg left where you could either go the safe route and stay on the grass or take the risky route of a forced carry over the rose bush. (I elected the risky route and made the carry.)

Chase really hadn't played much golf before, so he was having trouble getting the ball to go very far. The secret, as I learned, is to hit down on the ball to make it go up in the air. I demonstrated my classic hitting down technique. It's sort of like the movie Cars where Doc tells Lightning that on dirt tracks he should turn right to go left.

It was a great golf tournament.

Off the DL

Well, I'm off the DL. After suffering through last week with coughs and fever, I'm finally starting to feel more like myself again. While I still have a cough, and I still have red marks under my nose from having rubbed and blown it so many times, I'm on the road to recovery. That road, apparently. leads to play dates. I had my friends Chase and Katie over during the weekend. It was lots of fun. Chase is especially fun to wrestle with.

Finally back to school, but still coughing

Well, I was out of school Monday through Thusday last week, but I finally went back on Friday. I still have a nasty cough, runny nose, and low energy, but the fever is gone and I am feeling better. I hate being sick!

Sick

I'm home from school today. I had a fever and sore throat yesterday. Today, my throat is so sore that I don't even have any voice at all. I've been trying to put my fingers in my mouth to get out whatever bad stuff is in my throat, but this isn't working at all. It's no fun being sick.

Artistic Weekend

It was raining this weekend. That made for a perfect time to pursue creative arts. On Saturday morning, we put together some cool shots of Hot Wheels cars racing around Tuscany. Do make these shots, we found a nice travel book of Tuscany for the background and then used th black foamboard thing for the road. Here is the best shot:



Later, we did some painting. Daddy got out a bunch of art books, and I found a painting by Monet that I liked. We tried to imitate this painting using tempera on the big easel. Here's the result:



Finally, today we made some really goofy clone shots. I decided it would be fun to play Candyland with my clones. Of course, I had to change outfits and hats a zillion times since my clones would not be wearing the same thing as me. Here's the shot:



Following this, I played Candyland a couple of times (and soundly beat Daddy thanks to the help of Queen Frostine). No clones were playing.

Lunar Eclipse

Lunar Eclipse 20th Feb 2008
Originally uploaded by fwwidall

Last night we got to see something really cool--a lunar eclipse. We went out every 5 minutes or so to see how the eclipse was going. It got darker and darker and soon the moon was completely gone. A little later we went out to see the moon start to reappear.

Using some of my play balls, Daddy showed me how the Earth cast a big shadow on the moon by getting in between it and the sun. It was very neat!

Painting

Mommy got out the tempera paints for an exciting session of painting. We made a number of watercolors last week, so this seems to be a recurring theme. I made a picture of a sliding board. Mommy's colorful picture consisted of a rainbow spiral of Archimedes type of thing.



I love the feel of the brush on the paper. I also love the bright colors and the texture of the paint.

Let it rain

While I don't normally like rain, it's pretty fun when you make your own rain. Daddy and I did a flower photo shoot yesterday at dusk. Since flowers kind of look nice in the rain, we decided to get out a watering can and make it rain on the flowers while filming the "rainstorm". This is the best kind of rain because you don't even get wet.



You can see the highlights from the photo shoot here.

The amusing thing is that the flowers in the shoot are all in vases from Valentine's Day. The dew is created by using a water squirt bottle. The rain, of course, is courtesy of my bee watering can. The puddle is from the aftermath of the rain. Photography can be pretty sneaky you know.

Games, games, games

Daddy and I played a whole bunch of games on Saturday: baseball, golf, mini golf (although I didn't play well), and croquet. I had the yellow ball to show that I was the Oakland A's while Daddy had the red ball (for the Boston Red Sox). The way we play is that I get three shots to Daddy's one shot. In the first match, I built up a decent lead, but Daddy managed to come back at the very end for the win. The second game was pretty much a rout---I tore through all the wickets and finished the course while Daddy was still only about halfway done.

The Marshmallow Project

To celebrate the 100th day of school, we had to do an important building project--we had to construct something out of precisely 100 toothpicks and marshmallows. This seemed like a huge amount of work, so I tried some smaller versions as well as sketched some plans earlier in the week. One of my small projects was a porcupine with a marshmallow body and toothpick spines. This seemed promising since you can add spines until the total number of things adds up to 100. I sketched a marshmallow and toothpick Aidan on my whiteboard. I even attempted to create eyes, nose, and mouth by writing on the marshmallows with Sharpie marker. While this was great in concept, getting an actual marshmallow Aidan to stand up proved difficult.

Finally, yesterday was the big day for creating the full scale model. Mommy and I worked together on a marshmallow house. This was working out nicely until the roof collapsed and destroyed the whole structure. Since it took the better part of an hour to make the house, we were both very unhappy.



Eventually, we went back to the porcupine idea and built that. However, we found that the porcupine looked more like a turtle at scale, so we changed it to a turtle. At last, the marshmallow project was complete. I used 60 marshmallows and 40 toothpicks in making the turtle.

Here's a documentary video.



Here's a link to some photos of the project in progress.

Cool Structure

I built a very cool structure with my magnetic building toys. I consists of a whole series of interlocking triangles. Inside a bunch of the little pyramids, I place Hershey's Kisses to complete the look. I like it.

Super Tuesday

As you know, there was a big bunch of elections on Tuesday. My stuffed animals also had elections as well. I picked animals to be each of the candidates. Barack Obama was a tiger, Hillary Clinton was a leopard, John McCain was a puppy dog, and so on. I used my whiteboard to post the election results. In the primary, Barack Obama manged to defeat Hillary while Mitt Romney managed to defeat the others. Then came time for the general election. The election board I made is shown above. On the left is Mitt. you can see that I tried to spell his name (Mit Rone) and drew a picture of him. On the right is Barack. I abbreviated his name as simply "B". Since Barack is black, I used black market to draw him (except for his hair, which is blue just like Romney's). Up above are the party labels--R for Republican and D for Democrat.

The final tally--Mitt got 5 votes while Barack triumphed with 8.

Wheat Painting

In church school yesterday, we did a fun art project, painting with wheat sheaves. Apparently, long ago these were the standard paintbrushes of the time. They're pretty hard to work with. In fact, one of my pictures has a bunch of wheat seeds embedded in it. It was a lot of fun painting with these odd brushes.

Rainy Season

We're in the midst of rainy season, and I was dying t0 get outside. Finally, there was a break in the rain, so Daddy and I flew paper airplanes out in the backyard. Paper airplanes sure don't survive well when landing on wet ground. Still, it was a lot of fun building and destroying them. I also splashed about in various puddles with my trusty dalmatian boots.