The best way to brighten up a rainy day? Rain coats and boots, and puddle reflections.

Warming up for dance.

Little pink ballerina!

Carolyn in her sailor hat.

Stretching out!

I am very impressed with how much Carolyn has learned in this next level of dance.  Her class changes formations a lot more – no more standing in two lines and just doing different dance steps from there.  Anna is in the very littlest class, so their strongest asset is cuteness!

Carolyn's shawl in "River Rock"

Anna's shawl in "Lavender Fields"

These were fun (and super easy) to knit.  More details about these projects can be found here and here.

Chalk-covered hands: a sign of a fun day!

What’s the “Room of Doom” you ask?

Well, I made a nice poster to hang on the messiest room in the house:

Very doom-ish looking, no?

It is amazing how well this works. If I hang it on the entrance to a messy room, the kids obey the sign and pick something up when they go in. I don’t have to nag them to pick up, they both know what the sign means. Even better, if I hang it on the door to one of the kids’ bedrooms, everybody picks up when they go in. (This has a really nice side benefit – both girls have offered to help the other clean her room when it’s declared the “Room of Doom” and followed through.)

I’ve been using the “Room of Doom” sign and changing it’s location as needed for the past couple of months, and it still works. Is my house still messy? Of course! But it’s slowly getting better, because we’ve all gotten into better tidying up habits as a family.

Of course, declaring my craft room as the “Room of Doom” really just means that I’m intending to pick it up myself.  Everybody else in the house knows better than to go in there, even when it’s clean.  But what can I say?  The sign works on me, too!

Four leveled layers, waiting to be stacked.

It wasn't leaning, the photo is just at an odd angle.

But it was worth it in the end!

A perfectly rosy cake!

Instructions and inspiration found here.

We had to find all the winter outerwear again.

Well, we’re not going to complain about that.

It was more water than snow, and soaked through everything.

Besides, building a snowman on the deck (there wasn’t enough accumulated on the lawn) and giving him a carrot nose and cheerio eyes? In April? Sounds fun to me!

What else would you do with a deck full of snow?

(Carolyn didn’t fall for my April Fool’s “you’re going to be late for your bus” prank. But she didn’t believe me when I woke her up this morning and told her school was cancelled due to snow. Go figure.)

Getting ready to have her ears pierced...

...and now she's got sparkly earrings!

I can’t believe how fast she’s growing up!