Hakka

As promised from Scott's Birthday Pig Roast, I give you Phil (our Cajun Kiwi friend):

Over the Rainbow

Emi also sang "Over the Rainbow" again at the festival. She's new at this public singing thing and we are constantly amazed at how fearless she is; how comfortable she is on stage. We are so very proud of our budding musician.

Little Drummer Girl

Emi performed with Jahruba and her drumming class this past Saturday at the 2nd Annual Norman Music Festival. I felt bad that I hadn't tested her new top out for drumming (only singing, doh!).

Bunny Holly

After a Very Long Day celebrating Scott's birthday, we finally got into bed around 2:30am. 4 hours later Emi woke us up to let us know that the Easter Bunny had come!! It was fruitless to convince her to wait 2 hours to hunt for eggs or dig into the candy in her basket. She dubbed her new bunny "Bunny Holly" .... too cute...

Roasted

So we survived Scott's Birthday Roast this past weekend. No time to elaborate on the happenings or post the vid of Phil's challenge so stay tuned... for now, here are some pictures.

Garden State

Today we worked in the yard for several back breaking hours making lots of progress in beautifying things up for the upcoming pig roast. Emi and I also created her first herb garden following some cool instructions found at parents.com. Very cool idea indeed to simply lay down newspaper in the desired shape, cover with mulch, arrange the potted herb plants where desired, then just dig holes through the newspaper and plant the herbs. It wasn't too bad but I did get caught up in extracting more weeds than I thought I would have to...I thought over time the newspaper would kill existing weeds which in turn would become food for the plants. Well, our weeds seemed a little advanced so the garden took a little longer than planned, but I think it looks perfect! We planted rosemary, lavender, Greek oregano, thyme, basil, parsley and panseys. We also planted some strawberries in an existing bed close to some Italian Parsley that came back from last year. In other news, our garlic that we totally ignored last year is back with a vengeance and a couple of the asparagus plants that we neglected are back this year.

Alpha State

Emi's teacher gave her class a recipe (Edwina's recipe, actually) for chocolate chip cookies made with yellow cake mix, 1 egg, 1/4 c. brown sugar, 3/4 c. veg oil and 1 cup chocolate chips. We made a batch and immediately had to send over a dozen to the neighbors so that we wouldn't be responsible for wolfing them down. Of course we will have to answer for the remaining 2 dozen that disappeared....