Living the Lutz Life: Jackson's Surprise Party, Easter and the Midwest Homeschool Convention

We are in the middle of April and I feel like I am just now recovering from the whirlwind of a month we had in March. I lost my camera for a few weeks and my husband just recently found it hiding in our van. (Love that man!!) Needless to say, there wasn't a lot of picture taking going on there for awhile. 

I fell into a bit of a "funk" at the beginning of April (or was I simply recovering from March?) and my motivation, even for blogging, completely tanked. I got the Fresh Food Deals posted each week, but that's about it. I am finally back in the game and I've been posting up a storm this week. Here's what our family was up to during the last half of March and the beginning of April. 

For kindergarten, Jackson did a unit on colors and learned that "God makes our world beautiful". We sorted Crayola crayons by color families and graphed them, made our own recycled rainbow crayons, learned about the colors of the rainbow, mixed colored water in glass jars (on the dishwasher door) and measured/cut strips of paper to make construction paper rainbows. We continued to work on reading and writing short vowel words, addition and telling time.



Jackson wanted a surprise party for his 6th birthday, so that's exactly what he got! We invited family to come and surprise Jackson and he was so shocked that he almost cried. He had a great time with his cousins, loved the Bowser's castle cake that I made for him and was thrilled with all of his new gifts. It's hard to believe he is already 6 years old. Time seems to fly by more quickly with each passing year.

Our church held an amazing Easter egg hunt the Saturday before Easter and the kids had a BLAST! 50,000 plastic eggs stuffed with 100,000 pieces of candy...let's just say we had more candy from the egg hunt than we got last Halloween!

The kids helped me make a resurrection garden for our dining room table and Bill and I tried to put the Easter focus on Jesus as much as we could (and minimize the bunny). One night we made resurrection rolls out of jumbo marshmallows and some leftover pizza dough. I got the biggest giggle out of Charlotte biting into hers and exclaming, "Oh NO!! Where my marshmallow go? We need make new ones!"

Bill and I were able to get away by ourselves a couple weeks ago and went to the Midwest Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati. We sat in on a few workshops, including one from Ruth at The Better Mom and another from Crystal at Money Saving Mom. It was extremely nice to have two whole days where we could be Bill and Ashley instead of "Daddy" and "Mommy". I enjoyed browsing the gigantic vendor hall--filled with every homeschool curriculum, manipulative, workbook, game or supply you could imagine. It was fun running into a few friends from church while we were there, too!

What has your family been doing now that spring has finally arrived?